DummyText英文书.pdf

Dummy Text, or the Diagrammatic Basis of Contemporary Architecture Peter Eisenman has often remarked that his Ph.D. thesis of 1963, “The Formal Basis of Modern Architecture,” was a critical response to Christopher Alexander’s earlier Cambridge dissertation, which would be published as Notes on the Synthesis of Form. While the architectural agendas announced by these projects could not be more dissimilar—determining the “fitness of form” as a problem of set theory versus releasing the potential for forms to notate the forces of their emergence—it should not be overlooked that the techniques of diagramming are central to each. In fact, Alexander begins the 1971 preface to Notes by baldly stating that the most significant contribution of his book is “the idea of the diagrams.” In some ways, the present collection, Diagram Diaries, advances a related assertion, a post-facto preface to an unpublished dissertation, though one that now address (and is demonstrated by) a career-long body of intervening work. In general, the fundamental technique and procedure of architectural knowledge has seemingly shifted, over the second half of the twentieth century, from the drawing to the diagram. This is not to suggest that a diagram of one form or another was not always constitutive of architecture at various points in its history, but simply that it has only been in the last thirty years or so that the diagram has become fully “actualized”, that it has become almost completely the matter of architecture. Proceeding with halting steps through serial obsessions with form, language, and representation—though, as will be seen, equally with program, force, and performance—the diagram has seemingly emerged as the final tool, in both its millennial and desperate guises, for architectural production and discourse. Relatively impervious to the specific ideology being promoted, the diagram has instigated a range of contemporary practices. Just as Robert Venturi summarized the effect of his 1