Rem Diagram

On the piano nobile of the Fondazione Prada’s Ca’ Corner della Regina in Venice, nine black tables march in a row, cold altars repudiating the room’s rococo encrustations. In the enfilade spaces on either side of the hall, standing monoliths reflect the glare of top lights and the glow of the Mediterranean sun seeping through gaps in the well-worn palazzo shutters. Together, these mute vitrines display something like the entire sweep of modernity.

With Diagrams, whose run in Santa Croce coincides with the architecture biennale over in Castello, Rem Koolhaas writes himself into the canon of information visualization. Such is the entitlement of the curator (AMO, the research offshoot of Koolhaas’s Office for Metropolitan Architecture, or OMA, is credited as the organizer), but swagger doesn’t come as easily to the starchitect emeritus as it once did. It is a little jarring—almost risible—to move from, say, reproductions of the quietly devastating sociological charts W. E. B. Du Bois prepared for the American Negro exhibit at the 1900 Paris World’s Fair or Charles- Joseph Minard’s 1869 flow drawing of the Grande Armée’s immense casualties in the Russian campaign to AMO’s arrow-line map of “the top 6 destinations of students studying abroad from the EU” in the midaughts.

The mostra aims to be encyclopedic, yet there is no mention of the work of Edward Tufte, the grandfather of data viz, whose name has long been synonymous with the subject. The titular substitution of diagram for infographic (or chart, map, drawing, etc.), it turns out, provides an uneasy rubric on which to hang alchemical webs, zoological trees, anatomical illustrations, cosmological schema, cartographical reliefs, demographic deltas, Köppen–Geiger taxonomies, and more. All of these are visual abstractions that render data more immediately comprehensible. In architecture, the diagram entangles objectivity and authorship (often disavowing the latter)—though the show largely excludes design partis and napkin sketches from the galleries.

In fairness, AMO grants that the very activity of diagramming may inspire false confidence with respect to empirical neutrality. It’s a point Tufte made in The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (1982) and one that should have prevented Diagrams from committing the same errors as AMO/OMA’s 2020 Countryside exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum. Both attempt a grand aggregation of mountains of data across sprawling thematic groupings—dubbed “urgencies” at the Fondazione Prada—that can be interpreted as an unwillingness to edit. Works like Alexander von Humboldt and Aimé Bonpland’s 1805 Naturgemälde, depicting vegetation in the Andes, must be assayed almost as though they were paintings since, due to the sheer number of displayed works and the programmatic absence of context, their data cannot be parsed in the course of an afternoon. The breadth begets haste, as well: Some of the object labels contained misspellings, while others failed to contextualize the content. Even the catalogue arrives untrimmed and unbound.

These peculiar choices (or post-rationalizations) betray the preoccupations of a singular mind: Koolhaas’s own. In the catalogue, he tells an interviewer, “I was totally fascinated by diagrams and realized that my brain is particularly engaged in—and maybe also particularly capable of—synthesizing complex ideas in accessible forms.” The remark renders the assembled intellectual abstractions of modernity a matter of personal psychology—but it’s also banal in its implications. The architect, unable to communicate with a public whose approval he courts, must resort to lines on paper.