1.  The author quotes, "When a machine runs efficiently...one need focus only on its imputs and outputs and not on its internal complexity. Thus, paradoxically, the more science and technology succeed, the more opaque and obscure they become," and argues that, "this has been the case with notation in architecture."  Does this mean that there is a sort of spectrum of notational forms?  Is it that, at one end, the internal function becomes completely transparant, and the transformation from initial input to final output becomes part of the notation?  And at the opposite end, the internal logic becomes arbitrary and we only reconize the "distict character" of the input and output?  What does this mean for the application of the notation?  Which level of notation is most applicable in the architectural represenation?

2.  "Paradoxically, the dry, dispassionate form of notation, which makes no attempt to approach reality through resemblance, is better able to anticipate the experience of the real...in the passage from drawing to building, the real and the virtual wil always be present in some unpredictable mixture."  A musical score is a type of notation that, when performed, can produce emotional effects.  If an architectural notation is produced by the designer as a means of anticipating the experience of the real, how then is it performed in way that can create an emotional effect on the viewer?  Does a notation need to be presented or performed in way that creates or simulates the experiential complexity of the realized building?  Can it be?  How?

3.  The author suggests for diagram architecture that, "what is lost in depth is gained in immediacy. Diagram architecture looks for effects on the surface, but by layering surface on surface a new kind of depth effect is created.  A diagram architecture does not justify itself on the basis of embedded content, but by its ability to multiply effects and scenarios."  Do you agree with Allen in this sense?  Can we argue that diagram architecture strikes a successful balance of the autographic and allographic natures of architecutral representation?  Is the diagram in itself the autographic?  Is it's clarity and directness autographic?  Is the diagrams ability to layer and multiply effects and scenarios allographic?

4.  The author references the, "inevitablity of architecture, as a social system, behaving to some degree like language, and on the other hand, the impossibility of architecture ever approaching the transparency of discursive language."  His conclustion is that as designers we must abandon the idea of a "perfect fit between object and its representation".  How does this relate back to architectural represenation as a diagram? As a notation?  How transparent must the architect be with his/her public?  Is the notation then a reasonable way to communitcate architecture?