Agrest, Diana ( 1945 )
Sport City, Design process: plan study, overall view, October 18 , 2003 , Sport City, Shanghai,
China, Aerial view: 13 9. 5 in., Plan: 13 10. 5 in., Black ink on trace paperAn 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.^1
Incredibly facile with ink, this pair of sketches (Figure 8. 1 ) 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 surround-
ings 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 articula-
tion ends at the boundaries of the project, without providing context. On the plan Agrest has iden-
tified 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
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