Diagrams of Countercultural Architecture

The concept of the "diagram" has been promoted since the 1990s as an advanced mode of designing and thinking about design. This article proposes that the diagram helps us understand a different architectural moment wrestling with the convergence of overwhelming political, technical, and philosophical challenges: that of the pioneering ecological scene associated with 1960s counterculture in the United States. This approach is helpful in understanding the countercultural "mind" and the way in which it understood the ecological and ontological relationships between design, place, nature, the social, and the whole. The overreaching ambitions of countercultural architecture stand in contrast to the narrowing of architecture's agendas since the 1960s, and it reminds us that architecture is hermeneutic - that it is a way of interpreting the world. Readers of the books and magazines in which these diagrams were published were likely inexpert, forming their ideas about the very means and ends of design. The study of architectural diagrams assists in the comparative study of different modes and periods of design which aspire to register the bigger parameters in which design is formed. Though countercultural architecture was the chaos of diagrams without an agreed formal language, diagram architecture nonetheless produced rich formal abstraction.