Digital Diagrams in Contemporary Architectural Design: A Creative Interface Between Human Imagination and Form

Abstract

AbstractIn recent decades, digital diagrams have taken on a greater role in architectural projects, permitting, in terms of graphic prefigurative artifacts, other creative, relational and perceptive possibilities in the process of conceiving and representing architecture, which is increasingly focused on topics of complexity, transformation, flexibility, versatility, interaction, imprecision, virtuality, etc. Alluding to the notions of diagrams, machinic and figural of Deleuze and Guattari, these diagrams are constituted as strategic-communicative-productive intermediate matrix-space among architecture, the architect and the digital machine, and between architecture and other disciplinary fields. Functioning as hypertexts and creative and affective interfaces between the human imagination and architectural form, they propose a new type of reality in a permanent becoming, integrating both order and chaos, intention and the unexpected, mechanical and organic, real and virtual. Diagrams are no longer simply a strategic-informative technique that represents, they have become a technique or poetic operation that, in addition to representing, also presents and evokes.KeywordsArchitectural designContemporarinessDigital diagramsInterfaceHuman imaginationForm