The data collection/analysis is framed by a visual device: Le Corbusier’s diagram of the rational circulatory logic of a residential highrise [image_3].

Here Le Corbusier illustrates the highrise as a set of networked services: water [image_4], electricity [image_5], gas [image_6], telephone [image_7] and exact air [image_8]. The highrise fabric (tellingly almost absent in the drawing) and the sample resident (represented by the distended eye) [image_9] are bound in a relationship of prosthetic co-dependency by the technology. We co-opt this image, and, following Deleuze, exploit its diagrammatic potential to read modernist architecture against itself. This enables a more supple exploration of the co-presence of relations  – administrative, political, technical, aesthetic, social and bodily – that do or do not sustain the highrise. For instance, to trace ‘water’ in relation to the Singapore highrise, our account would extend from Malaysian water sources, to local reticulation systems, washing machines, domestic labour, external pole-drying technologies, and policies for highrise washing etiquette. Or, to trace ‘gas’ in relation to highrises in Britain leads from the North Sea to a cooker on the 18th floor of Ronan Point, to its catastrophic combustion and the collapse not only of a building, but of an entire techno-bureaucratic vision.