ABSTRACT
Diagrams are used everywhere in our daily life as a visual aid: in instruction manuals, for life safety, and for way-finding, to name a few. They help visually communicate the unfamiliar in a concise and elementary way. The diagram is, in its broadest sense, a representational tool used to reduce complexity to essential components and communicate critical relationships or tasks. But how does this relate to defining a site? Mark Garcia, in The Diagrams of Architecture, defines the diagram as it relates to architecture as “a spatialisation of a selective abstraction and/or reduction of a concept or phenomena. In other words, a diagram is the architecture of an idea or entity.” 1 His definition applies a broad understanding of the diagram as a representational tool to architecture as a specific selective and reductive process that occurs in the mind. Defining a site is also essentially a process of reduction that occurs in the mind: it distinguishes the surroundings from everything there is. This reductive process is also highly selective, reducing the surroundings to what an architect determines are its essential components, and this is where the diagram becomes a critical tool.
