The change in the representational techniques used by architects

Architectural Science Review, Sept, 2007 by Henry Jacob Cowan

The Portfolio and the Diagram: Architecture, Discourse, and Modernity in America, by Hyungmin Pai. MIT Press, 55 Hayward Street, Cambridge MA 02142, 2006. 403 pp., 128 ill., index. Pbk. Price: $US 22.95.

This book was originally published as a hardback in 2002. Its author is Associate Professor of Architecture at the University of Seoul, and the arguments he advances seem to be largely based on his postgraduate studies at the MIT during the late 1980s and the early 90s.

His dissertation starts with an account of the French Beaux-Arts system, which greatly influenced early American architectural education, and led to the establishment of the [American] Beaux Arts Institute of Design. World War I saw the demise of the Beaux-Arts portfolio of drawings, and the emergence of the discourse of the diagram, which provided a new possibility for the architect's relation to words, images and buildings, and a complex formation of texts, concepts and modes of representation. Pai discusses in detail the part played by the various American architectural journals, and the use of photographs rather than drawings.

The economic changes and the scientific advances in building technology, which occurred after WWI and partly because of it, led the architectural profession to study the efficiency methods introduced into industry by Frederick Winslow Taylor and by Henry Ford, and this led to an economic approach to architectural design, and a greater standardisation of architectural construction.

Sweet's Catalogue of Building Construction, now a multi-volume publication, is a design aid based on advertising information supplied by the manufacturers of building materials. The later, more compact, Architectural Graphic Standards by Charles Ramsey and Harold Sleeper became the prototype of similar publications in America and in Europe. They relate the available materials to the accepted standards and to the human scale.

Due to the time that has elapsed since the modern theory dominated American architecture, Pai can take a mature view of its failings, notably the slums that resulted from the use of high-rise buildings for subsidised low-cost housing, as evidenced by the demolition of the Pruitt Igoe Housing Estate in St Louis which he illustrates and discusses, and by the use of in situ off-the form concrete.

In this book, he is less concerned with constructing a new type of modernism than with explaining the boundaries and structures of modernity. In doing so, he draws attention to historical precedents for the emergence of architecture as a socially oriented practice.