Impressions are bound up with the concept of diagram, suggesting potential relations.

Diagrams might retain multiple series of impressions and constitute active apparatuses. A diagram is a series of graphic tachygraphy, a mode of representation. It is a collection of relations among forces, resulting in a map that formalizes articulable functions, and constitutes an explanatory abstraction. It allows a reorganization of hierarchies.

According to Deleuze (2007), two ideas linked with the concept of diagram are of special interest: chaos and germ. Chaos-germ implies a chaos from which something shall emerge, relating to the idea of “ordered abyss”.

Of what use is a diagram for an architect? In the perspective that interests us, a diagram is a mark of what exists that, however, heads into what might come to existence. For an urbanist, therefore, it includes a tension between the (intangible) reality and the “ordering logic power” that Lacan (1960) speaks about. The logic power, in its turn, presupposes an aesthetic drive. In this way, there is, since the beginning, an “ordering” intention which organizes aesthetically, tending to the ‘Beautiful’, with its meanings related to the precise context.

It follows that drawings are not sober, depurate or divested. What’s more, they include a certain dispersion.

We find a pleasure to abstract within them. Abstracting for liberating oneself, exiting scripts and determinations.

Hands have to be empty so as not to put obstacles to the influx they are communicated. They should be ready to the smallest impulse, as well as to the most violent one.

Diagrams are the complex traits of a practice’s impressions.