From Diagrams to Fictions: Populated Plans and Their Buildings

This essay builds on and reacts to concepts initiated by Dora Epstein Jones in her essay, “Populated Plans.” Published in Log 45, as well as presented at a previous ACSA conference, Jones’ essay identified the emergence of a ubiquitous (in schools of architecture at least) “new” form of drawing that looks like an architectural plan but isn’t due to the inclusion of human figures. This type of drawing is distinct from a traditional plan, according to Jones, because it isn’t strictly “architectural notation—data received from the object,” nor a universalized geometric abstraction best suited for describing a building’s organization. The introduction of busy little people disrupts the universal and particularizes it by depicting scenes of fictional activity, lending the drawing to narrativity and the projection of alternative worlds. This freshly observed and codified instrument is well-suited to representing stories, fiction, and narrative as motive forces in the design of buildings. What kind of architecture do populated plan drawings produce? How do the rules governing their construction and the viewpoint of their projection influence outcomes? The essay draws parallels between fiction architecture and diagram architecture in an unconventional analogy to arrive at a possible answer. Despite the apparent conflict between their foundational underpinnings, fiction and data, respectively, the more comprehensively theorized diagrammatic practice offers useful concepts and frameworks of understanding for the emerging practice. Most importantly, the idea that a building could be the equivalent of a constructed abstraction, as Toyo Ito argues in his “Diagram Buildings” essay, leads to the possibility of a “populated plan building.” Ito outlines the role between data and the material reality of the building in “Diagram Building,” so what is the equivalent relationship between fiction, populated plans, and the buildings they produce?

https://doi.org/10.35483/ACSA.AM.108.27

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ISBN
978-1-944214-26-5