• Folding In Architecture
• Folding In Architecture Greg Lynn

Begin with the example of Robert Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter’s Collage City and Mark Wigley and Philip Johnson’s Deconstructivist Architecture. These practices have been questioned and concerned with the production of heterogeneous, fragmented, and conflicting formal systems. Both Venturi and WIgley argue for the deployment of discontinuous, fragmented, heterogeneous, and diagonal form strategies based on incongruities, juxtapositions and oppositions within specific sites and programmes. Through contradiction, architecture represents difference in violent formal conflicts.

May 02, 2004 Contemporary theory of architecture has seen the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze emerge within the context. Folding in Architecture. Greg Lynn and John. FOLDING IN ARCHITECTURE@WILEY-ACADEMY INTRODUCTION GREG LYNN A s I argued in the original Folding in Architectu. Folding architecture. Greg Lynn is a leading exponent of metamorphosis in architecture and has.

Contradiction has also provoked a reactionary response to formal conflict. Unity can be observed with a continuous architectural language through historical analyses (Neo-Classicism or Neo-Modernism) or by identifying local consistencies resulting from indigenous climates, materials, traditions or technologies (regionalism). Reactionary call for unity nor the avant-garde dismantling of it through the identification of internal contradictions seems adequate as a model for contemporary architecture and urbanism. Presently, an alternative smoothness is being formulated that may escape these dialectically opposed strategies. For the first time perhaps, complexity might be aligned with neither unity nor contradiction but with smooth, pliant mixture.

Both pliancy and smoothness provide an escape from the two camps which would either have architecture break under the stress of difference or stand firm. If there is a single effect produced in architecture by folding, it will be the ability to integrate unrelated elements within a new continuous mixture. Folding employs neither agitation nor evisceration but a supple layering.

Disparate elements can be incorporated into smooth mixtures through various manipulations including fulling as an anti fabric or continuous variation. The two characteristics of smooth mixtures are that they are composed of disparate unrelated elements and that these free intensities become intricated by an external force exerted upon them jointly. A Thousand Plateaus, Spinoza’s concept of “a thousand vicissitudes” is linked with Gregory Bateson’s “continuing plateau of intensity” to describe events which incorporate unpredictable events through intensity. Vicissitudinous mixtures become cohesive through logic of viscosity.

Viscous fluids begin to behave less like liquids and more like sticky solids as the pressures upon them intensify. Similarly, viscous solids are capable of as pliant forms are manipulated and deformed the things that stick to their surfaces becomes incorporated within their interiors. Deconstructivism theorized the world as a site of differences in order that architecture could represent these contradictions in form. This contradictory logic is beginning to soften in order to exploit more fully the particularities of urban and cultural contexts. These same architects are beginning to employ urban strategies which exploit discontinuities, not by representing them in formal collisions, but by affiliating them with one another through continuous flexible systems. Deleuze’s The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque and Rene Thom’s catastrophe diagrams.

The smooth spaces described by these continuous yet differentiated systems result from curvilinear sensibilities that are capable of complex deformations in response to programmatic, structural, economic, aesthetic, political and contextual influences. Already in several Deconstructivist projects are latent suggestions of smooth mixture and curvature. For instance, Gehry house is typically portrayed as representing materials and forms already present within yet repressed by, the suburban neighborhood: shed, chain link fences, exposed plywood, trailers, boats, and recreational vehicles. The Gehry house violates the neighborhood from within.

Similarly, with Peter Eisenman’s Wexner Center is conventionally as a collision of the conflicting geometries of the campus, city and armory which once stood adjacent to the site. These contradictions are represented by the diagonal collisions between the two grids and the masonry towers. Where Deconstructivist architecture was seen to exploit external forces in the familiar name of contradiction and conflict, recent pliant projects by many of these arc hitects exhibit a more fluid logic of connect ivity. The contradictory architecture in the last 2 decades has evolved from highly heterogeneous contexts within which conflicting, contradictory and discontinuous buildings were sited. This characterization should not imply flaccidity but a cunning submissiveness that is capable of bending rather than breaking. Folded, pliant and supple architectural forms invite exigencies and contingencies in both deformation and their reception. These folded, pliant and supple forms of urbanism are neither in defer ence to nor in defiance of their contexts but t urning them within their own twisted and curvilinear logics.

At an urban scale, many of these projects seem to be somewhere contextualism and expressionism. For example, the curvilinear figure of Shoei Yoh’s roof structures are anything but decorative but also resist being reduced to a pure geometric figure. Inexact geometries lack the precision and rigor necessary for measurement. Inexact geometries are those geometries which irreducible yet rigorous, these geometries can be determined with precision yet cannot be reduced to average points or dimensions. Wexner center exemplify the monumental collision and in the other hand Columbus Convention Center attempts to disappear by connection between intervals within its context, where Wexner center destabilizes through contradictions the Convention Center does so by subterfuge. In similar fashion Frank Gehry Guggenheim museum in Bilbao covers a series of orthogonal gallery spaces with flexible tubes which respond to the scales of the adjacent roadways, bridges, the Bilbao river and the existing medieval city.

John Rajchman, in reference to Gilles Deuleuze’s book Le Pli has already articulated an affinity between complexity, or plex-words, and folding, or plic-words, in Deuleuzian paradigm of “perplexing plications” or “perplication”. Where Post-Modernism and Deconstructivism resolve external influences of programme, use, economy, and advertising through contradiction, compliancy involves these external forces by knotting, bending, and folding them within form.

In RAA Um’s Croton Aqueduct project a single line following subterranean water supply for New York City is pulled through multiple disparate programmes which are adjacent to it and which cross it. The implications of Le Pli for architecture involve the proliferation of possible connections between free entities such as these. A plexus is a multi- linear network of interweavings, intertwinings and intrications; for instance, of nerves or blood vessels. A comparison of the typological and transformational systems of Thompson and Rowe illustrates two radically different conceptions of continuity. Rowe’s is fixed, exact, striated, identical and static, where Thompson’s is dynamic, anexact, smooth, differentiated, and stable. Wittkower and Rowe ebserved villa Stein by Le Corbusier and Palladian villas, they discovered the exact geometric structure of this type in all villas in particular.

These fixed types become a constant point of reference within a series of variations. Thompson presents an alternative type of inclusive stability, distinct from the exclusive stasis of Rowe’s nine-square grid. The supple geometry of Thompson is capable of both bending under.

Folding In Architecture

Adafruit trinket software serial number. Architectural Curvilinearity’, Greg Lynn's keynote essay in AD Profile 102, Folding in Architecture, heralds the age of round shapes and smooth, intricate surfaces that flourished during the second half of the 1990s and that to this day are seen as the most visible expression of digital making in architecture. Lynn's theory of curvilinearity emerges from the internal and autonomous discourse of architectural theory itself.

Folding In Architecture Greg Lynn

Lynn's essay highlights that Deconstructivism theorised the world as a site of differences in order that architecture could represent these contradictions in form. Possibly the first instance of digital mass-customisation in design theory, Lynn's brief presentation of Shoei Yoh's roof for a sports hall at Odawara, Japan is a prescient anticipation of the formal and tectonic potentials of a non-standard space-frame truss. Lynn explains that the variations in the production of the structural components are made possible by the ‘computerisation of design, construction and fabrication processes’.