An ambitious new exhibition at Fondazione Prada's Venice location is examining one of humanity's most fundamental forms of communication: the diagram. "Diagrams," running until November 24, 2025, transforms the seemingly simple language of lines, arrows, and boxes into a subject of profound reflection, exploring how these visual tools shape the way we understand, communicate, and even manipulate knowledge.
Conceived by AMO/OMA, the research division of renowned architect Rem Koolhaas's studio, the exhibition is housed in the historic 18th-century Palazzo Ca' Corner della Regina. Running alongside the Venice Architecture Biennale, the comprehensive show assembles more than 300 objects spanning centuries and cultures, from medieval manuscripts to contemporary digital graphics. These materials reveal how visual schematics have been employed to address urgent global issues including public health, warfare, climate change, and social inequality.
The curatorial approach organizes the exhibition around nine core themes: Built Environment, Health, Inequality, Migration, Environment, Resources, War, Truth, and Value. Each theme is presented in specially designed vitrines that resemble unfolding thought processes, arranged in parallel formations throughout the palazzo's central hall. This innovative presentation creates an experience that feels less like a traditional museum display and more like an active tool for intellectual speculation, encouraging visitors to view diagrams not as neutral or objective devices but as powerful cultural artifacts capable of clarifying, persuading, or distorting information.
The exhibition draws on extensive research conducted by Fondazione Prada in close collaboration with Rem Koolhaas and Giulio Margheri, Associate Architect at OMA, with additional expertise provided by historian Sietske Fransen. Together, they trace the diagram as a nearly constant companion to human thought throughout history. Visitors can discover striking examples ranging from three-dimensional diagrams in South Africa dating back 40,000 years to intricate wood-carved maps of Greenland's coastline, demonstrating the diagram's role as an enduring form of communication that adapts to whatever medium exists at the time.
What makes this intellectual journey particularly compelling is how ancient and modern forms of visual thinking engage in dialogue within the palazzo's galleries. The exhibition demonstrates how diagrams move effortlessly between explanation and persuasion, illuminating areas as diverse as fashion, religion, and social inequality. Their independence from written language makes them, as Koolhaas notes, "one of the most effective forms of representation," capable of crossing centuries and cultures with remarkable clarity and immediacy. Twentieth-century infographics, shaped by avant-garde movements, sit alongside much earlier forms to highlight surprising connections and continuities.
Central to the exhibition is AMO/OMA's own design practice and philosophy. Koolhaas reflects that diagrammatic thinking has been a guiding principle for the studio since the 1970s. "Complex ideas are almost an intellectual or sometimes artistic pleasure, and they became a driving element in what we were trying to do," he explains. "In this context, diagrams were incredibly helpful. By researching and designing them, we were trying to form a space or to define another architecture, the form of which required an enormous amount of argument and articulation."
Koolhaas continues to elaborate on the evolution of his relationship with diagrams: "We would not have come close to that if I had not discovered a number of diagrams. The role of diagrams was crucial at that time because we needed the physical burden of proof to show that what we wanted to achieve was possible. Today, I may find myself in a different position, where I no longer have to prove that things are possible, and that certainly changes the nature or the role of diagrams. But I would still say that diagrams are an important part of my repertoire."
Through this comprehensive lens, "Diagrams" transcends being merely a historical survey to become a meditation on the enduring power of visual reasoning. The exhibition creates a unique space where centuries-old artifacts engage in conversation with modern graphics, revealing the diagram as both a practical instrument for understanding complex information and a powerful medium of imagination and cultural expression. The show invites visitors to reconsider how images have always served as essential tools for making sense of complexity in an increasingly complicated world.
