Concepts and Diagrams

The objective of this essay is to evaluate the organization of concepts in plateaus and the representation of concepts as ideograms. The hypothesis identifies the History of Architecture as a plateau composed of concepts of the organization of Space.

The elements that compose the History of Architecture are lines of action produced by concepts on space, whether architectural or urban space. The necessity of projecting these concepts into materiality has produced a wide field for representation. Furthermore, materiality has led to the evolution of the processes of design and representation.

Concepts and their representation may comprise different instances of time: the past and the future. In both cases, the internality of the representation is different. Traditionally, in the representation of concepts of the past, the proposition of space was precluded since in first instance what was regarded was analysis. Nevertheless, futurity may be introduced in the formulation of timeless concepts in the form of new concepts projected to future enterprises. The development of the concepts analyzed may also derive in the difference as consequence of the analysis. Jean François Lyotard wrote that the historian must reconstruct using concepts (Lyotard, Phenomenology; p.128). Hence, historic analysis cannot be severed from proposition.

What is the importance of investigating the origin of concepts into architectonic practice? Is it possible to re-orient the practice of Architecture from the social definition of concepts? As David Harvey, professor of Geography and Environmental Engineering of the John Hopkins University if Baltimore wrote, every discipline oriented thru society formulates concepts that are extensive to the social relationships in practice: ‘…social sciences formulate concepts, categories, relationships and methods that are not independent from the existent social relationships. As such, concepts are product of the phenomenon they try to describe…Our task is to exercise the power of thinking in to formulate applicable concepts and categories, theories and arguments to contribute to humanizing social change. These concepts and categories cannot be formulated on the abstract. They must be elaborated realistically in regard to events and actions that deploy around us…Nevertheless all these actions and information do not mean unless we synthesize them into convincing models of thinking’(Harvey, 130-151).

A model of thinking is a super-structure that regulates as well as transforms itself. This aspect is fundamental to provide Architecture with purposes different to those of the strict reproduction of capital. Only through the redefinition of Architecture within the social system of which it forms part it might be possible to attain prototypes of application.

Harvey adds: “Marx established that the perception, elaboration and representation of concepts happens through reflexive abstraction by the subject that observes…It is not possible to consider that concepts and categories have an independent existence and that they are always truly universal abstractions. The structure of knowledge may be transformed by its own internal laws of transformation…Concepts are ‘produced’ occasionally (including a series of pre-existent concepts) meanwhile they may be considered as producers of agents in a real situation. It is irrelevant asking if concepts, categories and relationships are ‘true’ or ‘false’. Instead, we must ask ourselves what produces them and what they produce…Hence there is the criteria that these theories cannot be used if abstracted from an existent situation. On the other hand they must be applied through a study of the modalities in which theories become a ‘material force’ in society and through their impact on social action…The meaning of each concept is re-adjusted according to social relationships. In order to perform this technique it is fundamental the criteria that categories and concepts establish (or at least appear) a mutual relationship that reflects the condition of society itself’. (Harvey, p. 313-316).

Hence, the origins of the proposing of architectural concepts are social and material (non-teleological). Nevertheless, what happens with the organization of concepts? As Hollander architect Herman Hertzberger points out: “The researcher does not start anywhere, he does not begin without an idea, a hypothesis, about what he expects to find, and where…” (Hertzberger, p.115). The design starts with intention, with vectors that push the yet-not formed concepts into specific directions. The vectors of a complex economy for the object include the relationships among material, program and event, and of course, the economic tension that the object produces in the city and the region, and among buildings as well. On the other hand, concepts related to the applied investigation of historical lines establish other relationships, in a process that formulates actions that take place in different times and spaces.

Ben van Berkel, Hollander architect, theoretician and critic, editor of the 23rd number of the ANY magazine (number is devoted to diagrams in Architecture), extends on the ambiguity of the concept: “Architecture still articulates its concepts, design decisions, and processes almost exclusively by means of a posteriori rationalizations… The demand to present the ‘right’ solution, even when the contents of that concept have become very uncertain, propagates architecture’s dual claims of objectivity and rationality”. (Van Berkel, p.19).

Hertzberger compares the concept with an enduring structure for a more changeable ‘infill’. As Hertzberger points, the concept allows interpretations since its description is ambiguous and open. The concept as structure works as a frame, as a structure coated by layers stirring cohesion and coherence on narrative basis. The master plan is a normative and mandatory representational device that Hertzberger opposes to the concept. (Hertzberger, p.100). On the other hand, the selection of a wrong concept for the analysis/proposal is not useless. A wrong concept may prove almost immediately its flaws, and help point another direction: “The concept may be a compass, but is hardly the final destination of the design process. The end product may be nothing other than a development and interpretation of that concept, the way one might apply or render an overall vision. Thinking in terms of concepts, models, strategies, etc.-deriving as this does from seeking out the essence of what you are occupied with-does mean that there is a danger of that abstraction all too quickly leading to simplification. The issue is how to couch complexity in simple formulas…you have to know exactly where you are ahead: you have to have a concept…The concept contains the conditions you wish to fulfill, it is a summary of your intentions; of what needs saying; it is hypothesis, and premonition. There may be no quest without premonition; it is question of finding and only then seeking”. (Hertzberger, p.101-117).

Concepts are not produced from void. From the past, real and virtual experiences allow the formation of a collection of ideas that are assembled in different configurations and that may be important in order to propose the future or to unveil the past. Unveiling the origin of concepts is important to understand that its is an evolved phase of thinking. This phase has had previous phases in order to accomplish representation. Author Piera Castoriadis wrote over the definition of representation: “The activity of representation is understood as the psychic equivalent of the work of metabolizing characters of organic activity…This definition may be applied entirely to the work that operates in psyche. Despite that, the absorbed and metabolized ‘element’ is not a physical body but an informational element. If the activity of representation is considered as a task common to psychic processes, we may tell that its goal is metabolizing an element of heterogeneous nature converting it into a homogeneous element to the structure of each system… The representations originated in its activity would be… the pictographic representation…the fantasized representation, … (and) the idealized representation or enunciation. The instances originated in the reflection of this activity would be designated as the representing, the fantasizing…, the enunciating or the Self [Je]…The objective of the Self’s work is to forge an image of the world’s reality around it and on whose existence it is informed in order to be coherent with its own structure…The concept of reality for the subject is no more than the whole of definitions given by the cultural discourse’. (Castoriadis, p.23-26).

(It is important the point where Castoriadis establishes that reality is nothing more than the adequacy to cultural discourse. The ‘Self’ works in order to adequate information until it fits it in the concept of reality that every individual has. We have then that reality is ambiguous for two individuals proceeding from different cultures. This is particularly critical for the proposition of public and semi-public spaces. Architecture and Urbanism must appeal to universal schemes of integration and on the way attain processes of ‘exportation of local concepts’ that may have universal basis. This process is attained though adaptation to different conditions).

The structure of these inferior and superior modalities of rationalization is important in order to understand their consecution to the concept:

‘The Psyche’s constant definition: nothing may appear in its field if it has not been previously metabolized into pictographic representation. The pictographical representation of the phenomenon constitutes a necessary condition for its psychical existence: this law is as universal and irreducible as the law that decides the object’s audibility or visibility conditions…The conditions of representation that objects must have in order to attain the material used by the Original may just be reconstructed in later phases’. (Castoriadis, p. 42).

The pictogram is a universal image that derives from stimulus or information. It is the base for the appearance of superior modalities of thinking. Its origin is involuntary and it constitutes a concoction of sensations and different stages of thinking that must be rationalized a posteriori. Castoriadis adds that using the term ‘information’ she refers to the role accomplished by sensorial functions (Castoriadis, pg. 48).

Castoriadis wrote that‘…what characterizes fantasized production is the mise-en-scène of the representation of two spaces, one of which is subdued to the absolute power of one of them…Fantasy and unconscious originate in the joint work…of the primary and of the primal judgment imposed by the principle of reality. They regard the presence of an exterior and isolated space. This first participation of the principle of reality in the work of the Psyche is responsible for the heterogeneity between pictographical production and fantasized production’. (Castoriadis, p. 72).

Fantasy is then a first encounter with reality. It is the separation of the original and primary spaces. Fantasy is not yet an absolutely rational space. In the transition from pictogram to fantasy the individual decides the penetration into the space of reality. Fantasy differences from the simple gathering of information through later phases of rationalization.

‘Any source of excitement and any information accomplish access to the register of the Self only providing the representation of an “idea”. Every activity of the Self translates into “thinking flux” implicitly or explicitly. A truly “simultaneous translation” from any form of conscious experience of the Self into “idea” occurs’. This translation represents a latent background that is habitually silent but that generally the Self may make present through an act of reflection over its own activity’. (Castoriadis, pg. 62)

Castoriadis adds that the Idea is function of ‘intellection’. As a new form of activity it is part of pre-existent partial functions. Hence, the activity of thinking is a condition for the existence of the Self. Furthermore, activity generates its own Topos. Castoriadis adds that every experience and every act imply the co-presence of an ‘idea’ that allow its thinking and naming (Castoriadis, pg. 62-63). (The appearance of a place, a ‘Topos’, is fundamental for the notion of Idea. In the same way that in material life a ‘place’ emerges from an indifferent space through the will of delimitation, in the same analogous way Idea differences from the space of fantasy and pictogram limiting its own different and virtual space).

According to Harvey, social processes accept the possibility of combining superior and inferior structures. As social totality is in relationship to all its parts (a posture assumed by Harvey), this combination may be applied to all structures within totality: ‘Any structure of superior category may be obtained from an inferior category through transformation. Under these conditions there may emerge a hierarchy of structures through a process of internal difference. Hence, there may coexist superior and inferior category structures’. (Harvey, pg. 306). The objective of the combination of superior and inferior chains validate, preserve and criticize the structure where they work (in this case, the structure of thinking). Harvey proposed the existence of theories (as part of the process of intellection) that are revolutionary, counter-revolutionary and favorable to the status quo (Harvey, pg. 314). This implies that concepts may assume these characteristics of resistance and conformity as well.

On the other hand, the relationship between word and idea is fundamental for the expression of the idea, according to Castoriadis: ‘The image of thing is the previous necessary condition for the image of word to include itself: the primal scenic follows the pictographical and prepares the spoken that follows…The real difference between an unconscious representation and a pre-conscious representation (idea) consists in the fact the first relates to known materials, meanwhile…the pre-conscious is associated with verbal representation…The hypotheses may be formulated as follows: the representation of idea demands that the Psyche acquires the possibility of uniting the representation of word to the representation of things through acoustic perception only when this last may be converted into the perception of a signifimayce…’. (Castoriadis, p. 88-90).

In ‘Matière et Mémoire’, Henri Bergson divided the mix (Representation) in two divergent directions: matter and memory, perception and remind, objective and subjective (Deleuze, Bergsonism, pg. 53). Deleuze pointed out that experience grants us with mixes and that the status of mix does not consist solely in joining elements that differ in nature, but in welding them in such conditions that differences within them may not be divided since their constituent nature (Deleuze, Bergsonism, pg. 32). Furthermore, Deleuze wrote that emotion is always linked and dependant on representation: ‘In the mix of emotion and representation, emotion is the potency; we shall not avoid seeing the nature of emotion as a pure element. Emotion truly precedes any representation: it is generator of new ideas. Properly, it does not have object, only an essence that extends over diverse objects: animals, plants, the whole nature…’ (Deleuze, Bergsonism, pg. 117). Hence, Deleuze’s conception is mainly phenomenological and eidetical, referred to essences. Representation for Deleuze is not objective, since it provokes emotions that generate new ideas. We may talk then of representation and feed-backing, or rather feed-forwarding the future, since in this conception the movement through time extends to a representation that might in turn modify the representation of the object again, and so on endlessly. Time’s scale (and duration) is essential for this Deleuzian conception based on the philosophical work of Bergson.

Coincidentally, Andrew Benjamin wrote over the ‘space of melancholy’ that is open in representation. In ‘Representation-Melancholic Spaces’ (in Benjamin’s book ‘Architectural Philosophy’), Benjamin wrote that what is represented, in the case of the ideogram or pictographic representation of the future, is the non-existence of the represented object (this definition extends even to the diagram). Futurity is essential in this conception: Absence unchains a sense of loss that is called melancholy (‘Architectural Philosophy’, pg. 148-151). In consequence, representation is an emotive space. This establishes a coincidence with Deleuze’s explanation on the origin and representation and to its connection with essence.

On the other hand, there is a fundamental difference between an idea with verbal consequence and an idea with graphical consequence. A phrase that cannot be articulated diminishes its potential for comprehension. Nevertheless, graphical representation find a a great gamut; from pre-graphics as the diagram to indexed and technical drafting that make use of syntax and symbols as languages. In the last, the omission of a symbol may produce serious differences in the implementation of a technical plan. On the other hand, the diagram is subject neither to rules nor syntax, and its verbal equivalent is impossible. The diagram does not need the rules that word require for their comprehension.

But, are Concept and Idea the same? Herman Hertzberger points out that there is a difference, and that concepts are the communicational phase of the idea. The concept powers the idea at the graphical level: “(The concept) …encapsulates all the essential features for conveying the idea, arranged in layers as it were and distinguished from all future elaborations as, say, an urbanistic idea, set down in a masterplan…the concept will be more layered, richer and abiding not only (to) admit more interpretations but (to) incite them to. …Concepts, then, are ideas expressed as three-dimensional ideograms”. (Hertzberger, p.100-101). Hertzberger states that the concept has ‘layers’ and ‘strata’. This is a almost geological vision that takes the concept to the category of tangible ‘material’. He does not specify how this combination of layers produces interpretations. Probably ideas arrange in three-dimensional combinations of layers (and through time too). Being the order of ideas and graphics critical for the determination and incitation of interpretations, a process of mediation is necessary. Hertzberger adds that the concept may have graphical expression and that this expression may be translated into a diagram. On the other hand, Rosental and Ludin equalize the concept to Idea and center ts signifimayce in practical and syntactical function (Rosental and Ludin, pg. 76 and 372).

In synthesis, the concept overcome previous instances of rationalization as a whole of ideas assembled by affinity. Under certain degrees of difficulty, concepts have the possibility of being implemented from easiness to extreme complexity. The concept may be affine or contradictory to the super- structures where implemented. My hypothesis is that in the course from ideas to concepts territorializing occurs. In this phase the Concept becomes excluding in relationship to others. A proposal with two contradictory concepts cannot exist since one of them works in order to invalidate the other. There must be a crisis of the Concept in order to attain its change, dissolution, re-composition and re-structuring with ideas that are internal or external to the concept in crisis. Therefore the crisis of Concept implies the crisis of a certain process of design.

The apparent controversy emerges between authors like Hertzberger for whom the concepts are already in position of originating ideograms and others like Karl Chu for whom the concepts cannot yet be graphics. If they could, it would be just partially, as points in space to be connected. In Chu’s essay, ‘The Cone of Immanenscendence’ (in ANY # 23, Pg. 39), he points that concepts are spatial coordinates and that they require of diagrams in order to give birth to the representation of their possibilities of configuration (please refer to the example of the connection of ordinates in the chapter entitled ‘Instructions’). Chu refers to immanence as the plane of all universal existences in the mind: ‘A renewal of the image of the plane would therefore affect the image of diagrammatic features registered on the plane. The plane of immanence is an image of thought which is constituted by the construction of concepts, according to Deleuze and Guattari. Concepts are events defined as concrete assemblages analogous to the configurations of a machine, whereas the plane is the abstract machine of the absolute horizon of events. Deleuze and Guattari interpret diagrams as trackings of dynamic movements, while concepts function as intensive ordinates of these movements in the plane’. (ANY #23, Pg. 39).

Furthermore, authors like Stan Allen point out a difference between the possibilities of the concept and the potential of the diagram to absorb graphical configurations. Allen refers to the impossibility of translating abstract texts into graphics in his essay ‘Diagrams Matter’ in ANY # 23: ‘…diagrams are not “decoded” according to universal conventions, rather the internal relationships are transposed, moved part by part from the graphic to the material or the spatial, by means of operations that are always partial, arbitrary, and incomplete. The impersonal character of these transpositions shifts attention away from the ambiguous, personal transpositions of translation and its associations with the weighty institutions of literature, language, and hermeneutics. A diagram in this sense is like a rebus. To cite Kittler again: “Interpretive techniques that treat texts as charades or dreams as pictures have nothing to do with hermeneutics, because they do not translate”. (Allen in Diagrams Matter, in ANY # 23, pg. 17, in reference to translation and transposition, please refer to the essay entitled ‘ Connections and Links in Time’).

Hence, Allen assimilates the concepts to abstractions that are not yet in possibility of being graphically transposed. The difference lies in the fact that both concept and diagram are in different structures and in different systems of rationalization. The concept may be assimilated as consequence of the last instance of rationalization that Castoriadis define as ‘idea or enunciation’ which attains mainly verbal expression.

Furthermore, in Gregg Lynn’s essay ‘Forms of Expression: The Proto-functional potential of Diagrams in Architectural Design’, he points out that ‘…a not so subtle distinction should be made between concepts; whose development is nascent and defined through possibilities, and ideas; which imply not only points of origin but also teleological progression’. (Croquis #72, Ben Van Berkel, p. 17).

If we understand the concepts as abstractions or charades, translating a concept would be, on one hand, if not impossible at least incomplete as method. (According the Collins Ductionary, a charade is ‘a game in which one team acts out each syllable of a word or phrase, which the other team has to guess’. Concepts as ‘transparency’ and ‘lightness’ cannot be expressed out of a metaphorical level (for instance, represented by ‘glass’ and ‘feather’ respectively) but only the level of form and communicability would be solved. Important issues for Architecture like space and program cannot be analogically represented through graphics (for instance perspectives) that depend on cultural discourse and training in order to be understood. The representation of concepts directly would be incomplete in this case.

Ben Van Berkel, wrote about the impossibility of the direct translation from concepts into ideograms: “No condition will let itself be directly translated into a fitting or completely corresponding conceptualization of that condition. There will always be a gap between the two. For this same reason, concepts such as repression and liberation may never be directly applied to architecture. There has to be a mediator…Previously, if the concepts of repression or liberation, for example, were introduced into architecture, a complex formal expression of this concept would be reduced to a sign with one clear meaning, which would subsequently be translated back into a project. This reductive approach excludes many possibilities in architecture. While concepts are formulated loud and clear, architecture itself waits passively, as it were, until it is pounced upon by a concept”. (Van Berkel, in ‘Diagrams, Interactive Instruments in Operation; in ANY # 23, p.21).

The verbal expression of a diagram, on the other hand, would be impossible as well, since the diagram is a map of multiple configurations, sometimes in astounding numbers. Please refer to the map (diagram) that describes the present book in the essay ‘Instructions’. In order to found my argument, I remind Castoriadis establishing the nexus between idea (concept) and word as condition for its existence. Being the idea expressed in words, it creates a text which cannot be translated into graphics but incompletely and ambiguously. (Combining words and graphics or words and spaces is another possibility. Furthermore, the joint of signs and spaces is ambiguous, since they both are in the same category of impossibility of direct communication. Nevertheless, Architecture cannot communicate; it is not a vehicle of communication. If someone pretended so, it is within a discourse where the elements accomplish ambiguous operations of expression).

If we follow the argument about the impossibility of direct translation of a concept into graphic representation, we may speculate that the mental and spatial position of the diagram is mobile. It may be found, for instance, half way between fantastic representation and idea, since it is properly neither an enunciation nor a fantasy. Nevertheless, as the relationship that the diagram describes occur through multiple connections in any space and time (in a plateau, as we shall see later), it is not subject to rules and not even to physics (through vertical, horizontal, transversal connections, leaps in time, travels of thousands of kilometers in seconds, etc.). The movement in these plateaus may be assimilated more to movements in fluids where there is no mechanical resistance. The diagram focuses more in possibilities of flux and configuration. This does not imply that a very explicit diagram cannot be used as political instrument of resistance providing, for instance, extreme degrees of representation of des-centralization or autonomy.

In consequence, the stage of rationalization that the diagram uses is displaced by its potential of mimicking fluxes and configurations. This potential extends since the diagram has not foreclosed its work as in the case of the ‘enunciation’. The diagram may also displace to inferior instances of rationalization as the pictograms and information, fantasy, stimulus, etc. In other words, it may use all sort of resources that language and words cannot. Hence, I conclude that the diagram does not proceed from a concept, and that there is no linearity between process of intellection and graphical representation. The diagram may appear in phases that are previous to the idea (enunciation), and even mutate it. This divergence creates a conflictive relationship expressed by Castoriadis: ‘That is why thought, the primal figuration and the pictogram preserve a more or less open conflictive relationship’. (Castoriadis, p. 110)

In summary, the ideogram or diagram’s potential is in a level different from that of verbal representation, since verbal expression contributes with narrative levels meanwhile diagrams contribute with configurative levels. Verbal narration of a space may also incite fantasy and produce ‘repetition and difference’ through the consecutive relation among people. This level of ambiguity may be found in ideograms as well. Nevertheless, since architecture needs under certain circumstances to be material, it requires the graphical document for its construction (other architectures stay in an the immaterial plane where their potential lies, as the Ferriss’ s futurist draws and Lebeus Woods’s inciting draws). The ideogram then assumes a phase of mimesis since it imitates instructions and possible (and impossible) configurations. It cannot be restricted through caesura. Its coherence is not questionable, since it does not work at the level of the intellect as finished stage (the diagram constitutes a plane of immanence and totality which lies in a graphic of potentialities. On the other hand, analogical diagrams are produced by the intellect as finished configurations, as in Frank Lloyd’s transposition of diagrams and plans. Nevertheless, this last instance precludes the possibilities of exploring and proposing configurations).

Zaera Polo and Farshid Moussavi write in ‘FOA Code Remix 2000’ that ‘…a diagram is essentially a material organization that prescribes performance. It does not necessarily contain metric or geometric information’ (2G # 16; p. 140). On the other hand, FOA explains that ‘…diagrams and computers enable you to work at a very abstract level and to integrate changing or differentiated conditions through the process while allowing local structures or contingencies to inform the final result’ (2G # 16, FOA; p. 137).

Moreover, Peter Eisenman wrote on the definition of ideograms, which diagrams are part of: “Generically, a diagram is graphic shorthand. Though it is an ideogram, it is not necessarily an abstraction. It is a representation of something in that it is not the thing itself…It may never be value-or meaning-free, even when it attempt to express relationships of formation and their processes…Although it is often argued that the diagram is a post-representational form, in instances of explanation and analysis the diagram is a form of representation”. (Eisenman in ‘Diagrams: An Original Scene of Writing’; in ANY #23, p. 27)

In architectural magazine ANY # 23, Stan Allen wrote that diagrams are the best means to engage the complexity of the real: “A diagram is a graphic assemblage that specifies relationships between activity and form, organizing the structure and distribution of functions….The diagram does not point towards architecture’s internal history as a discipline, but rather turns outward, signaling possible relations of matter and information. But since nothing may enter architecture without having been first converted into graphic form, the actual mechanism of graphic conversion is fundamental.” (Allen, in Diagrams Matter, in ANY # 23, p.17). Furthermore, Allen wrote that the diagram is more a productive device that a collection of graphics that only work in the narration of the plot of design. Hence, diagrams may also work unveiling Historic connections and projecting them into new possibilities.

Van Berkel extends on the features of the diagram: “More to the point is the general understanding of the diagram as a statistical or schematic image…understood as reductive machines for the compression of information…The condensation of knowledge that is incorporated into a diagram may be extracted from it regardless of the significance with which the diagram was originally invested….The diagram conveys an unspoken essence, disconnected from an ideal or an ideology, that is random, intuitive, subjective, not bound to a linear logic that may be physical, structural, spatial, or technical”. (Van Berkel, p.20). Van Berkel’s notion that the diagram is neither structural nor ideological reminds the description of Guattari and Deleuze of the rhizome.

Moreover, as a representational device, the diagram has the potential of revealing new organizations: “Although diagrams may serve an explanatory function, clarifying form, structure, or program to the designer and to others, and notations map program in time and space, the primary utility of the diagram is as an abstract means of thinking about organization...Unlike classical theories based on imitation, diagrams do not map or represent already existing objects or systems but anticipate new organizations and specify yet to be realized relationships”. (Allen, in Diagrams Matter, in ANY # 23, p.16).

The diagram has two purposes. In Design, it has the potential of forecasting the yet to come, and in Historical analysis, the diagram has the potential or assessing connections that have been undiscovered and to project them into the future. Hence, a productive relationship exists between the architectonic project and History: “The forward- looking tendency of diagrammatic practice is an indispensable ingredient for understanding its function; it is about the ‘real that is yet to come’. (Van Berkel, p.21). Deleuze wrote that thinking the past against the present (resisting the present) is performed not for an identical return of the past, but (quoting Nietzsche), ‘in favor…of a future time’. (Foucault, p.155).

Gregg Lynn, in his essay ‘Forms of Expression: The Proto-Functional Potential of Diagrams in Architectural Design’, in Croquis #72; establishes a difference between from-the-beginning concrete mechanical and technical assemblages and the abstract machines (diagrams), that are conceptual statements (part of a discourse) with many possibilities for reconfiguration and transformation. Lynn wrote that the effects of abstract machines trigger the formation of concrete assemblages when their virtual diagrammatic relationships are actualized as a technical possibility. Concrete assemblages (as technical details, scalar systems that extend to the whole project as in the work of R+U, where a detail is fractal in its relationship to structure, etc), are realized only when a new diagram may make them cross the technical threshold. Lynn wrote that ‘…it is the diagram that select new techniques....These diagrams bring functions of structure, circulation, enclosure and manufacturng into existence from an origin that is initially meaningless and useless. These diagrams and this design method is proto-functional...The sites, programs and structures of these projects are brought into existence through a proto-functional intuition...’ (Croquis #72, Ben van Berkel, pg. 29).

Therefore, the concrete assemblage may work as a diagram too when it assumed such characteristic. Herzog & de Meuron’s work, that of Gigon and Guyer and the firsts works of Van Berkel make use of tectonic diagram as an explanation of the project. In this cases, materiality displaces the abstraction of the diagram and represents reality, turning into analogical diagrams, that is, without any mediation. Nevertheless, the potential of these kind of diagram is sometimes limited to the envelope, being the architect’s responsibility to establish the relationship among programs, forms and events. (William Curtis in his essay ‘The Unique and The Universal: A Historian's Perspective on Recent Architecture’, wrote that ‘…so many of Herzog /de Meuron's recent projects start out with an alluring facade idea exploring materiality, ambiguity, allusion, 'object-hood', etc., but the same intensity of perception is not sustained on interiors which sometimes end up being quite ordinary and flat, as do the plans. The totality of the building is not always infused with the generating ideas’. Croquis #88/89, pg. 15).

Furthermore, Zaera Polo, in his essay ‘A World Full of Wholes’, wrote that ‘Herzog & De Meuron's work is conceptual and diagrammatic, and its material organization operates from a diagram that controls the totality of the work (Croquis #88/89; pg. 319). To Zaera Polo, the Basel’s team design is machinic since it ‘…posses an implacable order that keeps the project beyond authorial expression, or even its powerful material presence. Buildings such as the Warehouse for Ricola, the Signal Box and the Dominus Cellars may be explained by a diagram, in an order that automatically structures the decisions of the project, almost without any need for involvement by the author. In this sense, despite the powerful aesthetic thrust of the work, Herzog & De Meuron's production is largely abstract and mechanistic, and is fundamentally determined by an initial material and constructive concept which is capable of producing the project by pure repetition’ (Croquis #88/89; pg. 319).


Warehouse for the Ricola-Laufen Factory, Switzerland, 1987. (http://www.nai.nl/nl/extras/dossier_hdm/proj_038.html)	Dominus Warehouses, Yountville, California; 1997. (Zabalbescoa y Marcos; pg. 139).	Signal Box 4 Auf Dem Wolf-Basel, Switzerland, 1992-1995. http://www.moma.org/expansion/charette/architects/herzog_meuron/selected_proj.html

Concepts are organized into structures which are determined by the way in which they relate their parts. These structures may also extend to the organization of diagrams. Furthermore, diagrams are mimesis and image of the world. (Hence, the political origin of diagrams is crux for its proposing since the diagram is anteceded by the discourse, which must be reviewed if the potential of the diagram is not to be precluded). The importance in writing over structures is to define movements inside them. These movements may be static or relational and determine the way in which we perceive the totality and the way in which we interact with it. According to Harvey …’inside totality separated structures exist and that it is possible to distinguish one from the other. Structures are not “things” or “actions”. Therefore we cannot establish its existence through observation. To define the elements relatively means to interpret them apart from direct observation. Defining the elements relationally means interpreting them outside direct observation’. (Harvey, pg. 305).

Dealing with elements related with structures is important in order to extrapolate the vision of connections to the vision of a connected and inclusive world. Harvey refers that relationships may occur apart from the experience of observation. This means that the study of potential relationships among the elements within a structure cannot be neither studied nor proposed through pragmatic methodologies. (‘In pragmatism, objective reality is equaled to “experience” meanwhile division between the subject and object of knowledge is established uniquely within experience’. Rosental and Ludin, pg. 372).

Harvey adds that ‘…any structure must be defined as a system of internal relationships in processes of structuring through the work of their own laws of transformation. Therefore structures may be defined through the comprehension of the laws of transformation that model them…Structures may be considered as separated and different entities when there is no transformation that might turn one into another…To say that structures may be distinguished does not imply that they evolution in autonomy without influencing one on the other. Marx… suggests that relationships among structures are in turn structured inside totality…When we try to consider society as a totality, then everything must be related in last terms to the economic basis of the structures of society’. (Harvey, 306).

Furthermore, Harvey adds that structures are transformed by internal and external relationships that produce consequence among structures. Hence, he outlines a definition of totalitarian structures that impose their discourse in favor of their own laws of integrity: ‘In other words, totality is about to be structured by the elaboration of the relationships inside it…This concept is common to Marx and to Piaget. Ollman…signals how such a point of view influences the way of conceiving relationships among the elements and among the elements and totality. Totality tries modeling the parts so that every one of them is useful in order to preserve the existence and general structure of the whole’. (Harvey in pg. 303-304 makes reference to Piaget’s ‘Structuralism’, NY, 1970).

The manner in which structures are internally conceived provides with two different models of thinking, one of multiple transversal relationships and another in which elements answer to vertical hierarchies. In both models, their structures and elements provide with a gamut of scalar systems of organization. Furthermore, it is possible to arrange combinations among hierarchical and transversal structures.

The origin of vertical organizations is, according to Harvey, space itself. Any space of absolute properties is a defined and unchangeable space that provides a discourse of exclusion and segregation: ‘To say that space has absolute properties is to say that structures, people and lots exclude mutually in Euclidian tri-dimensional space. This concept is not by itself an adequate concept of space …’ (Harvey, pg. 175)

Since models and structures are extensive to societies, the hierarchical model is based mainly in forced and imposed significations expressed in urban space, the space of differences and hierarchies by excellence: ‘The general consequence of a hierarchical society is evident and produces tangible results into urban spatial economy. Dominant organizations and institutions use space hierarchically and symbolically. Sacred and profane spaces are created, focal points accentuated and, in general, space is manipulated in order to attain status and prestige’. (Harvey, p. 292).

The (mental and physical) spatial configuration of hierarchical structures provides with typical organizations. Some of these spatial experiences may be connected in a linear, consecutive fashion in which an element is pre-condition for the next and antecedent of the previous; i.e. that an individual admits an only active neighbor, its hierarchical superior. The individual may just occupy a precise position (through a process of signification and subjectivation). In this case, the formation of points that are central and pivotal produces a configuration with the form and structure of a tree.

On the other hand, the development of transversal structures produces another conception of the space and of social practice from which concepts derive. Configurations are not necessarily produced at the same dimension (neither in the same time nor in the same space). The connection of two lines in this configuration is not sequential. In this case, an element is not pre-condition for the other or antecedent of another. If we apply the notion of time in this case, the connection of two random elements in this three-dimensional net may be produced anytime. For instance in History, the connection of two random events in different times and spaces (like groups of ideas and experiences) takes years in order to finally establish a concept of relationship, which may finally occur in some other geographical point and in some other time which is not the original.

Respectively, these two types of organization may be regarded as the ‘tree’ configuration and the ‘rhizome’ configuration on which philosophers Guattari and Deleuze extended on. Furthermore, there is a strong relationship established between the works of Christopher Alexander (1965, in “A City is not a Tree”) and those of Guattari and Deleuze (of the possibilities of connecting different elements in random fashion). Nevertheless the intentions and the consequences of the aforementioned works were different. Alexander wrote his thesis in order compare the lack of complexity the American cities of the 1960’s had in comparison to traditional cities where the potential of connections was unlimited. (Harvey wrote that urban space is a space of multiple and improvised connections that defies the hierarchy through relations: ‘The activity of any element in a urban system may generate certain effects…over other elements of the system…Simple observation of urban problems indicates that an enormous multitude of external effects must be taken into account, a fact that is recognized implicitly by Lowry (in A Short Course in Model Design, Journal of the American Institute of Planners # 31, pg. 158) …in his phrase “In the city, everything affects everything”.’ (Harvey, 54, 55).

Moreover, Alexander wrote in ‘The City is not a Tree’ that “…both the tree and the semi-lattice are ways of thinking about how a large collection of many small systems makes up a large complex system. More generally, they are both names for structures of sets.”(Alexander in ‘A City is not a Tree’, in Jencks and Kropf’s ‘Theories and Manifestoes of Contemporary Architecture’, p. 30).

Comparatively, Deleuze and Guattari assimilated the tree configuration to that of books and roots. In the case of books, the tree configuration manifests materially because books have axis and pages around (like trees have a trunk and branches around), and meta-physically because books are reflections of reality (since they reproduce reality they produce the double of it, thus progressing always in binary shape). As Deleuze and Guattari pointed out of the ‘tree’ configuration: “This thought has never understood multiplicity: it requires a supposedly strong sense of primordial unity in order to get two by a spiritual method. And from the side of the object, according to the natural method, it is dubious to pass directly from one to three, four or five, but on the condition to have always a strong primordial unity, that is, of the axis that holds the secondary roots”. (Rhizome, p.10).

The definition of the tree configuration is provided through two theorems. On the one hand, Alexander wrote that “A collection of sets forms a tree if and only if, for any two sets that belong to the collection, either one is wholly contained in the other, or else they are wholly disjoint… The enormity of this restriction is difficult to grasp. It is a little as though the members of a family were not free to make friends outside the family, except when the family as a whole made a friendship…” (Jencks, Op. Cit. 31). On the other hand, Guattari and Deleuze mentioned the ‘theorem of friendship’ that may be related with that of the tree: ‘If in a given society any two individuals have exactly a common friend there is an individual that is friend to all the others”. (Rhizome, p. 27).

Alexander proposed the semi-lattice in order to establish a critique of institutions and structures (mainly of suburban cities) organized through the ‘tree’ configuration. Consequently, Guattari and Deleuze extend on the critique to the concept of linearity that Modernity imposed: “The modern methods, in their majority, are perfectly valid in order to proliferate the series or to favor the development of multiplicity in one direction (for instance lineal direction) meanwhile a unity of totalization affirms more in another dimension, that of a circle or of a cycle.” (Rhizome, p.11). Moreover, Guattari and Deleuze affirmed that circularity does not resolve the issue of free connections. Hence they proposed the solution as the rhizome.

The multiple, the rhizome, may be found in vegetables with multiple connections and even in the groups that animals like rats produce. A den is a rhizome, a functional habitat that provides modalities of prevision, displacement, evasion and capture. Furthermore, according to Guattari and Deleuze, the rhizome works like a social device that denies language: “Rhizome in itself has very diverse forms, from its superficial extension ramified in all directions, until its concretions in bulbs and tubers...A rhizome does not stop connecting semiotic chains, power organizations, junctures related to arts, sciences and social struggles. A semiotic chain is a tubercle that joins diverse acts, whether they are linguistic, perceptual, mimic or cogent: There is neither language in itself nor universality of language.” (Rhizome, p.12-13). Bertil Malmberg established the difference between the power of official languages and the subversion of subterranean languages mentioning that the universality of language proceeds as bulb, from a position of power in comparison to other languages which evolution by ‘stems and subterranean flows, along fluvial valleys, or railways, moving through oil spots’. (Bertil Malmberg is quoted in Rhizome p. 13-14, from ‘The New Paths of Linguistic’, p. 72. Mexico, Siglo XXI Ed.)

One of the most important characteristics of the rhizome is that it has multiple entrances. Another important difference between the tree configuration and the rhizome is that the last has no points or positions as may be found in a structure, in a tree or in a root. There are not more that lines that proliferate the whole in dynamism, always in connection to the external, with “flat multiplicities of n dimensions that are a-significant and a-subjective”. (Rizhome, p. 16). In some cases tubers, trees and roots may be found at the end of the lines of a rhizome, but they do not have the primacy of central tubers or trees. Moreover, Alexander’s definition of the semi-lattice establishes a comparison with that of rhizome in the case of Deleuze and Guattari. For Alexander, the semi-lattice axiom consists in the following definition: “A collection of sets forms a semi-lattice if and only if, two overlapping sets belong to the collection, then the set of elements common to both also belongs to the collection”. (Jencks, p. 31).

Although criticized by its focus on methodology, it is important to extend on Alexander’s work, because it opens the comprehension of reality as an unlimited matrix of possibilities. For instance, Geoffrey Broadbent wrote that “…according to Alexander, a tree based in 20 elements may contain at the most 19 sub-ensembles of those 20 elements. On the other hand, a lattice, also based on those 20 elements, may contain more than a million of sub-ensembles”. (Broadbent, p. 273). Nevertheless, the difference between the concepts of Alexander and those of Guattari and Deleuze is that the last focus in the internality of the concept of a non-tree configuration, not specifically on the mathematical possibilities.

According to Deleuze and Guattari, every rhizome is against the excessively signification of the segments (for instance, the segments of History). Hence, the lines of segmentation that rhizomes trace are stratified, territorialized and organized. On the other hand, the lines are also signified and attributed, but the focus is not specially on these processes. Furthermore, the rhizome also provokes processes of de-territorialization and re-territorialization that are relative; the rhizome constantly joins one to the other. (Rhizome, p.17-18). The example of the orchid mimicking the wasp in order to accomplish pollination is exemplary of the instance of territorialization and de-territorialization.

Deleuze and Guattari defined ‘plateau’ in order to establish the definition of a field where the rhizomes are applied. This definition may be extended to the field of concepts: “We call plateau to every multiplicity connectable with others by subterranean superficial stems in order to form and to extend a rhizome…Every plateau may be read everywhere and may be related to everyone”. (Rhizome, p. 34).

In this sense, I hold the hypothesis that the field of History (of Architecture) is a plateau formed by rhizomes. These rhizomes are lines (not events, since events are points) of action that work together in a-parallel trajectory, until selected by Historians in groups or associations in order to establish which joint strategies these lines have in common. As the orchid and the wasp, these elements have to wait until the moment of producing a common rhizomatic association in order to succeed. In History, this lapse may take decades or centuries to be produced. This plateau is a topography where concepts run in different and even contradictory directions, since by definition any connection may be established between two elements. Fixed points constituted by discourse are constantly re-defined and even eliminated.

A) Alexander's diagrams on the city: Top, tree configuration. Below, the semi-lattice. (Broadbent, p. 274). B) The Klein bottle,dDiagram by Ben Van Berkel's UN studio, (Verstegen, p. 72).

As aforementioned, the problem of representation arises for both tree and rhizome. The architect has to represent for different purposes. One of them is in the elaboration of forms that embody rhizomatic connections identified. Another is to structure the particularities of these connections.

As Hertzberger points, the difficulty lies in representing the ideas (and concepts) adequately: “A particular difficulty is faced by the architect…he cannot represent his ideas in reality, but has to resort to representing them by means of symbols, just as the composer only has his score with which to render what he hears. While the composer may still more or less envisage what he has created by checking to hear what his composition sounds like on the piano, the architect depends entirely on the elusive world of drawings, which may never represent the space he envisages in its entirety but may only represent separate aspects thereof (and even so the drawings are difficult to read…This unsatisfactory state of affairs is maintained and even aggravated by the fact that the drawing, irrespective of the meaning it seeks to communicate, evokes an independent aesthetic image, which threatens to overshadow the architect’s original intentions and which may even be interpreted by the maker himself in a different sense than initially foreseen)”. (Hertzberger, p.116).

Both tree and rhizome have a different representation. The rhizome does not answer to structural or generative models which are mainly principles capable of being reproducible until the infinite under the tree logic. On the other hand, the logic of the tree is that of ‘tracing’ and of reproduction and has as finality the copy of something that is given totally finished from a structure that over-codifies and from an axis that supports. This means that the logic of the representation of the tree is mainly based on interpretations and significations. On the other hand, the rhizome produces a map.

Deleuze and Guattari assimilated the ‘tree configuration’ to that of psychoanalysis, linguistics and structuralism, regenerations, reproductions, returns, hydras, medusas, and even informatics: “Arborescent systems are hierarchical systems that comprise centers of signification and subjectivation, central automats and organized memories.”(Rhizome, p. 27). Furthermore, Foucault (alluded by Deleuze) referred to the opposition between History and structuralism when he wrote that “…the essential debate has not mainly to do with structuralism as such, but with the existence of models and realities denominated structures, as with the position and the statute that correspond to the individual in dimensions that seemingly are not structured. So, as History is opposed directly to structure, it may be thought that the subject conserves a sense of constituent, agglomerated, unifying activity. But it does not happen the same when the ‘epochs’ of historic formations as multiplicities are considered. Those escape the realm of the subject and of the structure as well.”(Foucault, p. 40-41). For Foucault, the ethic of Power forbids the tracing of a structure in History, since this tracing derives in interested interpretation.

(The field of History as a non-homogeneous plateau, is the result of post-structuralism in the writings of authors like Deleuze; Foucault, Lyotard, Baudrillard, alluded in Josep Maria Montaner’s book ‘Architecture and Critique’: ‘We have entered into a new period in which cultural multiplicity prevails and in which the post-modern doubt has conduced to new scientific interpretations based on the concept of a universe in non-equilibrium. Such a concept is expressed in fractal geometries under the theory of chaos. Methods of thinking increase their critique and justify discontinuous, fragmentary and provisional interpretations based on the emphasis of transformation and difference. Scientific and philosophical activity are obliged to surrender their pretensions of neutrality and objectivity to the will of universal knowledge and to its project of a unified science and totalizing philosophy. Post-structuralism in architecture appears under the condition of perpetual crisis, in the lost of faith in great interpretations and in doubts on the capacity of linguistic to explain architecture' . (Montaner; Arquitectura y Crítica, GG Básicos; Barcelona, 1999; pg. 90).

Let us elaborate in the example of psychoanalysis, which Deleuze and Guattari identified with the formation and consolidation of the tree as validation of organizations. In order to interpret pathologies in the complex ‘net’ that human brain is (which understood in global terms is the map of the potential of humankind) psychoanalysts proceeds coding and assigning interpretations arbitrarily, thus precluding the understanding of political, material and proceedings that cannot be explained solely with interested or discursive configurations, such as those of the tracing and the tree. Tracing over the map of human mind is like trying to find figures over the tomography of a patient and then using the figures as interpretations of pathologies. (Non-physiological) explanations are to be found neither in the tomography nor in the interior of the person’s mind itself but on the outside, in his relations and experiences.

The map cannot be understood if not taken as a global instrument associated with lines of action and (social as well as geographical) ruptures. The map is a productive device that registers different changing temperatures of social stability and instability. The tracing and dismembering of the map into singular layers cannot but preclude the understanding of the place as a globality. In this sense, Deleuze and Guattari depicted the ‘tracing’ as an instrument that lacks the operativity of the ‘map’.

The comparison of maps and the definition of globality of Deleuze and Guattari establish a link with the 1905’s theory of Planning called ‘Survey before Plan’ by the Scot Patrick Geddes (theory described by planner Peter Hall in his book ‘Cities of Tomorrow’). The point is the outstanding similitude in the layering and the understanding of the relationship among intertwined phenomena as described in the definition of rhizome and plateau: “Planning must start, for Geddes, with a survey of the resources of such a natural region, of the human responses to it, and of the resulting complexities of the cultural landscape…For this great work, Geddes constantly argued, the planner’s ordinary maps were useless: you must start with the great globe…”(Hall, p. 142). Geddes’s planning theory extends to the approach of rhizomes in fields called plateaus that have relationships with other plateaus (thus implying the relationship among History, Sciences, Planning, etc.) Geddes vision is truly ecological and refers to processes of symbiosis. The planner assimilates natural and social phenomena through analysis (the survey) and establishes a relationship with other intertwined plateaus. The similitude with Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of rhizomes is relevant for Planning.

(Urban and regional planner Edward Soja, in his essay ‘Restructuring the Industrial Capitalist City, in the book TransUrbanism, describes the relationship that the architect must have with the different scales. A direct nexus may be established with the rhizomatic approach and the work on different scales that characterized Patrick Geddes: ‘The…disagreement arises from the different scales and concepts of urbanism that exist within architecture versus those in geography and planning…The core architectural view…consists of streets, road and a built environment located within a vaguely defined 'urban cloud'. In this vision, the city becomes a collection of separate cells with built environments compacted together to form an urban mass. This view is radically different from the larger-scale spatial or regional vision of the city as an expansive urban system of movements and flows…and people living not just in built environments but in constructed geographies characterized by different patterns of income, employment, educational levels, ethnic and racial cultures, housing and job densities, etc... These constructed geographies get lost when the city is reduced entirely to a collection of built forms. As a result, architects tend to see planning the city as their exclusive domain, as specialists in built form, or else they dissociate themselves entirely from the planning process, seen it only as imposing constraints on their creativity. The city that the geographer looks at is much more than the built environment. What's being planned from the geographer's point of view is a very different kind of city. The emphasis is not on the built environment per se but on a more variegated and larger scale social environment…That is, …(try ) …to think on multiple scales- local, human and Regional -then to even larger regional, national supra national and global scales. In the sense, the architect is being encouraged to think an little bit more like the geographer, and specially to think regionally...). Edward Soja, in ‘Restructuring the Industrial Capitalist City; op.cit. pg. 90).

On the other hand, the opposed model of work that relates to ‘tracings’ has been criticized by Harvey for whom this method opposes complex reality: ‘Urban planning, which has always been dominated by the primal work element of the drafting board and particularly by the process of copying draws from the maps (a deceiving instrument as no other), was completely immerse in the details concerning the human spatial organization on the terrain. In order to take a decision on a concrete lot, the urban planner…painted it in red or green on a planning map, according to his own intuitive evaluation of the spatial form…Webber…considers vital that the planner relinquishes “the deeply rooted doctrine that seeks its method in models extracted from maps when, on the other hand, it is hidden inside extremely complex social organizations”.’ (Harvey, in pg. 19, alludes M. Webber in ‘Order in Diversity: Community without Propinquity’ in Wingo, L., comp., Cities and Space: The Future Use Of Urban Land (Baltimore, 1963, pg. 54).

Alejandro Zaera Polo complements the definition of tracings and maps in reference to the work of Rem Koolhaas and OMA in ‘Notes for a Topographic Survey’ (Croquis # 53, 1997): “Tracing is the term used by Deleuze and Guattari in order to classify any ‘representation’ of reality operating as an abstract system of codification with a tendency to establish rules, measures, or ‘compositions’. ‘Tracing’ opposes the ‘map’, which is an instrument of contact with reality, always in perpetual modification, meant for experimentation. ‘Tracing’ is a tool for the determination of ‘competences’, whereas the ‘map’ is an arm of ‘performances’. The almost purely graphical approach which characterizes the work of (Zaha) Hadid and (Elia) Zenghelis, is almost immediately identifiable with ‘tracing’ as a formal abstraction of reality”. (Croquis 53, p.35).

Guattari and Deleuze wrote that the map “is open, connectable in all its dimensions, demountable, reversible, and capable of receiving constant modifications. It may be broken, inverted, adapted to mountains of any nature, and commenced by an individual, group or social association”. (Rhizome, p. 22). We may perform a tracing over a map, but the result is that the tracing has translated the map, transforming the rhizome into roots: It has organized, stabilized and neutralized the rhizome. The tracing only reproduces: “That is why it is so harmful. It injects redundancies and propagates them. What the tracing reproduce of the rhizome is just the mires, the blockades, the germens of the axis or the points of structure…When a rhizome is intercepted, arborified, it is over, nothing happens with its desire; because it is always by desire that the rhizome moves and produces… the rhizome operates on desire by external and productive impulses”. (Rhizome; p.23-24). According to Deleuze, what proceeds from the outside are forces; Deleuze places this outside even further than any form of exteriority. “At the same time, not only singularities of forces but singularities of resistance exist as well. The last are capable of modifying and permuting those relationships, changing the instable diagram”. (Foucault, p. 157).

Philosopher Christine Buci-Glucksmann in “From the Cartographical View to the Virtual” wrote that “the map is…a space that is open to multiple entrances, a ‘plateau’ where the gaze becomes nomadic.” For Buci-Glucksmann, the map is immediately both visible and readable: “The map seizes the real, masters it, and allows a glimpse of an unconscious quality of vision with its folding and unfolding, within a weightless plane. A map takes possession of the limits and the borders of the unlimited… An abstraction such as the virtual presupposes a mental image of the world and an abstract machine made of lines and of possibilities enabling one to ‘read a map’, as we say. This involves a complex reading, because one needs to project oneself outside of oneself, to forget one’s own position, in order to explore this cartography in rhizomes… From now on, the cartogram of contemporary art is endless, since the map is the interface of the world, as in Archizoom’s ‘No-Stop City’ (1969). And it is precisely this world-making quality of the map that generates all its paradoxes and its multiple logics. Since, however utopic it may be, the map may also become a highly effective machine of power. With the maps kept secret by totalitarian regimes, targeted bombings of sites, indeed of populations, the map truly is ‘a portrait’, an image ‘in meaning and in representation”.

Deleuze wrote in ‘Bergsonism’ that virtuality (of the maps, in this case) is ‘…the subjective, or the duration, …the virtual. More precisely, the virtual, as actualization, cannot be separated from the movement of its actualization since actualization is fulfilled by differentiation, by divergent lines, and creates by its own movement many other differences of nature’ (Deleuze, Bergsonism’, pg. 41). In this sense, the map is virtual, it actualizes itself. On the other hand, the tracing is defined by generating actualizations only through discourse.

Deleuze continues that “…from a certain point of view, the possible is contrary to the real, it opposes the real; furthermore the virtual opposes the actual, what is absolutely different…The possible does not have reality (although it may have an actuality; inversely, the virtual is not actual, nevertheless it has a reality). The best formula to define the states of virtuality is that of Proust: ‘ Real without being actual, ideal without being abstract’…And since not all possible fulfills, fulfillment implies a limitation by which certain possibilities are considered rejected or prohibited, meanwhile other ‘pass’ to the real. The virtual, on the other hand, does not have to fulfill, only actualize and actualization yet does not have as rules similarity and limitation, but difference or divergence and creation…since the virtual cannot proceed by elimination or limitation to actualize, but it must create its own lines of actualization in positive acts…In summary, the characteristic of the virtual is to exist in such a way that it is only actualized by difference: it is forced to difference, to create lines of difference in order to fulfill actualization’. (Deleuze, Bergsonism; pg. 101)

Castoriadis coincides with Buci-Glucksman: producing a map requires projecting out of the own discourse. Furthermore, Castoriadis establishes a critique to the repetition of the tracing scheme: ‘…what characterizes each process of metabolizing determined by the encounter between the psychic space and the space external to the psyche is defined by the specificity of the relational model imposed to the elements of the represented. On the other hand, this model is the trace of the representative’s own structural scheme’. (Castoriadis, p. 40)

Represented in ‘tracings’ or in ‘maps’, both tree and rhizome reproduce the image of the world (imago mundi). The only possibility to escape to the image of the world that theory has proposed is assimilating it with a box of tools, avoiding the discursive practice. As Miguel Morey wrote in the prologue to the Spanish edition of ‘Foucault’: “As a ‘box of tools’, the book’s connection with a domain of exteriority is what gives the book and theory their specific importance. At the same time they surrender their pretensions of setting, proposing or imposing an imago mundi; the writing, the theory, the book are tools altogether with other tools, standing all in order to be proved exteriorly to themselves and in multiple, local and plural connection with other books, with other theories, with other writings.” (Foucault, p. 13). Foucault established a critique to the systems and referred theory as an instrument for the relations of power and the struggles around it. He compromised Historic reflection (in certain dimensions) in the search of such a task. (Foucault p. 12).

In summary, the map is the mimesis of the world, an image of the world, an ‘imago mundi’. Nevertheless, it is also a holistic and political device for representation. The maps of capitalism are indeed different from the maps of socialism. They represent different positions and have different intentions. The maps of performance are also political; they cannot take away themselves from the modes of production. Furthermore, Christine Buci-Glucksmann establishes categories between the map and the diagram. She wrote that “…the diagram is already in itself a map or an overlay of maps, that allows one to explore movements…and virtual volumes…The diagram explores continuous space, the constructed, within an abstract figurative which initiates an experience of thought, through its allusive and schematic structure…(in) a kind of Leibnizian reasoning, that one rediscovers in the new connections made between the numeric continuousness and the morphogenesis that are so characteristic of architectures of the virtual. Seeing is to (construct, build) and to know, to link… systems, arrangements made of lines, of forces and of vectorial points, as in Paul Klee’s schemas, where the arrows are forces. The map combines the two space-times distinguished by Boulez and developed by Deleuze and Guattari in ‘Mille Plateaus’.”

Architectural rhizomes find an example in the Agadir Congress Center of Rem Koolhaas, which is in Zaera Polo’s essay ‘OMA 1986-1991. Notes for a Topographic Survey’ probably ‘…the most astonishing example of this material corporeality, of the connectivity of smooth space. No more segmentation between spaces, no more homogeneity: a continuous variation of form through space, the generation of a vectorial, directional and anisotropic space. Agadir is a differential space rather than an articulation of homogeneities. From the simple elimination of the structural grid, the setting of spatial or metric references disappears and with them the possibility of a formal codification. Space and material are treated in Agadir like dynamic flows rather than stable forms. (Croquis #53, p. 45). Zaera Polo explains that topological, or projective geometries substitute Euclidian or metric geometries in an epistemological difference; The Agadir Congress centre is a ‘…topograph(y) where measure and proportion, the basic instruments of classical architecture, are replaced by fundamentally topological relationships, geometries of connections, adjacencies or distances instead of measurements, magnitudes or properties’. (Croquis #53, pg. 40).

The Agadir Congress Centre is a hotel and congress palace designed in 1990 by Koolhaas in Morocco. It constitutes a project based on geology and topology, since it does not depart from top-down typology as direct re-elaboration. On the other hand, it does not proceed strictly from information as the bottom-up designs of FOA. Agadir’s concept establishes and promotes spatial connections that derive in topological and geometrical super-impositions.

Agadir’s section reveals what Colin Rowe denominated ‘phenomenologic transparency’, a section working as façade and establishing direct visual relationships with the content of the building. The structure does not modulate the non-Cartesian space which is truly proto-functional (it is functional but redefines the temporality of function through durations more than through standard measure). Structural elements are not posed as indexes (as coded information in gridded space), but as a truly topography or cartography, that is, according to topographic accidents or to the slope of the dunes, etc. The building’s elevations break the rigid ruling geometry of composition but, on the other hand, reveal the multiple relationships of space and function. This property is evident specially in the vestibule, a topological space that consists in dunes. Hence, surfaces accomplish an heterogeneous landscape within the building. The arrival of people at the great vestibule is entirely free, rhizomatic. Furthermore, the vestibule accomplishes the property of being an open urban plaza under the building.

In the upper floors, rooms lead to internal secluded patios in direct elaboration of the Muslim traditional riyad. The corridors that structure the guest’s rooms accesses, act as the derbs (alleys) of Moroccan cities (as in the Medina of Marrakech). Forming a urban space through connections, the corridors establish a net of multiple paths that remind of ancient Moroccan cities that were not accomplished through master plans but through historic super-impositions. Hence, Agadir’s Congress Palace is contextual via the re-elaboration of the traditional space of the Moslim city, and on the other hand, it is definitively modern. Nevertheless, the building has not been biased for the easy copy or historic quotation. Its merit is the re-elaboration of the urban Moroccan condition.

It is interesting to note that the guest’s first floor has a diagonal at the scale of the floor, which is significant if we compare that act with the urban trace of the Diagonal of the Cerdá Plan of Barcelona (let us remember that Spain was Moslim domain for more than 700 years). In summary, more than a floor in a building the stage is a miniature city (with Diagonal included). Koolhaas incorporates a profound urban virtuality in his building, thus opening the space of melancholy, since Agadir is located far from any urban environment (philosopher Andrew Benjamin proposed the category of the ‘melancholic space’ open by a graphic that makes allusion to the missing, which in this case is twofold: the never-realized building and the urban condition).


Model ofn the Urban Plaza (Croquis #53, p. 201).	Plan of the Hotel, h. 20 mts. (Croquis #53, p.196).	Urban Plaza, h.4-18 mts. (Croquis #53, p.196).


Urban Plaza from Reception; (Croquis #53, p.195).	Quartier Riad Zitoun Kedim, derb Jdid; Marrakech; 1987 (Wilbaux, pg. 80).

Proyecto de Rem Koolhaas para el Centro de Congresos de Agadir, Marruecos; 1990.

Furthermore, rhizomes find an example in Koolhaas’ s Melun-Sénart remodelling, which is a project at the urban scale that assumes the definition of connections. In an interview entitled ‘OMA 1986-1991. Notes for a Topographic Survey’, Zaera Polo wrote that OMA’s oeuvre replaces the ideas or the essences by relations or performances, liberating from linguistic procedures that found in de-constructivism the terminal phase of the representative paradigm, through ‘…indifference towards form as linguistic codification which enables us to typify the latest Office production as rhizomatic, i.e. , fundamentally constructed on its operativity’. (Croquis #53, pg. 36)

In the Melun-Sénart Project, the strategy ‘…consists in the generation of a system apt for development, rather than the determination of formal results. The aims of the proposal are summarized in the accessibility of urban services and the preservation of certain aesthetics qualities of the place. An initial distinction between urban project and development project may define the areas of control and indetermination. The explicit rejection of nay urban ideology as a determinant of the plan implies the acceptance of the impossibility of exercising absolute determination over the materialization of the city. The detonator for Melun-Sénart is directly functional, without compositive preconceptions. The urban system is developed around a series of belts associated with different activities and at different speeds at which the energy of the design is concentrated, minimalizing the determinations of the developable areas. In Melun-Sénart, the need for a formal determination of the city is dissolved in a strategy of control over the developable/undevelopable areas. Again, an operative rather than a linguistic logic. The Melun-Sénart system is made of lines which intersect at structurally asignifying points: the points of articulation do not necessarily influence the materialization of the lines. It is a type of structure that may be perfectly associated with the principle of connection and diversity used by Deleuze and Guattari to characterize the rhizomatic systems: 'Any point of the rhizome might and should be connected to nay other'. (Deleuze and Guattari). The urban topography of Melun-Sénart is organized in lines or vectors instead of points, centers or positions, each line having a particular determination in terms of speed, direction or activity: a multiplicity of measures and directions. There is no single spatial reference in orientation or measure. It is a disorganized topography which does not impose regulations on the correspondences between elements and positions, in perfect fulfillment of the rhizomatic principle of multiplicity: 'In a rhizome there are no points or positions like in a tree, simply lines. There are no units of measure, only multiplicities or varieties of measurement'. (Deleuze and Guattari). The lines structuring Melun-Sénart are extendable, able to grow, given that their boundaries are neither significant, dimensional, syntactic nor semantic: there are no formal codifications of ties or ends. Here we find the third principle of the rhizome, that of the a-signifying rupture: 'A rhizome may be broken, shattered at any spot, but it will start up again from one of its old lines or on new lines. It will not have the oversignificant breaks separating structures or cutting across a single structure'.
(Zaera Polo en Croquis #53, pg 37-38).

“Publishing the cartography of current architecture is the only possibility of submitting it to the judgment of anyone, of the crowd, anyplace.” (Solà, p. 25)

Ignasi de Solà Morales alludes Manfredo Tafuri, the Italian architect and theoretician in reference to the representation of History: “Manfredo Tafuri, in a recent essay on the issue of the realism in Modern Architecture, proposed the interpretive problem of what we commonly call Modern Architecture concluding that the contemporary experience of the architecture of the XXth century cannot be read in a linear fashion any more. On the other hand, it presents itself as a plural and complex experience, in which is valid to cut pathways not just upside down, but in diverse directions, from the beginning to the end, transversal, oblique or diagonal as well. In such a way, the diverse and plural experience of the architecture of the XXth century un-knits, undoes the intrinsic complexity of the self modern-experience”. (Solà, p. 65).

Similarly, Christine Buci-Glucksmann wrote that the “cartographic view is therefore inseparable from a new regime of historicity of the masses, which joins with a double temporality: A machinated and machine-like time, an ephemeral time, that of the eternal present, with neither future nor plans. Besides, this regime tends to destroy the time of memory that has become more and more commemorative, as well as another time, that of mirrors and reflections, characteristic of the crystal-image of architectural and artistic modernism. If this crystal, with its sharp edges and its coalescences of the present and the past was the allegory of the entire culture of glass of the 20th century…, the image-flux with its new fluidities and its diaphanous transparencies would be the allegory of a present marked by a plane of global immanence that is screen-like”. Buci-Glucksmann proposes an allegory in reference to the final of Modernism (in the figure of glass reflections as modern ambiguities). On the other hand, she proposes the upcoming of architectures that make use of the capacity of media to attain an end that is immediate. These architectures are mainly based in presentness and do not appeal to the past, neither through form nor through remembrance. Toyo Ito, in his essay ‘Tarzans in the Media Forest’, established Buci-Glucksmann’s same remark: The presentness and the extension of media to the crowd are vital for architecture in order to be experimented, especially in cities where the vertigo of immediacy has turn quotidian. (2G #2, 1997/2, Toyo Ito; p. 122-142)

Furthermore, Foucault’s and Deleuze’s concepts of enunciation may be assimilated to that of Solà of segmentations in diverse directions, which allow passing from one system to the other. Deleuze wrote that the ‘enunciation’ is a multiplicity that passes through the strata, and Foucault that the enunciation “crosses the realm of structures and of possible unities and make possible the apparition of concrete contents in time and in space”. (Foucault, p. 41). Furthermore, Deleuze extended on the enunciation: “The enunciation is very distinct; it is inseparable of an inherent variance by which we are never in a system, but we constantly pass from one system to the other…The enunciation is neither lateral nor vertical; it is transversal, and its rules are at the same level…Such is the associated or adjacent space: each enunciation is unbound from heterogeneous enunciations to which it is linked by rules of transformation (vectors).” (Foucault; p. 31-32).

Deleuze wrote that Foucault created a diagonal dimension in which the points are not distributed in the surface but truly in space: “Just a serial method, as used currently by historians, allows constructing series around a singular point, and seeking other series that extend it, in other directions, at the level of other points. There is always a moment, places, in which the series diverge and are distributed in a new space, where the segment cross. Being a serial method based in singularities and curves…,the theory of the segments is an essential piece of the system. We have to follow the series, cross the levels, grant the thresholds, never be contented with the unfolding of the phenomena and the enunciations according to a horizontal or vertical dimension, but form a transversal and mobile diagonal in which the archivist- archaeologist moves”.(Foucault, p. 47-48).

The archivist- archaeologist is the example given by Foucault as the way of proceeding, not enunciating theories and then finding the discoveries that might justify the theory, but proceeding oppositely, finding the discoveries and then enunciating the hypothesis. Deleuze wrote that Foucault was interested in conditions, in “…historic investigation and not (in) the work of the historian. He does not make a history of the mentalities, but of the conditions under what everything that has a mental existence manifests: the enunciations and the regime of language. He does not make a history of the behaviors, but of the conditions under what everything that has a visible existence manifests under a regime of light. He does not make a history of institutions, but of the conditions under which they integrate differential relationships of force in the horizon of a social field. He does not make a history of the private life but of the conditions under which the relationship with it constitutes private life. He does not make a History of the subjects, but of the processes of subjectivation under the folds that take place in the ontological and in the social field as well.” (Foucault, p. 151).

The method of re-considering History as a topography instead as a place of narrative, (a place delimited by the walls of signification), leads us to identify History more as a material, as a weaving formed by discontinuous and different threads than as a plain, horizontal terrain, where the Historian arbitrarily tries to see linear and consecutively interested interpretations.

In this sense, there have been some attempts of “mapping” Modern Architecture, for instance Charles Jencks’s in the 1970’s. The value of this taxonomy is that “whether accurate or not, they demonstrate the art of predicting, of trying to understand where we have been and where we are going, and that might be more important than the accuracy of the predictions themselves”. (Sirefman, p. 49). On the other hand, in an essay entitled ‘A World Full of Holes’ (in Croquis 88/89, pg. 308), Zaera Polo faces Jenck’s topography and asks what would be the fundamental difference between Jenck’s analysis and a more actualized nowadays produced twenty years later from Jenck’s attempt (Zaera Polo’s essay was published in 1995).

Zaera Polo wrote: “Is there any sense in drawing a map? Despite having been harshly criticized, the architectural taxonomy proposed by Jencks has to my mind nonetheless been one of the bravest and precise attempts at describing 1960's and '70s architecture. Of course all classification is destined to ruin but one of the ways of producing knowledge is precisely the possibility of naming the phenomena. A map is nothing more than an instrument of controversy- always a personal panorama and never a description of the absolute truth. In this sense, map making is the only means of being able to work on a territory...The map I wish to propose here is a more instrumental than his. It is for doing things more than just describing, representing or capturing them. To become operative, however, we need a purpose, beyond that of the re-description of a situation...The prospective on the map I wish to propose is based on a market's model rather than the bureaucracy model, which has characterized classic criticism. Instead of stratifying practices into minimalists and formalists, we shall try to define a series of variable relationships which survive stable alignments amongst different practices...and has the virtue of making operative the fragmented landscape which Worlds tries to describe...it is potentially more productive to invest in hitherto unexploited domains than the areas that already generate high profits”. (Croquis # 88/89, p. 308-309).

Zaera Polo deployed three matrices that combined establish degrees of professional practiceand proposed a map that must be conditioned by every architect in order to find a niche in the market. The map is more an open-ended mobile scale rather than a finished classification. In that sense it is unfinished. First matrix refers to the elaboration of the subject of Modernism. Horizontal reading provide a category of Feedback that implies acceptation or rejection of Modernism as potential. To Zaera Polo, Chipperfield, Zumthor, and Holl (closer to phenomenology and eidetic or the study of essences) retreat from Modernity deploying idea and discourse. Libeskind and Eisenman are part of the negative feedback for their subject is the interior of architecture and not architecture as a field of externalities (they elaborate ‘architecture’ of the process of architecture).

The positive feedback of Modernism refers to working with conditions and changes of the field such as productivity, alienation, economy, etc., without proposing architecture through discourse and historic quotation but rather proposing direct strategies working on materials understood in a broad range.

The vertical reading of the first matrix refers to determinism. Positive scale refers to the determination of the project which implies an elaboration of tectonics, function, program, etc., appropriate for their fulfillment. Negative scale refers to authorial projects that lack the level of determination of material, function or program that diminish their potential, as the questionable synthetic finishing of Peter Eisenman’s Aronoff Centre. Zaha Hadid is questioned for her elaboration on a expressionist style as seal, indetermination of form; and Gehry’s oeuvre is probably referred as productivity associated to expressionism.

The second matrix has in the horizontal scale the Instruments of architectural practice that Zaera Polo classify into external and internal. The first require knowledge from other discourses in order to make the architectural discourse comprehensible, among them culture, styles, traditions, codes, etc. Philosophy may be added to this list of external instruments if applied as detached from architectural practice and if it becomes only abstract discourse. On the other hand, the internal instruments of architecture are inherent to its practice and are not necessarily understood in reference to a exterior discourse. In reference to the category of Formalists/Linguistics, they use an internal discourse of the practice although the origin of this knowledge comes from other fields such as literature (that is the case of deconstruction).

Vertical reading of the effects relates architectural practice with the productive elements of the architecture. Pragmatics is related more to the kind of practice of FOA, for instance. Practices with Internal effects are those that not work directly with architectural productivity and that have elaborated their own discourse that isolate them. Their discourse presumably has been overcome in a moment of historic shifts (the Post-Moderns and Deconstructivists may enter this list).

The third matrix refers to the implementation and organization of materiality and the program. Referred to materiality, Zaera Polo divides it between Integration and Differentiation. In the first list he includes practices such as those of Miralles and Pinós (material and topographic multiplicity with bottom-up implementation of design, that is, inFORMing design with the conditions of site, views, topography, etc., instead of imposing the idea. Please refer to Croquis 88/89. p. 321). Among the seconds Zaera Polo includes Gehry and his Guggenheim Museum, although Zaera Polo does not clarify why this building is an example in material integration, and this doubt grows in the internal path of the museum, since there is a divorce between the exuberant exterior and its interior except for the high-ceilinged spaces associated to the external glass façades. The material integration alluded by Zaera Polo may consist to the fact that the museum is titanium-coated, a material that reacts to the conditions of light and that changes its effect constantly. On the other hand, the museum integrates the economic conditions of a formerly-decaying city like Bilbao in order to enhance its effects to the whole city. In this sense, the Museum rejoins the city and its projects.

Zaera Polo refers to Nouvel’s Tokyo Opera and to the H & dM Signal Box as a process of material difference since the implementation of a top-down or authorial design approach where forms are neatly differenced from those of their environment. For instance, the Opera is produced by a process of Morphing (that Philippe Starck defines as a ‘whale that swallowed the Kaaba, in Croquis 65/66 in ‘Jean Nouvel. Intensifying the Real, by Zaera Polo) which provides the fact that the process comes clearly defined by the election of a concept that is separated from others (a concept that precludes others) and not by the influence of information in architecture as in FOA or OMA’s practice. On the other hand, H & dM’ s oeuvre differences from its impersonal environment of train rails and infrastructures in order to acquire a neatly sculptured and minimal character as strategy of difference.

In reference to the program, Zaera Polo also divides it into Integration and Difference. In reference to the integration of the program, he propose Koolhaas’s Kunsthall as an example in which the architect integrates the Exposition Center in Rotterdam with the infrastructure of roads that cross the building. The same commentary could have been made to the Congrexpo in Lille. In both cases the infrastructure supports with affluence but are due also to the condition of the buildings as new elements in the re-organization and density of programs that otherwise could have ended in only road infrastructure. Koolhaas takes advantage of the position of the new buildings in relation to flux and the necessity of peripheral sites of superimposition of programs.

In reference to the Difference of the program, Zaera Polo includes the baths at Vals by Zumthor probably because its materiality (and function) provide new approaches to the definition of the thermal bath. The pools occupy the entire dimensions of the precincts: in fact, the pools are the precincts and not just containers of water in depressed or abutted surfaces. This redefinition provides an integral approach of sensations and materials for the baths. The walls, ceilings and transitions between different pools are part of the thermal baths and not a detached experience (as a matter of fact, Zumthor collapses the scale of the pool and provides a prototype which has walls, ceilings and continuity with other pools. The exterior is just the envelope). William Curtis wrote that the materiality of Zumthor’s Baths at Vals ‘becomes a sort of release mechanism for the free associations of the imagination’ (Curtis in ‘The Unique and the Universal. A Historian’s Perspective on Recent Architecture, in Croquis 88/89, pg. 16).

Museo Guggenheim, Bilbao, Frank Gehry, 1991-1997

Photo by Luan Shing

Cementerio de Igualada, Pinos y Miralles, Concurso, 1985.

Photo by Hafizur Rahaman

Kunsthal, Rotterdam, Rem Koolhaas; 1987-1992.

http://architecture.mit.edu/~elos/4.297/KOOLHAAS/FINISHED%20PAGES/KUNSTHAL-%20ROTTERDAM.htm

Termas en Vals, Peter Zumthor; 1996

http://www.archinform.net/medien/00009065.htm?ID=a0a8c6b5f6c3459e6f011c1075c5f028


Sección de la Opera de Tokio de Nouvel, Concurso, 1986.(El Croquis #65/66; p. 16)	Sección de la Opera de Tokio de Nouvel, Concurso,1986. (El Croquis #65/66; p. 16)

1. Hertzberger, Herman; Space and the Architect; 010 Publishers; Amsterdam, 2001.
2. Van Berkel, Ben; Diagrams-Interactive Instruments in Operation; en ANY 23; Anyone Corp.; NY; 1998
3. Jencks, Charles y Kropf, Karl; ‘A City is not a Tree’, en ‘Theories and Manifestoes of Contemporary Architecture’, Academy Ed.; West Sussex; 1997.
4. Deleuze, Gilles; Guattari, Félix: Rizoma; Ed. Coyoacán, México; 1994
5. Broadbent, Geoffrey; Diseño Arquitectónico; Gustavo Gili; 2da Ed.; Barcelona; 1982
6. Eisenman, Peter; Diagram: An Original Scene of Writing; en ANY 23; Anyone Corp.; NY; 1998
7. Allen, Stan; Diagrams Matter; en ANY 23; Anyone Corp.; NY; 1998
8. Zaera Polo; Notas para un Levantamiento Topográfico; en Croquis 53 OMA/Rem Koolhaas; Ed. Croquis; 1997).
9. Sirefman, Susana, The name game, en Architecture, Dec. 1999, p. 49.
10. Solà Morales; Ignasi; Diferencias. Topografía de la Arquitectura Contemporánea; Ed. GG; Barcelona; 2da Ed; 1996.
11. Hall, Peter; Cities of Tomorrow; Blackwell; Oxford; 1996.
12. Deleuze, Gilles; Foucault; Paidos Iberica; Barcelona; 1987.
13. Buci-Glucksmann, Christine; en ‘From the cartographical view to the Virtual’; http://www. medienkunstnetz.de/works/no-stop-city/
14. 2G #2, 1997/2, Toyo Ito ; Yiuchi Suzuki Ed; GG; 1997
15. Harvey, David; Urbanismo y Desigualdad Social, Siglo XXI de España Editores; 3ra Ed, Ma-drid, 1985.
16. Castoriadis-Aulagnier, Piera; La Violencia de la Interpretación; Amorrortu Editores; Bs. As., 1977.
17. M.M. Rosental y P. F. Ludin; Diccionario de Filosofía; AKAL Editor; Madrid, 1975.
18. Collins Dictionaries; Intense Educational Ltd; UK; Digital Edition; 2003.
19. Lyotard, Jean François, La fenomenología, Ediciones Paidós; Barcelona, Buenos Aires, 1989.
20. Deleuze, Gilles, El Bergsonismo, Ediciones Cátedra, Colección Teorema; Madrid, 1996.
21. Benjamin, Andrew; Architectural Philosophy, The Athlone Press, Londres, 2000.
22. Croquis #72, Ben Van Berkel, El Croquis Editorial, Madrid, 1995.
23. 2G #16, FOA; Editorial Gustavo Gili; Barcelona; 2000.
24. Croquis # 88/89; Worlds One; El Croquis Editorial; Madrid, 1998.
25. Wilbaux, Quentin; La Médina de Marrakech. Formation des Spaces Urbains d'une Ancienne Capitale du Maroc; L'Harmattan; Paris, 2001.
26. Zabalbescoa, Anatxu; Rodriguez Marcos, Javier; Minimalismos; Ed. GG; Barcelona, 2000.
27. Croquis #65/66; Jean Nouvel; El Croquis Editorial; Madrid; 1998.
28. Montaner, Joseph María; Arquitectura y Crítica, GG Básicos; Barcelona, 1999.

Initial	Chapter 0	Chapter 1	Chapter 2	Chapter 3	Chapter 4	Chapter 5
Main Page	Instructions	Concepts	Connexions	Questionings	Structures	Differences

Initial	Chapter 0	Chapter 1	Chapter 2	Chapter 3	Chapter 4	Chapter 5
Main Page	Instructions	Concepts	Connexions	Questionings	Structures	Differences