Chronogram of Chronograms: On Disciplinarity

Disciplinary Tensions and the Project of the Chronogram

Chronogram of Chronograms is an open-ended, divergent representation of the discipline in transition. It is driven by two interrelated targets: to track and visualize the evolution of core tensions and mediations; and to engage with the project of the chronogram itself, questioning its purposes, methods, and techniques.

It is both important and also inherently difficult to represent architecture as a discipline. Some of these challenges arise from recent attitudes towards disciplinary identity and specificity. Due to the past tensions between architecture’s outside and inside, there are less research projects being done today than in the past that concern themselves with disciplinarity.1 The ongoing redrawing of disciplinary boundaries, deliberate collapses between its centers and peripheries, as well as emergences of new sub-disciplines complicate the task further. There are increasingly fewer common grounds and conscious crossovers within the field of architecture today. Some core concepts and tensions have persisted, albeit critically repositioned, destabilized, or transformed. And while fundamental problems of architecture remain, recent discourses do not easily fit into previously established disciplinary analytical frameworks, especially when it comes to dialectics, oppositions, and extremes.

Architects today advocate for autonomy and contingency, with projects set for internal consumption and external impact.2 Those who engage with history also do so using cutting-edge technologies. By re-imagining avant-gardes and utopias, new radical visionaries use design as a tool for action and speculation.3 Many experimental design practices have functional and formal, diagrammatic and narrative profiles in their DNA. Previous distinctions between individual methods and tools are blurred, with new understanding of design practices and media. Meanwhile the era of post-digital production and augmented design intelligence is transforming considerations of authorship, creativity, and intuition.4 What would it mean, then, to capture the most significant shifts in relationship to the discipline’s past?

Chronogram of Chronograms aims to highlight the transformation of existing disciplinary frameworks, converge disparate innovations into broader tendencies, and make their implications more visible and accessible. It is also an extension and a subversion of the chronograms’ particular histories. It learns from genealogies, descendencies, and movements (as explored by Banister Fletcher and Sigfried Giedion); its elevation into a potent polemical, semiotic, and organizational tool (in the work of Charles Jencks); as well as more recent attempts to cut transversal sections or capture sub-sectors of architecture (in projects by Alejandro Zaera-Polo and Guillermo Fernandez Abascal, and Manuel Gausa and Jordi Vivardi). We also follow the previous diagrams commissioned, published, and exhibited as part of Chronograms of Architecture, which utilize sub-chronograms to elucidate recent disciplinary preoccupations.

The diagram responds directly to the organizational systems of past chronograms. It departs from the three “double-axes” of extremes (self-conscious/un-self-conscious; idealist/activist; intuitive/logical) that give rise to the six main “streams” in Charles Jencks’s Evolutionary Tree to the Year 2000. These three double-axes still hold relevance in the twenty-first century, but need to be updated to reflect disciplinary transformations. As a result, their extremes turn into complementarities: self-conscious/un-self-conscious becomes autonomy and contingency; idealist/activist becomes speculation and action; and intuitive/logical becomes imagination and rationality. These three main axes can also be supplemented with three additional sub-axes, or spin-offs and extensions of twentieth-century tensions: innovation and history; system and form; diagram and narrative.

Chronogram of Chronograms focuses on the twenty-four-year stretch that runs between Emmanuel Petit’s proclaimed “end of postmodernism” (2001) and the present (2025).5 Each of the three pairs of concepts are linked to six disciplinary sources, which are complemented by six counter-sources to balance out the debate. These sources are limited to books and other publications that condense, package, and structure disciplinary discourse, and therefore contain a proto-chronogram within. These publications are first plotted against time along the X-axis, while the-Y axis measures conceptual bias. Key ideas are unpacked and used to construct a larger “mind-map.” Additional resources like exhibition catalogs, pedagogical projects, and web platforms are then brought in and plotted as localized points or “satellites.” Gradually, adjacencies, coincidences, and disagreements between the proto-chronograms start to emerge and reveal a network of relationships. This not only allows key points and links to be observed, but also highlights areas of omissions and zones of instability and ambiguity.

These three sub-chronograms—one for each conceptual pair—plus the three additional "sub-axes” are then brought together into a single meta-construct. In doing so, we consider how they occupy the same time-space and, in a nod to past projective strictures and cartographic inaccuracies, force them onto a single flat surface. Further temporal dimensions are then added: in addition to distorting the linearity of each individual sub-chronogram, ideas fall through and then reappear from the “holey fabric” of space-time. All of this is finally defined by two specific boundary conditions: one being the past, an inner “void,” hollow core, or tunnel; and the other being the future, a charged “horizon,” a conceptual frontier, and a backflow of information. While we attempt to run essential connection back into the “void,” it is across the “horizon” that we venture our speculations on alternative futures (for each project on the past begets new futures, and vice versa, and ours is no exception).

Corralling the research into the meta-construct leans on dissimilar systems of organization as well as their graphic counterparts. It moves from hierarchical and axial (cosmologies, mnemotechnic devices, geometric schemata, evolutionary and phylogenetic trees, and concentric diagrams) to the a-hierarchical and multi-dimensional (labyrinths and clouds, fields and plateaus, complex systems and neural networks, discrete moments and quanta).

As a meta-chronogram, Chronogram of Chronograms is designed to be used as an epistemic device. While there are multiple ways one might approach it, we can start by mining the three sub-chronograms and their corresponding “margins.”

Chronogram 1: Innovation and History

The first chronogram explores discourses that focus on disciplinary continuity and technological progress, while also overriding past divisions such as history and innovation, modernity and postmodernity, revisionist and visionary.

At first, around the turn of the twenty-first century, the project on history is temporarily “interrupted” due to a series of “turns” towards digital technologies, as well as our profound ambivalence with regards to memory and “amnesia.”6 Yet in the second decade, history does return. Architects are reminded to better balance “ancient wisdom and modern knowhow,” while the generation of “new ancients” bypasses their false oppositions, seeking new syntheses of disciplinary history and contemporary technology.7 But over that period of time and transformation, the ways architects use and abuse history changes: it is actively reinvented, reconstructed, and manipulated. As a result, architecture adopts much more individualistic and opportunistic approaches to precedents, exploiting them in variations, re-enactments, and swerves.8 Provisional associations, affiliations, and affinities take the place of lineages and movements.9

This freedom to extract, collide, and transfer architectural ideas and projects between historical periods is aided by an evolving understanding of time. Architects gradually start switching between linear, cyclical, and multidimensional space-times. And past-present-future is further collapsed, either opening up “parachronistic” and “a-temporal” domains or scattering discrete time-particles and data-points.10 But all these distortions and displacements also incite debate on the value of historical narratives and disciplinary frameworks. The advocates of the subjective, unstable, and porous “canons” (which stretch to include multiple generations of architects and disciplinary problems) are at odds with proponents of visual atlases and dynamic “archives” (which grow to include the overlooked, peripheral or generic).11 And whereas new canonizers still rely on theoretical framing and comparative analyses, new archivists tend to lean directly on design tools and “technics” (from scanning and sensing to modeling and rendering).12 These instruments not only underpin new collages and morphs, but help reveal connections and ruptures with the disciplinary past. No matter which thread that is followed, theoretical or technical, the agendas grow increasingly projective, aiming at converting histories into future possibilities.

Nevertheless, architecture has yet to fully pursue the “trans-disciplinary” evolution, which depends on the ability of the discipline to absorb new influences, tools, and approaches yet retain its specific knowledge and expertise.13 Looking towards doing this in the future, we might develop approaches towards the disciplinary past that is neither a neutralized dataset nor an ideological minefield. We might be able to revel in the exponential accumulation and leveling of information, but also learn to combine it with deliberate analysis, discernment, and judgment, balancing fast and slow thinking. Finally, we might not only intensify those pivotal “capsule-projects,” but also search for visual interfaces, conceptual lenses, and spatial analogies to condense and transfer the multi-generational architectural knowledge across time.

Chronogram 2: System and Form

The second chronogram explores mediations between different domains of architecture, while challenging previous oppositions between program and paradigm, infrastructure and form, system and object.

One might expect that recent interests in infrastructural flows, fields, and ecologies would continue to counter questions of form, structure, and geometry. However, leaning on versatile diagrammatic and computational tools, advanced design practices are neither strictly programmatic nor formal, tackling both operation and appearance. Initial attempts to capture these expansions into new concepts—such as artificial ecologies, heterogeneous spaces, or design models—may be premature.14 But they highlight that design approaches are now multifaceted: those who promote new programmatic and ecological thinking also develop spatial and formal models, while those who pursue digital morphogenesis aim to respond to contextual dynamics.

Regardless, these subtleties fade once faced with a sharper disciplinary divergence of two further disciplinary streams. The first aligns with discourse on the urbanism of matter, force, and information, and suggests that architecture emerges out of non-linear interactions between various environmental systems, replacing design control with parametric modeling.15 The second re-asserts an architectural project of the city, claiming that built form can subsume but also resist various systems of production while reclaiming political autonomy for social and typological experiments.16 In the void left between these two tendencies, new disciplinary approaches begin to emerge, from post-compositional logics and collective form to spatial infrastructures.17

Dissimilar ways to mediate between city and architecture, infrastructure and form, only appear in historical catalogs and guides.18 This makes recent “cartographic” projects significant, in how they offer broader disciplinary frameworks, from manifold design logics that link ecologies and forms to schemata for diverse mediations between form and use, architecture and city.19 While initiating further interdisciplinary exchanges, these projects tend to reveal technical “hyperobjects,” actors and agents that are enmeshed within various ecologies and systems which reverse familiar relations and causalities. But they also remind us of multiple means we have at our disposal to address their architectural fallout.

Thinking towards the future, it would be worthwhile to rethink long-standing design elements, concepts, and categories in view of unstable and complex worlds. At the same time, we could redraw the boundaries between interdisciplinary practices (sliding into geography, economics, statistics, and other fields) and architectural approaches to systems and objects. The biggest challenge to the discipline, however, might be integrating those divergent expertises into expansive and polyvalent projects, tapping into our organizational, typological and “dispositional intelligence.”20

Chronogram 3: Diagram and Narrative

The third chronogram charts the discourses on design methods and tools, rethinking divisions between diagrammatic and narrative practices. It considers relations between diagrams, drawings, stories, and models, as well as new conceptions of the image.

Due to the intense period of “diagrammania” in the last decade of the twentieth century, at the turn of the twenty-first century, diagrams try to displace drawing as a super-tool.21 However, conscious of the gaps between their theoretical promises and practical capabilities, diagrams’ omnipotence (or ability to mediate between abstract and concrete, analytical and projective, formal and programmatic traits), begins to be doubted. As a result, architects begin to recover its historical depths and differentiate between types of diagrams and their disparate histories.22 This allows the work of a handful of “diagrammatic” practices to be contextualized within much longer projects on the “diagrams of architecture.”23 This leads to acknowledging ongoing exchanges with other representational tools, from maps and drawings to datascapes. Diagrams thus become much more widespread experimental tools for sensing, modeling, and transforming space, found both within the historical core of the discipline and on its edges, with links to art, the humanities, urban planning ,and landscape.24

At the same time, discourse on drawings slowly regains ground, defending its imaginary, heuristic, and generative capacities.25 Drawing features as the key tool of narrative practices for its ability to connect architecture to cultural histories, memories, and desires.26 However, linking narrative and spatial structures requires a wider tool kit that includes syntactic diagrams, programmatic transcripts, and symbolic imagery.27 Experimental drawings therefore become hybrid, complex, and multimedia.28 Initially, there is a perceived “threat” from digital models and renderings.29 However, the complexity of drawings eventually gives way to the directness of images (with their own historical references to theatrical sets, tableaus, comics, and storyboards). From there, the relationships between images and realities, storytelling and time-based media, become further destabilized.30

During this period of instability, architects are rethinking the boundaries of visual representation and reconsidering previous distinction between individual tools. But we still largely fail to confront the ubiquitous “signals and images” that threaten to wipe away most disciplinary legacies (from projection and drawing to geometry).31 The predominantly image-based training datasets for most AI-driven tools only flare these anxieties.32 In the future, all architectural representations might become replaced with pervasive “images” that ignore current concerns with abstraction or concreteness, symbolism or realism. Architectural production might also be relegated to neural networks, with data- and image-based inputs and outputs (and no processes or mediations to speak of). The question for architecture is therefore how to retain the most unique human capacities for visual and abstract thinking, while forging new relations between what is yet unknown and unseen.

Postscript

Chronogram of Chronograms is both a research compendium and a subtle cautionary tale. One might turn a blind eye on the discipline, but its transformation never stops, and has the power to propel, shape, or sink individual projects. It is too soon to conclude that the disciplinary project is just too ideologically burdened or dated, or that it is now underground along with a few remaining protagonists. The diagram touches on the widespread influences of key disciplinary figures and their works, which might be seen as reinforcing ancestral families and tight alliances. However, it might also warn us against shortsighted abandonment of disciplinary thinking by insiders and outsiders alike. Going beyond power dynamics, we hope to initiate debate on considering discipline as both disparate “anchors,” “camps,” or “streams” as well as one shared realm.

We do not claim to offer a universal, objective, or unambiguous representation of the discipline. Instead, we pursue narrative “exactitude” and mental “visibility.” And yet, with all its constraints, omissions, and other imperfections, we hope that Chronogram of Chronograms can serve as a springboard for future endeavors. We invite others to reconstruct and reinvent what architecture was, is, or could be. For conscious connection to disciplinary context not only bestows any intellectual project with stronger identity, but also grants it deeper meaning and lasting significance. Disciplinarity is fickle, unstable, and contested. It is replete with contradictions and paradoxes. It moves through untimely breakthroughs, false novelties, and eternal returns. And it treats its treasure chests of ideas and project with either excessive reverence or brutal frivolity. Despite all of this, disciplinarity is a world that we must learn to inhabit with awareness and conviction.

Chronograms of Architecture is a collaboration between e-flux Architecture and the Jencks Foundation.