Stan Allen describes the diagram as “not a thing in itself but a description of potential relationships among elements, not only an abstract model of the way things behave in the world but a map of many worlds.” This is a curious assertion as I always considered the diagram to be much more of a direct and concise representation of information, while mappings aimed to discover something new about a set of relationships.
I was stuck by the connection Allen made between the transactional nature of architecture and the diagram. It makes sense then that the diagram is such an appropriate tool for architects, in that the tasks of translating processes, organizing information, and conveying ideas are the tasks of both the architect and the diagram. The architect, in a sense, is the diagrammatic element in the realization of a project. Ito further expresses the importance of the diagram in architecture in its demystification of the process, which should be the architect’s objective. This is an important point. It illustrates the diagram as not only a tool of communication, but also regulatory system to clarify the idea and the designer in check.