Operative Intersections: Between Site-specific Drawing and Spatial Digital Diagramming

Computers are considered to be highly ordered and overtly deterministic devices, offering predetermined outcomes. Nevertheless, the algorithmic paradoxes of an architectural software derive from the complexity of its infrastructure and cause non-linear processes of diagramming. According to the architect Bernard Tschumi, any "transformational sequence" (animation) is a kind of "operative drawing": a "prescriptive" and thus, non-descriptive activity. Nevertheless, a "transformational sequence" is not, by definition, "operative". Operative drawing emerges when the uncertainties of our reasoning, spatial perception and the paradoxes of digital diagramming, are creatively exposed. This can only happen through the superimposition, but not the material construction or cinematic projection, of a virtual spatial configuration onto its pre-existing actual referent. This inter-passage between a virtual (absolute, alienating) Cartesian space and an actual place is where the relationship between the digital and physical boundaries of built architecture can be delineated. Entering this inter-passage is entering a diagram itself: a destabilising, interpretative activity in progress.