Philosophica 70 (2002) pp.

5-9
INTRODUCTION: DIAGRAMS AND
THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF SPACE
This collection of essays marks a step in defining an area of inquiry that
touches on disciplines whose histories carry substantial relations to
philosophy. Although one should not expect a single philosophical
position to emerge from our work, each of the articles shares an interest
in the practice of visual representation and the problems inherent in the
translation of one symbolic form to another. Above all, this collection
marks the collaborative work of practicing architects, scholars, and
theorists who have come to think that the study of visual representation
deserves to be approached through more than the interpretation of ready-
made objects. From the vantage point of architecture, such an approach
emphasizes the cognitive linkages and interactions among visualization,
spatial knowledge, and language. If one were to use a metaphor from
chemistry, we might say that we have become drawn to the evolution and
morphology of shapes just as chemistry has become drawn to
understanding the transformations (the half-reactions) that take place in
chemical reactions. While multiple disciplines have worked to understand
the process involved in the constitution of form, most approached such
practice from the vantage point of the interpretive dismantling of
something that may be regarded as formally complete. Historical
approaches to art and architecture and the formalized aesthetics that
usually accompany them provide ample study of completed objects. By
contrast, we have approached design as an incremental process that relies
in substantial ways on the incremental evolution of shapes, percepts, and
concepts engaged as one thinks through diagrams.
We have found our inquiry complemented in substantial ways by
cognitive science or perhaps more precisely a cognitive philosophy that
has been shaped both by epistemology and phenomenology. Rather than
constituting interpretive positions that rely on the study of completed
projects, we have become drawn to the ways in which design enables not
6 KENNETH J. KNOESPEL
simply further ratiocination but further steps within the design process.
To draw on another metaphor from chemistry (and this one from early
chemistry), we would say that we are less interested in theoria than
praxis. Indeed; such a distinction should hardly be surprising at the
beginning of the 21 st century, for the human as well as the natural
sciences are showing with greater frequency the ways that interpretation
also marks action and intervention. Certainly, the digital revolution of the
end of the 20th century contributes substantially to a sense that we are no
longer reading in the same way. In effect we are experiencing something
of the transformation evidenced in the new visual logics that accompanied
the invention of printing. Great libraries are hardly warehouses for old
book technologies but laboratories for exploring the changing practices
of visual representation. Screen technologies bring before us not only a
stream of visual imagery through which we think but provide multiple
ways of making linkages from one image to another. Instead of
identifying targets for textual interpretation, we think of texts as points
of departure for building new shapes through the silicon screens on which
we think. Within architecture, practice is hardly grounded on the naive
aesthetic appreciation of the histrionic structures, or on second-level
histrionic structures provided by the freeze-frames of "theory," but on the
capacity to transform or morph structures through increasingly
sophisticated CAD systems. Certainly even from the vantage point of
prInt culture itself, we are recognizing how our own work in digital
visualization was anticipated by the visual technologies of the past.
Our questions may be mapped more precisely with reference to
twentieth-century philosophy (Cassirer's symbolic forms, Goodman's
world-making, Ricoeur's overlapping narratives, and Lakoff and
Johnson's embodied metaphors). Many links (that I will not rehearse
here) can be made to work on reading and interpretation as well. Finally,
however, the questions posed by these essays should be regarded far less
as a conversation with the past or as a response to particular figures than
as anthropological reports from our own navigation of liminal space. In
the broadest sense, there has been a shared interest not simply in
comparative work but in the symbolic translations that take place when
one moves from sharing the mental space of a poetic text with others to
architectural design. All the essays share an interest in developing
strategies for exploring the ways in which text-based cognition of mental
space can serve as settings for the projection and construction of space
INTRODUCTION 7
that becomes physically experienced. One important consequence of our
work is a shared experience that such spatial translation does not occur
through the random combination of forms in a vague phenomenological
setting. Instead, we have found ourselves asking how the
phenomenological settings hallenge us to see the emergence of a new .
shape-logic. Peter Galison has referred to shape-logics within phenomena
registt:red by instruments that require the development of different
interpretive schema. In a related manner, we find ourselves asking how
the emergent shapes within the design process - shapes that are
reenacted, reinvented, and reembodied - not only t o u ~ intuition but
shape logical schemas that guide the phenomenological experience of
intuition. How such a logical turn manifests itself through the repeated
synthetic operations within design marks an important question to be
pursued in subsequent research. Inherent in such research would be an
exploration of the ways in which diagram, like metaphor, can be
controlled by narrative or can lead to ruptures of the narrative continuum.
How shapes such as diagrams work as cognitive vehicles for evolving
invention and for shifting between different symbolically constituted
worlds becomes explored in each essay.
Although each essay speaks for itself, I would like to anticipate
several questions raised by each. John Peponis and his colleagues Iris
Lykourioti and Iphigenia Mari trace the unfolding stages of a project that
moves from a translation of Lewis Caroll's Alice in Wonderland from text
to diagram and then, to model and structure. As in his previous work on
Halo Calvino and architectUre, Peponis is interested in exploring the ways
the phenomenology of imagined visual space and the abstract spatial
structures that sometimes underpin literary construction in the text may
be used as a means for exploring architectural space. Aarati Kanekar
gives a rich case history of such a symbolic translation through a
demonstration of what is learned not merely by studying Terragni's
Danteuin by itself, but more importantly, by comparing its spatial
configuration to the cognitive space created by Dante's Diviha commedia.
Paul Gehl looks at the emblematic coding that accompanies early book
design and shows how such visual features of early printing are
frequently elided or missed by. histories of early printing or simply
ignored as a consequence of 'the aesthetic issues that accompany art
history. In my article, I consider the heuristic use of diagram within
architectural theory and practice and show how a seminar in architecture
8 KENNETH J. KNOESPEL.
used diagrams to explore the mental space created in texts such as Ovid's
Metamorphoses. My questions are shaped by research in visualization in
mathematics as well as my long-standing interest in narrative as a
mechanism for order and control. Together the articles demonstrate the
ways that practices of visualization interact to construct new media for
engaging human experience.
All the articles also come out of the practice of working in settings
that require an agility t6 move quickly between multiple disciplines. It is
also significant that not only are multiple disciplines represented in these
essays but also varied institutions. Six institutions in particular deserve
special recognition for their support of this project. Georgia Tech has
provided a productive setting for joint seminars and for an international
symposium on Space-Syntax that proved to be a rich occasion for
exploring ideas. TheNational Technical University of Athens has created
a flexible setting that has permitted Greek post-graduate students of
architecture to situate their work within a truly international context. The
University of Cincinnati has provided a setting for extending the inquiry
reported here through elective studios; this work, while not directly
reported here, has informed our joint explorations. The Newberry
Library in Chicago gives ample evidence for being not only one of the
world's major research libraries but also one of the major visual
laboratories for research into the history of multiple technologies of
representation. The University of Pavia hosted the 'First and Second
International Conference on Model-Based Reasoning (1998 and 2001) and
created a 200 1 session in which early versions of the published papers
were delivered. Finally, I would like to recognize Ghent University and
Professor Erik Weber for publishing these papers in Philosophica. Since
institutions have their unique identities through the people that shape
them, it is with pleasure that I recognize the importance of my
colleagues, Professor Lorenzo Magnani (University of Pavia) and
Professor Nancy Nersessian (Georgia Institute of Technology), in
encouraging the creation of a session on visual forms at the Pavia
conference. Their efforts in building an international community for
interdisciplinary work in cognitive science truly represent a significant
example in looking to the future. I am indebted to both of them. I would
also like to recognize the presence of my colleague and friend John
Peponis in the development of the articles. The six institutions
represented in the collection manifest an international inquiry that we
INTRODUCTION
hope will be expanded by our readers.
9
Kenneth J. Knoespel
Georgia Institute of Technology