The Nature of the Image: Olgyay and Olgyay’s Architectural-Climatic Diagrams in the 1950s

This essay discusses the emergence of ecodiagrams focused on both representing and operating upon the changing relationship between “man” and “environment,” with an emphasis on the design methods of Hungarian American architects Victor and Aladar Olgyay. The architectural diagram became an important site for reconsidering the parameters of social transformation amid increasing knowledge of the fragility of the global ecological system. Of interest in the Olgyays’ diagrams, even more than the methods they proposed, are the conditions for the human that they imagined.