Agrest, Diana (1945)

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An educator and theorist in addition to her practice, Diana Agrest has studied semiotics and film as ways to question the ability of architecture to represent. She has worked extensively with urban issues winning the competition for a Master Plan and Urban Design Proposal for five square miles in the center of Shanghai, China, and was a Fellow at the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies in New York where she was also the Director of the Advanced Workshop in Architecture and Urban Form.

Argentine born, Agrest graduated in architecture from the University of Buenos Aires in 1967. She continued her studies in Paris at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes and the Centre du Recherche d’Urbanisme. A Professor of Architecture at the Cooper Union in New York City, she has also taught at Columbia, Princeton, and Yale Universities and the UP 8, Paris, France. She is a principal of Agrest and Gandelsonas, founded in 1980 and of Diana Agrest Architect in New York City. A few of their most recent projects include the Melrose Community Center, South Bronx, New York (1998–2000) and the Breukelen Community Center, New York (2002–2005), and urban master plans such as the Vision Plan for Red Bank, New York (1992–1997).

Using the tools of a theorist, Agrest has published numerous books and articles. Her books include The Sex of Architecture (editors, Agrest/Conway/Weisman), Agrest and Gandelsonas, Works, and Architecture from Without: Theoretical Framings for a Critical Practice. Incredibly facile with ink, this pair of sketches conveys Agrest’s exploration of the design for Sport City, located in Shanghai, China. The black ink is bold and expressive. As a result of its heaviness, she needed to further intensify the contrast between the buildings and their surroundings by solidly filling in the buildings in the plan. Devoid of erasures, the confident lines narrate the entire story of the project with efficiency. The site has been rendered with paths and stippling most likely replicating grass. The marks giving texture to the grass have been placed hurriedly as they become commas. Out of scale, certainly they were not to represent grass but instead to provide an alternative texture to the buildings to make the sketch easier to comprehend. The textured articulation ends at the boundaries of the project, without providing context. On the plan Agrest has identified portions of the program with words, such as golf, swimming, and roller-blades. The buildings were easy to distinguish by their shapes but in the abstraction of the small sketch it would have been difficult to render the swimming pool so that it was recognizable in plan. Thus, the notations clarified the details less easy to recognize.

The sketches in plan and overall view intensify the relationship between forms on the site. The white of the paths surrounding the buildings help them to appear as floating islands. The three-dimensional view shows the negative space between the structures in a very different way. Here the foreshortening of the space suggests the dynamic nature of the cylinders as growing out of the landscape. Possibly used for comparison or in reference to each other, both sketches have been viewed from a corner. This may indicate that Agrest found significance in the orientation, either a reference to north or viewed from a point of distinction.

This design sketch appears both vague and precise simultaneously. The simple geometric shapes act as placeholders in the master plan, whereas Agrest did not want to forget the sports aspect of this complex.