As architects we traffic mostly in diagrams—two dimensional descriptions of characteristics of a building or a built environment that you will not necessarily see but which will shape your experience of it. Diagrams have been with us for millennia and architects have employed them for centuries (plans, sections, elevations) but for most of us they are a relatively newly ubiquitous. Today we are exposed to some kind of diagram almost every day in the media and elsewhere-visual representations of information meant to convey at-a-glance a picture of a set of facts, some kind of reality-- that we don’t necessarily see but which influences how we see or think about the world around us.
The most common are pie charts (relative quantities of parts in relation to other parts-- useful, for example, in demographics) bar charts (same thing, different format, sometimes with the element of time, often used in economics) organization charts (hierarchies and relationships among people) and flow charts (allocations of resources over geography or time, genealogy such as a family tree, binary decision making such as writing code in computational algorithmic languages). There are Venn diagrams (similarities and differences among groups or categories) graphs (change and rates of change over time) and spreadsheets (numerical relationships such as payables and receivables).
These are diagrams that are useful for statisticians, accountants, journalists, economists, scientists, environmentalists, geographers and demographers, elected officials and even those kinds of planners who think of “planning” in mostly social or economic terms. In the practice of architecture, though, there’s not a whole lot that can be explored or explained by way of a pie chart or bar chart or any of the rest of those kinds of diagrams.
Last century architects invented and (especially during the hyper-functional post-war mid-century years) obsessively employed a kind of flow chart called the “bubble diagram.” It claimed to be a value-free or unbiased tool with which to understand and show relationships of component parts of a building without resorting to old mind-sets or traditional habits. It turned out to show mostly what was already obvious. Worse still it proved inhibitive, a way to avoid composition altogether and it created its own habitual oddities. Since a lobby or living room necessarily relates or “flows” to every other room you inevitably end up with a star, spoked wheel or H-shaped composition—every building a panopticon.
Perhaps the most famous diagram ever invented was an 18th century map of Rome by Giambattista Nolli. It’s not your typical city map (a different kind of diagram altogether) because he had something different in mind: an idea to convey. He wanted to map not streets and buildings but rather public spaces distinguished from private spaces. Think of it like this: if in the middle of the night you walked the city with a flashlight (or I suppose a candelabra) down streets and into publicly accessible spaces (lobbies, loggias, churches, city halls, courthouses, courtyards and gardens) what would you see? Everything that lights up goes white on Nolli’s map and shows as public space, everything that doesn’t goes black and shows as private space.
This is what today we call a “figure ground” diagram. It is a method with which to see buildings not as free agents in a neutral field, but rather material with which to shape the public realm. It too has its biases and inhibitions favoring composition in two dimensions avoiding three dimensions and what buildings and built environments look like. As with the bubble diagram the figure ground diagram is driven by a point of view. The bubble diagram seeks to map functional relationships, the figure ground spatial relationships.
Diagrams are the tools with which to extract and highlight one aspect of an otherwise complex set of relationships of a building or built environment in order to better understand it and explain it to others. Useful diagrams within the practice of architecture nearly always have a pictorial, albeit still abstract, aspect to them that, however remotely, relate back to some aspect of physical reality (unlike a pie, bar or flow chart) even as they highlight properties not directly seen in the apprehension and experience of a built environment.
It is with the specific kinds of diagrams we choose to depict for ourselves and for others that we are already deciding what’s important to us and what we think is important to them. The choice of what to draw, what to accentuate and what to leave out in order to make accessible that which is meant to be conveyed is an art. Our choices are driven by the desire to connect to those other than ourselves. We want those we serve to do the right thing, that which in our dispassionate estimation is the right thing for them, to understand it and have the confidence to act upon it. This requires that we as architects cultivate an understanding and feeling for what is important to others, or in a word, empathy.