A Diagram's Work

The Vancouver House by Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG), a diagrammatic form rendered at full scale and in real life (my photo).

I participated in a review of student work this past Wednesday at the University of Oregon, one of several summer studio reviews I've sat in on this year. A faculty member and I reviewed a pair of projects—an admittedly small sample—that between them captured two versions of the same issue. One student's presentation had no site analysis or parti diagrams of any kind. The other's did, but they read as an afterthought, drawings that explained the finished design rather than ones that had helped generate it. I've noticed the same in previous reviews; even when an instructor explicitly requires process diagrams, what is pinned up still looks reverse-engineered. The problem lies in the diagrams' provenance—a reality that holds true whether they are the work of students or some of today's most celebrated firms.

Stan Allen, the architect, theorist, and former dean of Princeton's architecture program, drew a useful distinction in a 1998 essay: a diagram's job isn't to depict a building. It's to work out relationships—between program and form, between one space and another—before the building exists to depict. As Allen puts it, diagrams are "architecture's best means to engage the complexity of the real." Much of what gets called a diagram does the opposite: it reverse-engineers a graphic summary after a decision has been made, rather than helping to discover it. A generative diagram precedes the decision. It doesn't explain the building afterward; it's part of the process by which the architect finds the building's basic idea in the first place.

There's a simple test for telling the difference. Point to a particular move in the finished design and ask the student to trace it back to the diagram. Not necessarily to an identical mark, but to something in the diagram that participated in the sequence of decisions that produced it. If they can do that, the diagram probably played a generative role. If they instead begin explaining the diagram in terms of the finished building, the odds are good that the diagram came later. A generative diagram doesn't have to predict the finished design, only to have been capable of changing its direction.

Early design diagram for the VA Roseburg Protective Care Unit. The courtyard organization survived; the entry gesture did not.

The old sketch above passes this test, with qualifications. I drew it during my earliest analyses for the design of the VA Roseburg Protective Care Unit, as I attempted to match site, program, and intent. (I covered this project's design process in my "A Case Study" series of posts.) It's clearly rough: hatched masses standing in for building volumes, a loose unhatched void at the center indicating a courtyard, and an arrow driving in from outside the frame toward one corner.

The courtyard organization held. It became the wrapped, mirrored heart of the finished design, anchored by a huge mimosa tree that I likened to the proverbial Tree of Life. The arrow, on the other hand, didn't hold. It was a stand-in for a real, unresolved question: how to control entry into the secure courtyard. What ultimately emerged wasn't a refinement of the arrow's gesture. It became an entry pavilion, akin to the Propylaea at the Acropolis.

Site plan for the VA Roseburg Protective Care Unit.

That's the important distinction. The diagram didn't predict the building. It put a problem into play while the design was still unsettled enough for the problem to matter. One part of the sketch survived almost intact; another led somewhere I hadn't anticipated. Both were useful because they helped determine what came next.

This tension between diagrammatic exploration and graphic presentation persists in contemporary practice. Bjarke Ingels has described how his firm, BIG, uses diagrams to track the reasoning behind design decisions, a practice he developed in part while working under Rem Koolhaas at OMA. MVRDV's Farmax, published around the same period as Allen's essay, made particularly explicit use of diagrams as instruments of form-finding.  

BIG's series of conceptual diagrams for their Vancouver House project (source: htttps://big.dk/projects/vancouver-house-missing-pictures-7130)  

Yet, there remains a persistent ambiguity in architectural representation: a diagram can document a process, or it can be made to look as though a process existed. Critics have sometimes read BIG's diagrams less as records of discovery than as clever post-rationalization of forms arrived at by other means. The distinction matters because a diagram can be perfectly convincing as a graphic artifact while having had no meaningful role in producing the design.

AI makes that distinction more consequential. Current tools can generate massing alternatives, test code and zoning conditions, manipulate models, and produce images that would once have required considerable effort. Those capabilities may become useful parts of conceptual design. The more immediate problem is simpler: AI can also produce polished, diagram-shaped images on demand. It becomes all too easy to manufacture the appearance of a rigorous design process after the fact.

The issue isn't whether an AI-generated diagram is legitimate because a person didn't draw it by hand. A computer-generated diagram can be every bit as generative as a pencil sketch if it helps identify a consequential relationship, tests an idea, or changes the direction of the design. What matters is what the diagram does in the sequence of thought. A diagram that merely gives graphic form to a conclusion reached some other way is still an afterthought, regardless of who, or what, made it.

Generative diagram by MVRDV for The Modernist, a mixed-use project in Rotterdam (image source: https://www.mvrdv.com/projects/308/the-modernist)  

This is also why a diagram's graphic appearance can be misleading. Arrows, bubbles, hatching, color coding, and other conventions can make a drawing look diagrammatic without telling us anything about its role in the design process. Resembling a diagram isn't the same as having done a diagram's work.

The student who left diagrams out of the presentation wasn't hiding anything, and the one whose diagrams read as afterthoughts wasn't trying to pass off invented process as real. Both, I suspect, simply hadn't yet learned the purpose of diagramming during the early phase of project conceptualization. That's a lesson AI tools may make easier to skip, in a studio or in a firm, because they can cleanly simulate the appearance of analysis without requiring the heavy cognitive lift of the analysis itself.

The afterthought diagram is the more instructive case because it looks like it's doing a job it isn't. Whatever insight it might have delivered—what relationship was worth testing, which constraint should organize the plan—was available only while the design was still unsettled enough to need testing. It can still look flawless on a presentation board, but what it ultimately lacks is a place in the sequence where it still had the power to change the outcome.

2.MO: A Progress Report

Oregon Football's new indoor practice facility, under construction (all photos by me).
 

I’ve followed the construction of the University of Oregon’s new indoor practice facility, “2.MO,” since its groundbreaking in early 2025. With yesterday being the 2026 season opener against Boise State, I decided to walk around the construction fencing beforehand and photograph the project.
 
The curved steel roof structure is complete, and workers have already installed about a quarter of the associated wood decking. The steel ribs and timber framing will remain exposed in the completed building, contributing significantly to its architectural character. The installation of the reflective glass curtain wall on the east elevation is nearly finished. Other parts of the exterior remain at earlier stages of enclosure, but the overall size and form of the massive building have been clear for months now.
 

Site development has also progressed. The major moves—realignment of Leo Harris Parkway and reconfiguration of parking serving the Eugene Science Center—were completed last winter. Given that the current construction perimeter essentially corresponds with the eventual boundaries of the practice complex, pedestrian movement around the site should have worked well on game day.

 

As of this writing, University of Oregon Athletics has not announced an official name for the latest addition to Oregon Football’s Hatfield-Dowlin Complex. Nor has it revealed the project's cost, as it generally has not for its other major donor-funded developments.
 
If I am lucky enough to tour the facility following its completion in 2027, I’ll record that visit as well.

What If? The Emerald Canal

Emerald Canal model between Oak & Pearl to the Amazon channel (image source: pages.uoregon.edu/diethelm/CanalImages.html)
 

During my University of Oregon days, I became aware of a visionary plan to create an eleven-block-long canal through the heart of Eugene that would connect the eastern end of the old Millrace that courses along the backside of the fraternity and sorority houses north of 11th Avenue to the concrete drainage channel extension of Amazon Creek at 17th and Oak. This plan proposed, in the words of its champions, “a rich, local blend of historic millrace and San Antonio Riverwalk.” If realized, the project, which they dubbed “The Emerald Canal,” would be a 35’–40’ wide waterway with broad promenades on both sides meandering beneath native trees within an urban garden.
 
A related but formally separate proposal from the same era envisioned restoring the Millrace’s own downtown dead end near Ferry Street as the anchor for a new riverside district.(1) 
 
I thought the Emerald Canal concept was brilliant. Portions of the Millrace as it existed were navigable by canoe. How great would it be if my friends and I could row further through the city, perhaps pulling ashore along the way at a canal-side café for lattes? How much would such a linear water park and urban village add to Eugene’s identity and sense of place? I found the prospect of the project being realized someday incredibly attractive.
 
Chief among the plan’s proponents was Jerry Diethelm, now Professor Emeritus of Landscape Architecture & Community Service at the University of Oregon and both a registered architect and a registered landscape architect. The Emerald Canal was his decades-long personal campaign. Its origin story dates back to a 1977 graduate studio he taught called “The Amazon Corridor.” Community interest soon led to the formation in 1982 of a joint City of Eugene/Lane County Emerald Canal Feasibility Task Force, chaired by state senator Margie Hendriksen, with Jerry serving as the principal planning consultant. The task force studied the project for six months and determined it was feasible. The estimated cost back then to make it a reality? $22 million.(2) 
 
After I returned to settle in Eugene in 1988, I was excited to read further news about the Emerald Canal concept. Jerry continued to build the case for the project through the mid-1990s, teaching new design studios around the concept and conducting a series of associated planning studies for the City of Eugene and EWEB, which featured a restored millrace and a Millrace Park at the river confluence. Along with Charlie Porter and Jerry Rust, he formed the Emerald Waterways Citizens Committee, Inc. They had two large, elaborate models built to show around town, garnering support for the project. The wealthy Gloria Teichert became an enthusiastic patron, primed to invest in a water-related project after helping bankroll water-conservation work in Africa. With her backing, the committee rented a storefront space on West Broadway to show off their Emerald Canal models.(3) Then, in what Jerry called his favorite near-miss, Teichert and her brother fell seriously ill and moved to Canada, and the funding vanished with them.

 

Reversing the Canal for Amazon flood release (image source: pages.uoregon.edu/diethelm/reversible.html)

The pitch for the Emerald Canal was never just aesthetic; it promised hydrological benefits as a small but critical link in a regional water circuit: Willamette into the Millrace, through the Emerald Canal to the Amazon, past the Fairgrounds to Fern Ridge Lake, over the dam into the Long Tom River, and back into the Willamette north of Monroe. This circuit would be important for area farming, wetland habitat, and recreational boating access to Fern Ridge. The relatively short in-town connection would create a very large waterway system with benefits for the community everywhere along its course. That’s a testament to how comprehensive Jerry’s vision was.

 
The flood-control argument was the most concrete of the bunch, and probably the one that came closest to actually unlocking money. During a major flood in the Amazon Basin, when an overwhelmed Amazon Creek would back up into the city, a reversible Emerald Canal could carry the excess directly to the Willamette. Engineers at the time argued it was a cheaper fix than building dams upstream.(4) That argument has since been overtaken by events. Since the 1990s, the Amazon Basin’s flood-storage problem has largely been addressed a different way, through the West Eugene Wetlands Plan and the ongoing naturalization of sections of Amazon Creek, including the stretch between 19th and 24th avenues. The federal dollars that might once have built a canal went to restoring wetlands instead.
 
During the years that followed the initial bloom of public enthusiasm, Jerry wrote several pieces for The Register-Guard and Eugene Weekly about the concept. Undaunted but increasingly wry, these included a jab at the City of Eugene, calling it the “Home of the Historic Eugene Millrace Cover-Up,” and later, sardonically ranking the Emerald Canal and Millrace restoration as “No. 8” on the city’s perpetual to-do list.
 
Jerry’s doggedness has gone unrewarded. The Emerald Waterways Citizens Committee is no more, and there’s no next-generation advocate to reopen the conversation. In 2026, he is the plan’s sole institutional memory.
 
The disappointing part of this story, besides the fact that the Emerald Canal is not a reality today, is what it says about ambition and its limitations in Eugene. I want to believe that imaginative, farsighted people can, with popular support, still make dreams come true. That this is increasingly difficult goes without saying. Regardless, I can lament the shrinking of our ambitions while still retaining hope that realizing them remains possible.
 
Chicago architect Daniel Burnham (1846–1912) famously said the following about visionary ideas:

“Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men’s blood, and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die, but long after we are gone will be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-growing insistency. Remember that our sons and grandsons are going to do things that would stagger us. Let your watchword be order and your beacon beauty. Think big.”(5)

Burnham wished to inspire large-scale civic planning and bold thinking. This was more attainable in his day than it is now. The reality is that grand visions and big projects aren’t financed the Burnham way anymore, through a single civic will imposing itself on private land. The post-war urban renewal era caused real damage, including here in Eugene. That era’s legacy fueled the apparatus of environmental review, historic preservation law, mandatory public comment, and eminent domain restrictions. This apparatus is necessary, but it has handcuffed those community leaders who have harbored ambitious dreams.

San Antonio's Riverwalk (image source: Library of Congress - public domain)

 

The city can still build big things, but typically only on ground it already controls, with private-sector partners. The Downtown Riverfront development is the case in point. That site was a vacant industrial brownfield: one owner, EWEB, and no other properties to buy out. The Emerald Canal, by contrast, would have run through built-up urban fabric. Digging an open waterway through eleven or twelve blocks of the West University neighborhood would have meant acquiring dozens of parcels, relocating infrastructure, and disrupting a part of town that’s only gotten denser and more expensive since Jerry first proposed the project nearly fifty years ago. Lacking an overwhelming public mandate, the city can no longer draw a diagram through occupied city blocks and proclaim eminent domain. And, tellingly, the Downtown Riverfront’s own master plan, for all its ambition, includes no reopened millrace, no daylighted canal, no flowing water at all beyond the river’s own edge.  
 
Money was and is always an issue, too. The Emerald Canal’s funding path largely depended on passage of a countywide general obligation bond measure, which never occurred. Tax-increment financing wasn’t an option, either, since much of the proposed route lay outside the Downtown Urban Renewal District.
 
The one piece of Jerry’s vision still alive today is the University of Oregon’s own millrace restoration, a concept plan for a bio-habitat-focused Millrace Natural Area, with implementation still in the planning and incremental restoration stage rather than full construction. It’s a worthy project on its own terms. It is also, unmistakably, the shrunken remnant of something much larger: campus-bound, ecological rather than civic, with no ambition to reconnect to downtown at all.
 
Eugene once had the imagination for a project like the Emerald Canal but lacked the means. Today, it is a case study that reads less like a missed chance than a measure of how far Eugene’s civic capacities have contracted. Jerry’s idea was sound, its benefits clear, and his advocacy persisted for nearly fifty years. The problem is that the machinery that might once have carried a project of its scale no longer exists here. My “what if” isn’t a prompt for nostalgia so much as a note on the distance between the Eugene some could imagine and the Eugene that could never build it.

(1) The Emerald Canal plan proper ran from the Millrace’s blunted end near 10th and Ferry to Amazon Creek at 17th and Oak. The separate Millrace Park / lower-Millrace restoration idea, tied to the mid-1990s Ferry Street Corridor and South Bank planning process, would have daylighted the Millrace down to the Willamette on EWEB-owned land, the same parcel now redeveloped as Eugene’s Downtown Riverfront district.

(2) Figure and task force account per Jerry's own 1998 Register-Guard commentary, “Millrace for the Millennium.” Accounting for inflation alone, $22 million is about $70 million today. This understates the current reality, as urban construction and right-of-way costs in a dense, developed corridor have outpaced general inflation for decades. A 2026 estimate that prices in property acquisition would probably run into hundreds of millions.

(3) Sourced to Jerry's own retelling in “Emerald Canal Diary,” Eugene Weekly, June 30, 2005 (reprinted June 27, 2013).

(4) The hydrology was run by LCOG and confirmed by the Army Corps of Engineers at the time, per Jerry's own account.

(5) The quote’s own provenance is shakier than its fame suggests. It first appeared in print nine years after Burnham’s death, in a 1921 biography, with no citation, and historians long suspected an associate had assembled it from letters and speeches rather than recorded it verbatim. A 1910 Chicago newspaper account of a Burnham speech, unearthed in 2019, closes with nearly the same words, which is generally taken as confirming he really did say something close to this.  

Echoes in Eugene

 

The Australian Pink Floyd Show performing at the Hult Center, August 4, 2026 (my photo).

Earlier this month, my wife and I thoroughly enjoyed seeing The Australian Pink Floyd Show (TAPFS) at the Hult Center for the Performing Arts. I’ve been a Pink Floyd fan since my teens but never saw the band live. TAPFS has earned its reputation as one of the finest Pink Floyd tribute acts, and this was our second time seeing them.

Before Pink Floyd came together in the mid-1960s, Nick Mason, Roger Waters, and Richard Wright were students at the Regent Street Polytechnic School of Architecture in London, now part of the University of Westminster.(1) As someone who also studied architecture, I’ve long been intrigued by the possibility that their education influenced the way they approached music. Pink Floyd’s most celebrated albums—Meddle, The Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here, Animals, and The Wall—often take the form of carefully structured sequences rather than collections of conventional pop songs. They establish atmospheres, introduce recurring themes, and develop gradually, creating a sense of place within the music.

Waters has acknowledged the importance of their years in architecture school. He recalled that an instructor ultimately encouraged him to bring his guitar into the classroom: “If I wanted to sit in the corner and play guitar during periods that were set aside for design work and architecture, he thought that was perfectly alright.”(2)

So, whether architecture directly shaped their music is difficult to say. But listening to Pink Floyd, I often hear patterns that remind me of the discipline: attention to sequence, proportion, repetition, contrast, and the gradual development of an experience.

That quality was particularly apparent in the TAPFS performance. The heavy bass and percussion in One of These Days and Sheep established a strong rhythmic foundation. In The Great Gig in the Sky, the vocals seemed to expand into the volume of Silva Concert Hall. Run Like Hell moved with a chase-like energy. And The Wall turns construction into its central metaphor, using one brick after another to represent the psychological barriers its protagonist builds between himself and the world.

TAPFS faces the difficult task of reproducing music that many listeners know intimately, down to its textures, transitions, lighting, and timing. Their achievement is not simply that they perform the songs accurately; they also recreate an experience that Pink Floyd constructed so carefully decades ago. For a couple of hours in the Hult Center, the familiar music took on a physical presence: sound filling the room, light shaping the space, and thousands of people listening together.

That may be one reason the music has lasted. Great works do not require their creators to remain present. They can be revisited, interpreted, and experienced by people who were not there when they were first made. I didn’t see Pink Floyd live, but thanks to TAPFS, I could see how the distance between an original experience and its echo can sometimes be surprisingly small. 

(1)    Syd Barrett, another founding member of Pink Floyd, studied art at the Cambridgeshire College of Arts and Technology. David Gilmour, who had attended high school with Barrett and Roger Waters, joined Pink Floyd in 1967. He initially played alongside Barrett before eventually replacing him. 

(2)    Roger Waters, “Building the Internal Wall,” Musician, May 1992, p. 51.

The Butsudan

A butsudan; not ours, but similar (photo credit: CC BY 2.1 jp, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1801262)

The house I grew up in included a piece of furniture found in many Japanese homes. It was a butsudan—a household Buddhist altar—comprised of a dark-lacquered wooden cabinet with doors and shiny brass fittings that served as a personal shrine for memorializing ancestors and honoring the Buddha. Ours stood about four-and-a-half feet tall by two-and-a-half feet wide and occupied a corner of our formal dining room. The pair of outer doors opened to reveal fabric screens behind them. These folded out of the way, in turn revealing several ornately decorated tiered platforms for offerings and incense burners. I’ve come to think of our butsudan not only as a devotional object but as an architecture of remembrance scaled to domestic life.
 
Butsudans trace back to an edict issued by Emperor Tenmu in 685, encouraging every family to keep a Buddha image and sutras in the home. The traditional lacquered cabinet form we recognize today developed gradually and eventually became a standard across ordinary households during the Tokugawa period (roughly the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries). By then, the butsudan had settled into a recognizable architectural typology: a cabinet with doors, thresholds, and an internal hierarchy of spaces. A butsudan commonly holds a Buddha image appropriate to the family's sect alongside ihai (memorial tablets for the dead), serving two purposes at once: as a site for daily devotion, and as a fixed place where a family's dead remain, in a sense, present in the house rather than confined to a cemetery or a temple's care. Its form is not incidental; it is a domestic micro‑architecture built to house devotion and memory.
 
That underlying impulse, as a fixed place in the home where the dead remain present through offering and ritual, isn't uniquely Japanese; households across China, Korea, and Vietnam keep their own versions of the same idea, each shaped by its own blend of Buddhist practice and ancestor veneration. The object itself is another matter. The cabinet form (the doors, screens, and the internal hierarchy of platforms) is a distinctly Japanese elaboration. Even the relationship to memory differs: in Korea and China, a memorial tablet is often treated as temporary, ceremonially retired after a few years as a specific person is folded into a more general ancestral memory, while the Japanese practice tends to keep the ihai in place indefinitely. These differences matter because they show how Japan gave architectural permanence to a practice that elsewhere has been more fluid: the butsudan fixes remembrance in a built form.
 
Speaking architecturally, a butsudan is in many ways a miniature building. The ancient Romans constructed analogous structures: the aediculae, literally Latin for “small house” or “small temples.” These were classically a niche flanked by columns or pilasters and capped with a pediment or entablature, built to house and honor a sacred image or statue. And Charles Moore often used the “geode” as a conceptual metaphor for design that parallels the butsudan morphology: a building that appears plain on the outside like a rough rock, but opens up to a vibrant, colorful, and richly textured inner universe of crystals. He built the idea into his own work more than once. Our butsudan was a geode in the truest sense: a dark, silent shell that yielded upon opening to a radiant, sacred interior of gleaming brass and gold leaf.
 
Whoever crafted our butsudan understood, as any architect should, that a small object can organize the space around it if it's given enough formal authority. Ours was, without question, a focal point of our dining room.
 
My grandmother tended it daily. I don't know the full content of her practice; I was familiar with its rhythm: she placed offerings (usually fresh water, rice, seasonal fruit), lit candles and incense, and followed with solemn chanting and prayer. My father took up tending to the butsudan after, though only on special occasions, New Year's chief among them. His custodianship was lighter than my grandmother’s had been. Even as the intensity of practice shifted, the butsudan’s authority in the room never did.
 
I don't know the butsudan’s provenance. I suspect my grandmother’s parents brought it with them when they immigrated to Canada. It certainly predated anything else our family owned. It was older than the house it sat in, even older than the country my great-grandparents chose as their new home.
 
One of my cousins is now the custodian of our butsudan. I don't know if it occupies a corner as commanding as the one it held in ours. I also don’t know if she tends it the way my grandmother once did. But a butsudan doesn’t just stop being what it is. The doors still open the same way, the platforms still hold whatever is placed on them, and the hierarchy inside remains legible. Well-designed buildings outlast the intentions that first organized them too, and we don't think changes of use necessarily diminish them. Above all, a butsudan embodies a domestic architecture of remembrance by virtue of its form. Its architecture is one that quietly persists, even if the rituals that once animated it have thinned.