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Architecture Curvilinearity: The Folded, the Pliant, and the Supple/Greg LynnIntroduction
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Greg Lynn, in 1993, guest edited
emerging movement in architecture: folding.
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Greg Lynn background of philosophy and his attraction to computer-aided design was idealperson to publicize, in effect, define the fold in architecture as the intense interest during theremainder decade.-
 
Greg Lynn ties together Gilles Deleuze (French philosopher 1925-1995), Rene Thom (FrenchMathematician 1923-2002), cooking theory, geology.-
 
He states that since 1960’s architecture has been guided by the notion of contradiction, whetherthrough attempts to formally embody heterogeneity or vice versa. For instance, postmodernism and deconstructivism are standing in two sides of the same coin.-
 
His interest is neither for reactionary call for unity nor does the avant-garde dismantling of itthrough the identification of internal contradictions seem adequate for both contemporaryarchitecture and urbanism. Rather he offers
a smooth architecture (visual and mathematicsense) composed of combined yet discrete elements that are shaped by forces outside thearchitectural discipline, and it’s relative to the discerning chef.
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This architecture exploits connections between elements within a design instead of emphasizing contradictions
or attempting to erase them all together. It is inextricably orintricate with culture and context, including a reliance on topological geometry and digitalsoftware and technologies, but the resulting works tend to be curvilinear in form and inflectedwith the particulars of the project and its environment.-
 
In Lynn’s essay, Folding in Architecture, included Deleuze, Jeffrey Kipnis, and John Rajchman,and representative projects by Peter Eisenman, Frank Gehry, and Philip Johnson. It is a way of intimating that the phenomenon of the fold was already entrenched in architectural design.-
 
If folding in architecture cemented
the shift in architectural thought by identifying andhighlighting this new architecture of smoothness.
 
Notes:
Helen Castle, “Preface”, in Folding Architecture, ed. Greg Lynn (London:Wiley-Academy, 2004),7. See Greg Lynn, “Introduction”, inFolding in Architecture,8-13; and Maria Carpo, “Ten Years of Folding”, in Folding in Architecture. See also Branko Koleravic, ed., Architecture inthe Digital Age:Design and Manufacturing(New York: Spoon Press,2003),3-10
Begin with the example of Robert Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, Colin Roweand 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. Contradiction has also provoked areactionary response to formal conflict. Unity can be observed with a continuous architectural languagethrough historical analyses (Neo-Classicism or Neo-Modernism) or by identifying local consistenciesresulting from indigenous climates, materials, traditions or technologies (regionalism). Neither the
 
reactionary call for unity nor the avant-garde dismantling of it through the identification of internalcontradictions seems adequate as a model for contemporary architecture and urbanism. Presently, analternative smoothness is being formulated that may escape these dialectically opposed strategies. Forthe first time perhaps, complexity might be aligned with neither unity nor contradiction but withsmooth, pliant mixture. Both pliancy and smoothness provide an escape from the two camps whichwould either have architecture break under the stress of difference or stand firm. If there is a singleeffect produced in architecture by folding, it will be the ability to integrate unrelated elements within anew continuous mixture. Folding employs neither agitation nor evisceration but a supple layering.Disparate elements can be incorporated into smooth mixtures through various manipulations includingfulling as an anti fabric or continuous variation. The two characteristics of smooth mixtures are that theyare composed of disparate unrelated elements and that these free intensities become intricated by anexternal force exerted upon them jointly.
Viscous Mixtures
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 throughintensity. Vicissitudinous mixtures become cohesive through logic of viscosity. Viscous fluids begin tobehave 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 theirsurfaces becomes incorporated within their interiors.
Curving Away from Deconstructivism
Deconstructivism theorized the world as a site of differences in order that architecture could representthese contradictions in form. This contradictory logic is beginning to soften in order to exploit more fullythe particularities of urban and cultural contexts. These same architects are beginning to employ urbanstrategies which exploit discontinuities, not by representing them in formal collisions, but by affiliatingthem with one another through continuous flexible systems. Deleuze’s The Fold: Leibniz and theBaroque and Rene Thom’s catastrophe diagrams. The smooth spaces described by these continuous yetdifferentiated systems result from curvilinear sensibilities that are capable of complex deformations inresponse to programmatic, structural, economic, aesthetic, political and contextual influences. Alreadyin several Deconstructivist projects are latent suggestions of smooth mixture and curvature. Forinstance, Gehry house is typically portrayed as representing materials and forms already present withinyet 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 PeterEisenman’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 thediagonal collisions between the two grids and the masonry towers. Where Deconstructivist architecturewas seen to exploit external forces in the familiar name of contradiction and conflict, recent pliantprojects by many of these architects exhibit a more fluid logic of connectivity.
 
Immersed in Context
The contradictory architecture in the last 2 decades has evolved from highly heterogeneous contextswithin which conflicting, contradictory and discontinuous buildings were sited. This characterizationshould 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 deformationand their reception. These folded, pliant and supple forms of urbanism are neither in deference to nor indefiance of their contexts but turning them within their own twisted and curvilinear logics.
The Supple and Curvilinear
At an urban scale, many of these projects seem to be somewhere contextualism and expressionism. Forexample, the curvilinear figure of Shoei Yoh’s roof structures are anything but decorative but also resistbeing reduced to a pure geometric figure. Inexact geometries lack the precision and rigor necessary formeasurement. Inexact geometries are those geometries which irreducible yet rigorous, thesegeometries 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 Centerattempts to disappear by connection between intervals within its context, where Wexner centerdestabilizes through contradictions the Convention Center does so by subterfuge. In similar fashionFrank Gehry Guggenheim museum in Bilbao covers a series of orthogonal gallery spaces with flexibletubes which respond to the scales of the adjacent roadways, bridges, the Bilbao river and the existingmedieval city.
The Pliant and Bent
John Rajchman, in reference to Gilles Deuleuze’s book Le Pli has already articulated an affinity betweencomplexity, 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 externalforces by knotting, bending, and folding them within form. In RAA Um’s Croton Aqueduct project asingle line following subterranean water supply for New York City is pulled through multiple disparateprogrammes which are adjacent to it and which cross it. The implications of Le Pli for architectureinvolve 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.
Alternative types of transformation
A comparison of the typological and transformational systems of Thompson and Rowe illustrates tworadically different conceptions of continuity. Rowe’s is fixed, exact, striated, identical and static, whereThompson’s is dynamic, anexact, smooth, differentiated, and stable. Wittkower and Rowe ebserved villaStein by Le Corbusier and Palladian villas, they discovered the exact geometric structure of this type inall 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 stasisof Rowe’s nine-square grid. The supple geometry of Thompson is capable of both bending under
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