Privileging the sketch: coop himmelblau, nonlinear dynamics and the psychogram

Michael Sorkin’s introduction to Blaubox (the Architecture Association’s Folio of Coop Himmelblau’s work) commences with an argument that links Coop Himmelblau’s architecture and its development with the dominant culture of its time. As Coop Himmelblau’s work developed over three decades Sorkin proposes that it parallelled other important changes that were occurring in science, literature and the arts throughout the same time periods. Although this proposition underlies much of Sorkin’s text there is one point at which the critique changes in both style and content. After describing the development of different themes within the work of Coop Himmelblau Sorkin produces a complex critique which links their architecture to the science of nonlinear dynamics. The present paper focuses on this critique and the relationship it proposes exists between Coop Himmelblau’s design method and the sciences of nonlinearity. The paper tests Sorkin’s claims against both the scientific concepts as well as other interpretations of Coop Himmelblau’s design method offered by Aaron Betsky and Charles Jencks. At the heart of this analysis is the psychogram; a celebrated design armature that Coop Himmelblau employed in their work throughout the 1990s. The paper concludes that Sorkin’s analysis is at its most accurate when it is concerned with the poetic or spatial qualities of Coop Himmelblau’s architecture and least useful when it draws more detailed scientific parallels.