Between Analogue and Digital Diagrams

Abstract

This essay is about the interstitial. About how the diagram, as a method of design, has lead from the analogue deconstruction of the eighties to the digital processes of the turn of the millennium. Specifically, the main topic of the text is the interpretation and the critique of folding (as a diagram) in the beginning of the nineties. It is necessary then to unfold its relationship with immediately preceding and following architectural trends, that is to say we have to look both backwards and forwards by about a decade. The question is the context of folding, the exchange of the analogue world for the digital. To understand the process it is easier to investigate from the fields of art and culture, rather than from the intentionally perplicated1 thoughts of Gilles Deleuze. Both fields are relevant here because they can similarly be used as the yardstick against which the era itself it measured. The cultural scene of the eighties and nineties, including performing arts, movies, literature and philosophy, is a wide milieu of architecture. Architecture responds parallel to its era; it reacts to it, and changes with it and within it. Architecture is a medium, it has always been a medium, yet the relations are transformed. That's not to say that technical progress, for example using CAD-software and CNC-s, has led to the digital thinking of certain movements of architecture, (it is at most an indirect tool). But the ‘up-to-dateness' of the discipline, however, a kind of non-servile reading of an ‘applied culture' or ‘used philosophy'2 could be the key.