#Architectural and program diagrams manual
#Architectural and program diagrams full

Focusing on Koolhaas’s built work, my thesis questions the architect’s agency in relation to other agents who may initiate creative or unpredicted uses of space beyond the designer’s intention. In this respect, Rem Koolhaas cuts a peculiar figure as he can be seen simultaneously as the villain of ‘starchitects’ and a critical or post-critical architect.

The aim is twofold: to give a comprehensive account of the discourses on agency today and to push it beyond the current scope of the debate in order to expand our understandings of agencies in architecture. Therefore, my thesis begins with a critical inquiry into the current discourse and considers interdisciplinary theories from architecture and sociology. Despite the booming debate over agency in architecture, the recent discourse tends to be associated with marginal types of architecture, and hardly goes beyond that line. The scepticism towards the impossible unity, which, at the same time, pursues a challenging unitary iconic condensation.Īgency, as used in architecture, questions the role of architects in terms of criticality and responsibility. The impossible concordance between form, meaning and image. Both articles find in Koolhaas' method strategies based on a paradoxical conceptual identity, a diagrammatic coherence that coexists with the greatest semantic inconsistency. This second paper also uses other comparisons with other historical references, for example, Venturi. A second article 1 complements this analysis of the Embassy with an itinerary that, in this case, extends its route to other buildings by Koolhaas. Therein lies the uniqueness of this study. For this reason, this text is an essay that tries to introduce us to the deepest motivations of a project, most of the time intertwined in the form of spiral paths, cyclical paths that unite and contradict each other at the same time. Neither can a text that tries to unravel the creative method be strictly linear.

This is because architectonical method, our way of thinking and creating, is never analytically structured. At times, this research development can be disconcerting. Having it as a support, the paper opens a new way for future research which can be specifically focused on the architectonical project's methodology. In this way, the paper differentiates itself from the scientific-historical research. This does not preclude the inclusion of innumerable references related to the conceptual issues that we can find in this architectonical analysis (Ungers, Vidler, Somol, etc., see citations and bibliography). Thus, this paper developed an object-based method, as opposed to traditional and orthodox text-based research. A sensitive and intuitive itinerary through the graphic documents published about the embassy allows us to access a continuous narrative dissertation that deconstructs the conceptual issues that have constituted the building. In this way, architectonical object and work are considered the susceptible elements that provide the material knowledge that unravels the manner and the methodology by which they were conceived. In order to achieve such an objective, the article simply rethinks a specific architecture that already exists, the Dutch Embassy in Berlin. Those able to read them can follow the process by which ideas and thoughts take visual shape, find aesthetic form and, if all goes well, become part of the built environment.This article ventures into the investigation about method in architecture, that is, about the way in which we think and create architecture.

#Architectural and program diagrams manual

The title Architectural and Program Diagrams in the series Constructionand Design Manual brings together more than 400 pages from a predominantly international avant-garde and offers an overview of the state of the art in architectural representation across a spectrum extending from simple arrow diagrams to sober graphs and highly elaborate, often somewhat surreal collages and computer animations which trigger a wide range of intellectual and emotional responses. Today, architectural diagrams are no longer mere aids to explaining a design or reducing an idea to a simple outline, but have emerged as an art form of their own among the creative skills related to planning and building. This makes them easy to understand even across linguistic and cultural boundaries and an ideal method of communicating ideas to clients. Similar to comic strips or graphic novels, diagrams are a visual medium of communication.

#Architectural and program diagrams full

Architecture can be as full of suspense as a graphic novel.