Living the Diagram: What It’s Like Waking Up to A Gym Across the Hall

I woke up in the Dutch town of Leiden, looked out over a plaza crisscrossed by people heading between the adjacent train station and the medical complex that surrounded the square. Showered and shaved, I then opened the door of my hotel room and found myself looking directly through a glass wall into a physical therapy room across the hall. Then it hit me: I was in a diagram.

For at least three decades now, architects have been producing design sections that stack up different programs in a sometimes-willy-nilly fashion, calling out what is meant to go on in the proposed spaces with capital letters. Developed by the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) in the late 1980s, this mode of representation has spread around the world and across students’ desks.

My diagram (actually a building called Level Leiden) was, no doubt, labeled “municipal offices,” “retail,” “university offices and classrooms,” “outdoor atrium,” “day spa,” “physical therapy,” “hotel,” “restaurant,” and “event space.”

If the architects (MVSA, a firm based in Amsterdam) had made a larger section, they would have included “multimodal transportation center” (the railroad and bus station, with the de facto shopping mall that is now de rigeur for all such facilities coursing underneath the tracks), “hospital” (the University of Leiden Medical Center complex all around me) and “laboratories,” “classrooms,” “offices,” and who knows what other related uses.

All of this had been built in the last few years (although the Medical Center itself is older) on the “wrong side” of the tracks separating the medieval core of Leiden, a university town, from what had been industrial areas and poorer suburbs. This kind of development is, in other words, pretty much one of the standard ways in which cities have accommodated the tremendous growth of medical facilities in the last half century.

In Europe they have also tied them and everything else to transit hubs conceived as integrated and partially climatized versions of the town squares that used to be the focal point for cities.

What made my experience in this hotel in Leiden so intense was the immediacy of the adjacencies. Not only was my hotel built onto the train station, but it was designed to be a structure housing a variety of different uses that ranged from the semi-private, such as my room, to the fully public. The only separation between these functions were circulation elements such as plazas, lobbies, elevators, and corridors.

Courtesy MVSA Architects/Ronald Tilleman

What I was living in, it occurred to me, was not only a diagram but also the fully modernist environment it represented. Level One and the area around it not only did away with the notion that a hotel, an office building, or a hospital should have its own architecture that expresses its character as well as housing its particular needs, but also with those elements that stage the hierarchy of uses within each building.

There were no vestibules, waiting rooms, or other preparatory spaces that would introduce the different experiences you would have by delaying your arrival into them and framing their entrances with structure and space.

The elision of these spaces into each other, with only “circulation space” that has its own call-out on the section left between them, is part of a larger modernist erasure of distinctions. Public spaces are now often “multifunction,” building on the old idea that the high school gym can also be the auditorium. They are often anchored by the stair/stadium steps, another OMA invention, that seem to have become inescapable in any lobby or gathering space.

Those same lobbies, as well as the passages in transit center I mentioned, become cafes, stores, and, at best, “third spaces” where you can hang holding your Starbucks. It is rare to find a public space anymore that is just there to be, well, for the public.

The same is true at the smaller scale of buildings, where offices become restaurants, cafes, pool halls, and gyms, and vice versa. Even the recent controversies about who gets to use what bathroom have created another elision: instead of different toilets for different sexes, each with their own specific equipment, we are now moving towards unisex bathrooms. Some airport lounges are going one step further, doing away with public restrooms altogether in favor of rows of cubicles that are also showers.

On one level, is this all highly rational and efficient. It means that spaces are used with greater intensity by more people, can change their function depending on the time of day, week, season, or year, and can integrate those uses in such a way as to encourage the kinds of encounters that many believe are the core benefit cities have to offer. Meanwhile, the elimination of both all those anterooms and all that architecture dedicated to only one use saves a lot of time, effort, money and, what is just as important, natural resources.

What is lost, of course, is exactly time and space. These qualities are captured by older buildings in the notion of transition: the phenomenon of the enlarged threshold that acts as a place of pause, limbo, and collection.

It is here that you have the chance to realize where you are and to adapt to the role you are going to play in environment you are about to enter. The people going through their stretches and exercises in the rehabilitation center seemed as startled as I was by our instantaneous, if momentary, mutual presence in a space divided only by a thin layer of glass.

For Rem Koolhaas, who co-founded OMA, this is a positive example of the “culture of congestion” he has been promoting since he discovered it in Manhattan in his seminal book Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto in 1978.

For my students, and I assume the ones in Leiden are no different, it is not an issue. When I tried to raise it with them at Kean University, where I am a Visiting Professor at the Michael Graves School of Public Architecture, they did not seem to understand what I was talking about.

They, after all, spend a great deal of time flitting at to me astonishing speeds between different images, sites, and other digital experiences. There is no threshold on TikTok and only a minimal one on YouTube. They have also grown up in a world in which these kinds of implosions are so commonplace as to be hard to notice.

Does it make me nostalgic for the formality of a pre-modernist architecture? Only slightly, and only when the transitions are as abrupt as mine that morning in Leiden. But, after the first moment of surprise, the patients and I smiled and nodded at each other, and I was able to catch my train five minutes later, greasy croissant in my hand. The modern world works, and has its own beauty, even if it is one sometimes takes your breath, and you poise, away.

The views and conclusions from this author are not necessarily those of ARCHITECT magazine.