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Re-Animating Greg Lynn's Embryological House: A Case Study in Digital Design

Preservation

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 Conserving the Media Arts
G e n e r a l A r t i c l e

Re-Animating Greg Lynn’s

Embryological House: A Case Study
in Digital Design Preservation abstract

Greg Lynn’s Embryological

House was an early work of

Lawrence Bird and digital architecture: a work

in which the computer was a
fundamental part of the design
Guillaume LaBelle process. It was the subject of
a case study in digital preser-
vation by the Daniel Langlois
Foundation’s project for the Doc-

T
umentation and Conservation of
Media Arts Heritage (DOCAM)
and the Canadian Centre for
Architecture (CCA). Research
he field of preservation has long been based activated in the context of that envi- identified characteristics of
on the notion of the work of art or architecture as an integral ronment or a close substitute. In ad- digital architectural artifacts
object, to be preserved intact and unchanging for all time. dition, digital files often reference that are key to their long-term
preservation. The results imply a
New technologies have made this objective ever more chal- other digital files; an architectural shift in the focus of preservation
lenging, for a number of reasons. The long-term stability of drawing, for example, might in- from the artifact to its transfor-
new materials is relatively untested in comparison with tradi- clude links to external drawings of mation in a digital context and
tional materials like stone or even more ephemeral materials building components. Preservation- a re-evaluation of preservation
strategies and principles.
like paper. Artworks that make use of technological compo- ists thus find themselves concerned
nents, including many works of media art, multiply such chal- not just with the artifact, but also
lenges [1]. Perhaps the greatest challenge to preservationists with its technological context—a
comes from the growing use of digital technologies in the cre- context that changes rapidly. This
ation and make-up of works of art. Digital artifacts are depen- implies problems that are more than technical. They extend
dent upon a technological environment specific to the time to the ontology of the work. Can a digital work be considered
of their creation: hardware, operating systems, software and to exist in isolation? Given that these are objects whose nature
output mechanisms. For us to experience them, they must be depends on reproduction and translation from one form to
another, can one speak of an “original” digital artifact in the
sense of classical preservation? Does the idea of preserving
Lawrence Bird (designer), 954 Palmerston Avenue, Winnipeg, MB, R3G-1J9, Canada.
E-mail: <bird@mts.net>.
artworks integrally, and forever, make sense for such works?
Such questions go to the heart of the work of preservationists.
Guillaume LaBelle (designer), 3 Avenue Glayre, 1004 Lausanne, Switzerland. E-mail:
<guillaume.labelle@epfl.ch>. They imply a reformulation of the principles, strategies and
See <www.mitpressjournals.org/toc/leon/43/3> for supplemental files related to technological frameworks used in art preservation.
this article. The discipline of architecture poses some of the most press-

Fig. 1. Greg Lynn’s Embryological

House in the Microstation environ-
ment, rendered as a wire-frame struc-
ture. The split screen on the right
shows that at this stage the form of
the House has evolved: It has become
articulated as an architectural form,
with columns and the beginnings of a
secondary structure. (© Greg Lynn)

©2010 ISAST LEONARDO, Vol. 43, No. 3, pp. 243–249, 2010       243
Conserving the Media Arts
ing and, as we shall see, acute manifes-
tations of this problem. Digital tools are
now ubiquitous in architectural produc-
tion and will continue to be so. Besides
architectural firms themselves, which
need to keep archives of completed work
accessible for professional purposes, mu-
seums and other institutions are finding
themselves responsible, with growing
frequency, for the care of digital archi-
tectural files. Such institutions are also
concerned with the cultural implications
of digital architecture, as are a number
of the architects who make intensive use
of digital technologies [2]. One of the
earliest of these was Greg Lynn, whose
firm Greg Lynn FORM has been preoc-
cupied with the technical potential and
cultural implications of digital design
since its formation in the late 1990s. One
of the earliest projects in their investiga-
tion of this area was their Embryologi-
cal House (1997–2002) (Color Plate H
No. 1). This work of digital architecture
was chosen as the subject of a case study
in digital art preservation by the Daniel
Langlois Foundation’s international re-
search alliance for the Documentation
and Conservation of the Media Arts
Heritage (DOCAM) and the Canadian
Centre for Architecture (CCA). Both
the authors of this paper participated in
that research. At the time the study was
initiated, in 2005, the CCA was in charge
of a corpus of physical models associated
with the Embryological House. The insti-
tution was also preparing a general pro-
cedure for documenting and preserving
the House’s digital files. At that time,
however, digital preservation strategies
for architecture had rarely been tackled
by cultural institutions on more than an
ad-hoc basis [3]. This was an opportunity
to research, develop and test options for
digital preservation of architecture with
potentially broad applications.
The Embryological House
as Test Case
Greg Lynn intended the Embryological
House to be a seminal project in the na-
scent field of digital architectural design:
architecture in which the computer’s
capacities took it far beyond the status
of a mere drawing tool. The House, like
Lynn’s other work, evokes the paramet-
rically developed flows of force-become-
architecture that the designer refers
to as “animate form” [4] or, in a more
self-deprecating turn of phrase, “blobi-
tecture,” a term Lynn derived somewhat
mischievously from the computing term
“Binary Large Object,” which refers to
an amorphous set of information stored
244       Bird and LaBelle, Re-Animating Greg Lynn’s Embryological House
in a database. For Lynn and others such
architecture resonates with contempo-
rary cultural and technological condi-
tions [5]. In this case those conditions
demanded a rethinking of both the
means of production and the typology
of the house as an architectural con-
cept, through Lynn’s experimentation
with “mass customization.” Attempting to
move beyond classical and modern ideas
of the module (based on the division of
a whole into harmoniously proportioned
parts, or the assembly of elements in a
modern “kit of parts”), Lynn proposed
instead the manipulation of an organic,
flexible, generic prototype or “primi-
tive” from which an infinite number of
iterations could be generated [6]. Clients
could in principle select from the many
iterations possible, based on an on-line
palette of design options [7]. The in-
terplay of “generic” and “variation” im-
plied in this rethinking was extended to
notions of product “branding” and the
satisfaction of individual desire through
unique, consumer-specific versions of a
product. As a testing of principles and
a play of possibilities, there is no single
or final version of the Embryological
House. Nor was there ever intended to
be one: Multiplicity and open-endedness
were integral to the project from its con-
ception.
In order to achieve the project’s goals,
Lynn developed the Embryological
House through an interplay of robust
geometrical modeling and character an-
imation software on the one hand and
digitally generated physical models on
the other. A key piece of software was Mi-
Fig. 2. The Embryological House in the Maya modeling environment. (© Greg Lynn)
crostation (Fig. 1), chosen for its ability
to model elaborate geometries, particu-
larly precisely defined curves. The anima-
tion software Maya (Fig. 2) enabled the
visualization of the House’s transforma-
tion from primitive into variants.
Lynn moved the House back and forth
between these software frameworks and
others as the design process dictated:
modeling forms, testing them for aes-
thetic and material qualities and rework-
ing them (Figs 3–5 and Color Plate H No.
2). Periodically, he manufactured physi-
cal models of the results with a number
of rapid prototyping systems and in a
variety of materials and, based on these
experiments, re-designed the House. In
addition, the design process fed into pe-
riodic bursts of communications related
to the product, for which animations and
graphic layouts were created. The design
thus developed through an iterative and
hybrid design process, blending tech-
niques from architectural, product and
communications design. It resulted in a
wide range of outputs in various formats,
including proprietary 3D vector graphics
files, as well as raster images, animations
(MPEG, MP4), print layouts and com-
puter-numerically-controlled (CNC) files
for automated manufacturing (ORD,
G-CODE, HPGL). While the Embryo-
logical House is not formally typical of
the design work of most architectural of-
fices, the use of a wide range of modeling
packages and outputs is. Also typical is
the “mix and match” approach; a proj-
ect may be sketched out in one software
product, shifted to another for design de-
velopment, to a third for coordination

Fig. 3. Microstation was used to set up the basic geometry of the House. Control points were
attached to an ovoid volume composed of 12 primitive curves (ovoid object in bottom-left
quadrant). The control points were manipulated to distort the curves (articulated as splines).
(© Greg Lynn)
with collaborative disciplines and for the
production of working drawings, and to
others for communication and advertis-
ing purposes.
Many of the characteristics of the Em-
bryological House project are consistent
with Thérèse Tierney’s observations on
the characteristics of digital artifacts [8].
These include contextuality, as we have
already mentioned: a dependence upon
a technological environment and other
digital files. Most important, however,
and one can see this clearly in the Em-
bryological House, is the nature of the
digital file as something genetic or gener-
ative. Digital architectural objects cannot
Conserving the Media Arts
be said to represent architecture in the
same sense that the drawings or models
that make up conventional architectural
collections do. Conventional architec-
tural representations can be understood
as depicting a building; they are images
of it. This notion of representation is,
according to Tierney, fundamentally
Platonic. It implies the difference be-
tween a thing and its image, an original
and a copy. It is consistent with classical
preservation thinking, in which an arti-
fact is evaluated in comparison to what
is imagined as its original, “true” condi-
tion. The digital object, however, cannot
be understood in this way. It is a piece
of code that must undergo a process of
translation to become either an image
(displayed on the computer screen) or
a building (output as a set of manufac-
tured components). Neither the image
of the building, nor the building, nor the
code that generates it can be considered
original in the classical sense. Instead the
essence of the work consists in its trans-
lation from one form to the other. Its
epistemology is its ontology. For Tierney
this always implies potential mutation, a
multiplicity of iterations and manifesta-
tions, a non-linear process of realization
and an interactive emergent process
that is neither simply technique- nor
concept-driven but both. The Embryo-
logical House illustrates this idea well. It
demonstrates the conceptual problems
posed by digital architecture for preser-
vation. It also demonstrates many of the
technical problems associated with this
new ontology.

Fig. 4. Maya (specifically, the function “Blending Tool”) was used to animate the House’s transformation through its key iterations. This cre-
ated a potentially infinite number of intermediate forms. (© Greg Lynn)

Bird and LaBelle, Re-Animating Greg Lynn’s Embryological House       245

Conserving the Media Arts
Fig. 5. Digital modeling was also used to produce physical outputs of the Embryological
House: in this case, a mould for the creation of vacuum-formed models. (© Greg Lynn)
The Problem of
Three-Dimensional
Descriptive Systems
Several strategies for preserving digital
files had already been developed at the
time this case study was begun. These
stemmed from early research spurred
by the need to recover scientific data [9]
and, later, works of cultural significance
[10].
These strategies include “refreshment”
of media: copying the sequence of bits
that makes up the digital file (the source
code or “bitstream”) to new supports
before older supports become physically
corrupted or obsolete. However, guard-
ing against physical decay is not enough.
As already mentioned, for digital files to
be operable they must be activated within
a technological context. This context is
impractical or impossible to maintain for
long. Computing hardware and software
become rapidly outdated as new ma-
chines, operating systems and software
products are developed. Thus files of a
given type or format (the format defines
how information is organized within all
files of the same type) can prove inoper-
able after a short period of time. Despite
this, some file formats have shown longev-
ity; often because of their ubiquity, new
software products are designed to work
with them and they remain current for
some time. Thus one strategy for keeping
246       Bird and LaBelle, Re-Animating Greg Lynn’s Embryological House
digital files operable over the long term
involves “normalizing” all files in a collec-
tion to one or a few types. Criteria for the
choice of normalization formats include
ubiquity, openness (is the format in the
public domain?) and community or cor-
porate support; examples today could in-
clude for example TIFF or PDF. If these
formats do become obsolete eventually,
their periodic “migration” (conversion
to more up-to-date formats) is manage-
able because the collection involves only
a limited number of formats.
There is some consensus today on
appropriate normalization formats for
many file types, including text files,
photographic images, two-dimensional
Fig. 6. Diagram showing a single form defined in several different descriptive systems.
(© Guillaume LaBelle)
vector files and even sound and video
objects [11]. Unfortunately, there is
little consensus on normalization stan-
dards for 3D vector graphics, which
are extremely common in architectural
archives. This stems from an important
characteristic of computer assisted draw-
ing (CAD): There is more than one way
to describe and therefore digitally model
architecture.
Modeling software packages can
describe a given form geometrically
(focusing on the arrangement of ele-
ments in space) or mathematically (as
a consequence of a set of operations or
commands). Each of these general strat-
egies can be further broken down into
a number of approaches. Geometrical
descriptive systems, for example, can ar-
ticulate a form as a “point cloud” (a set of
points delimiting the form in 3D space);
as a “wire frame” (which delineates the
form as a group of segments in space);
as “voxels” (“volumetric pixels”), which
describe the form as a group of volu-
metric elements analogous to the pixels
in a bitmap; as surfaces or boundaries
between an object and its surroundings
(“BREP” or Boundary Representation).
Mathematical descriptions can also work
with geometrical forms: For example,
“constructive solid geometry” (CSG) de-
scribes forms as sets of primitives com-
bined by Boolean operations. Forms
can also be described mathematically
based on a set of key parameters: what is
known as “parametric” design. Program-
ming can also be used to generate forms
from a set of procedures of various types
(analytical, simulational or optimizing).
Added to this complexity is the fact that
one piece of design software can employ
several means of description, and a de-
signer may use more than one piece of
software to complete a project (Fig. 6).
Normalization involves changing in-
gested files (those received by an insti-

Fig. 7. Diagram of the Embryological House digital archive, organized according to Greg Lynn’s workflow. (© Guillaume LaBelle)
tution) to a limited number of standard
formats, and that implies a change of
descriptive system. However, as different
descriptive systems describe geometry
quite differently, approximations will
be made during the conversion process,
and information about the geometry re-
corded in the original format is likely to
be lost. The loss of an artifact’s geometry
is a problem both in terms of traditional
design concerns [12] and in the context
of contemporary design, where a work’s
geometry is dependent on a specialized
set of tools and approaches and is not
readily accessible to the casual observer
[13]. In the terms from Tierney adopted
earlier, the genetic material of the archi-
tecture has been lost.
Normalization therefore is not an op-
tion as a preservation strategy, or, if it
is, it is only useful in a limited way; for
example, to preserve the secondary files
that form part of the archive (such as
bitmap images of the House or Maya-
generated digital animations). For the
files containing 3D information, the
strategy of “emulation” has to be consid-
ered. Rather than changing the digital
file to fit current environments, emula-
tion attempts to reproduce the function-
ality of the technological environment in
which the digital object was first created.
This can involve simulating the original
operating system on a new machine (for
example, the Mac “Classic” environment,
which operated on early versions of the
Mac OSX operating system). Or it can
involve the use of new software to activate
a file originally designed for an obsolete
software package. The new software may
not preserve all the functionality of the
original (in fact the software can be de-
signed to emulate certain functions and
not others, depending on what informa-
tion in the file is considered useful by the
software writer).
In light of Tierney’s observations on
the translation of digital code as the es-
sential and generative characteristic of
digital material, we can see that what
is proposed here is a potentially open-
ended and (arguably) creative mode of
preservation. Rather than attempting
to preserve a given manifestation of the
Embryological House (or files like it),
the goal is to preserve the capacity for
the re-creation of the House—one might
even say its re-animation—at any point
in the future.
Besides the technical challenges of
emulation, this strategy raises the possi-
bility that the designer’s original vision
may be lost. While the original source
code is kept intact, the way in which it is
realized in rendered model or image is
dependent on decisions made over the
course of the preservation process. Over
time the realization of the digital work
of art can become more about the insti-
tution’s, researcher’s or curator’s under-
standing of the work and its context than
the creator’s knowledge of these things.
In other words, the notion of the work as
a transforming object can undermine the
notion of authorship important to classi-
cal preservation.
The Embryological House is, despite
its transformative nature, a highly “in-
tentional” project: One can clearly iden-
tify the design sensibility of Greg Lynn.
Therefore the qualities of digital prod-
ucts Tierney identifies do not necessarily
negate authorship. Preservable items of
evidence of the author’s intention can
include the secondary files associated
with the Embryological House: images,
animations, layouts of museum displays,
and so on. Others are the author’s own
writing and public presentation of his
work and critical appraisal from other
sources. Another is an understanding of
the design process and workflow associ-
Bird and LaBelle, Re-Animating Greg Lynn’s Embryological House       247
Conserving the Media Arts
ated with this project. The evolution of
the House design over the development
of the project both reflected Greg Lynn’s
thinking on design and had an impact on
that thinking. Despite its importance, the
design process was in fact hard to deter-
mine from the archive itself.
Digital Archaeology
When the Embryological House’s digital
files were first received by the CCA, a
design process could be surmised based
on the evolving complexity of the forms,
but there was very little hard evidence.
In fact, even though Microstation in-
cludes a function to record the version-
ing history of a given file—recording the
model’s formal transformations as the
design evolves—there was no History
record in any of the files; if there had
ever been one, it had been erased. The
evolution of a design from one form to
another is, however, crucial information
for researchers. A way had to be found,
therefore, to reconstruct Greg Lynn’s
workflow, to understand how the design
had moved from one form to another
and from one software tool to another.
It proved possible to do this based
almost entirely on the metadata associ-
ated with each of the files: the creation
and modification dates. Using this infor-
mation, an array of all the files along a
timeline based on date of creation was
developed, and this allowed a speculative
outline of the workflow to be proposed
(see Fig. 7). This stage of the project
demonstrated several things. One was the
amount of information that could be de-
rived based on only a limited amount of
metadata. This underlines the crucial im-
portance of metadata in the cataloguing
and preservation process. Archives have
always depended on the recording of
information about their contents in the
Conserving the Media Arts
Fig. 8. The Embryological House visualized as a set of overlaid contours. (© Greg Lynn)
form of a museum catalogue. The cata-
logue records specific essential informa-
tion about each work of art, for example
materials and dimensions of the work.
Digital artifacts call for the recording of
different data. Among these are the in-
formation embedded in the files in the
form of metadata [14]. Given the large
quantity of files to be preserved, it may be
necessary to automate some parts of the
preservation process (as an example, this
exercise in digital archaeology involved
some automated tasks). Cataloguing of
metadata is essential to this aim [15].
This sort of manipulation of informa-
tion is potentially an extremely powerful
capability for researchers and institu-
tions. In this case it allowed the case-study
participants to determine, at least provi-
sionally, the “parent-child” relationships
between the various files: which files
were predecessors and descendants of
which other files in the evolution of the
design (another aspect of the contextual
nature of digital artifacts). However, this
experience also demonstrated the fragil-
ity of that information. If the metadata
associated with a file is lost or altered, as
can happen automatically when a file is
copied from one medium to another (for
example, when creating a CD-ROM disk
as an archive), crucial evidence about the
file’s history or context can easily be lost.
Preservationists are used to thinking of
artifacts and the information recorded
about them as two different things. How-
ever, in the case of a digital work, much of
the crucial information about the artifact
is an essential part of the object itself (its
metadata). It may be the only informa-
248       Bird and LaBelle, Re-Animating Greg Lynn’s Embryological House
tion available enabling deeper investiga-
tion. That information forms part of the
networks with which the artifact is bound
up, for example the cataloguing system.
Again, the line between the artifact and
its context is blurred.
The fragility of the digital file, the
need to preserve the bitstream intact
rather than depending on normaliza-
tion and the need to preserve the file’s
contextual relationships all suggested a
specific strategy for ingest of files (their
reception by an institution, the first step
in their preservation). This was to trans-
fer all ingested files not individually but
as elements of a medium image (also re-
ferred to as a disk image or “ISO”) of
the designer’s original support media.
This maintains the source code of not
only the digital files but the digital struc-
ture of their support also, and with it the
contextual relationships of the files. The
bitstream of the disk image is then main-
tained (through periodic refreshment of
media, checksum testing, and other strat-
egies) as though it was itself the object to
be preserved—rather than the individual
file. Copies of the original bitstream, or
normalized files in some cases, are then
made available for access to researchers
or for public dissemination as needed
(and clearly identified as information
taken out of its original context). Some
manipulation of the computer code may
be implied: for example, the addition or
extraction of metadata for preservation
and cataloguing purposes.
The CCA developed, as detailed above,
a speculative timeline of the evolution
of the Embryological House. In order to
confirm this, however, it was necessary to
meet with Greg Lynn himself, and this
happened in Lynn’s Venice, California,
office in the fall of 2007. This series of
meetings confirmed, with only a few
adjustments, the workflow we had pro-
posed. It also allowed representatives of
the CCA to discuss with Lynn his inten-
tions behind the project. This was crucial
for the reasons outlined above. Transla-
tion or transformation are essential to
digital works and will form a likely part
of many preservation processes. This un-
dermines notions of originality and au-
thorship, but the Embryological House
provides evidence that we cannot simply
deny an author’s intention. This seeming
paradox can be resolved to some extent
in light of recent speculations by C.E.B.
Reas (artist and creator of the program-
ming language Processing) [16].
Reas has expressed a concern with the
same limitations that perplex the digital
preservationist: the inevitable eventual
obsolescence of his tools. To get around
this problem, Reas proposes a system of
creation borrowed from Sol LeWitt’s wall
drawings. LeWitt provided skilled drafts-
men with written instructions for the ex-
ecution of his drawings at a given site.
Similar to this, Reas proposes breaking
down the instructions coded in a given
programming language to a simple,
even terse, text in plain English. This
text forms a kind of universal instruc-
tion, which can serve as a basis for the
code (written in any of several computer
languages) that generates the work of
art. Here Reas emphasizes, as did Tier-
ney, open translation as essential to the
kind of generation implied by digital
work. A designer’s statements about the
intentions behind his or her work offer,
in some sense, a meta-code not unlike
that proposed by Reas. Taken together
with other indications of design inten-
tion (the designer’s writing and critical
work on his oeuvre, secondary outputs
from the archive, and other creative work
by the designer), it is a crucial guide for
future re-creations of the digital model
in the context of emulation.
Broader Implications
The technical implications for digital
preservation of the Embryological House
and collections like it include those al-
ready mentioned—changes to catalogu-
ing standards, preservation of original
disk images, use of metadata to automate
certain tasks, normalization of some files
and preparation for the emulation of
others. There are others. Conventional

agreements between institutions and
donors include copyright agreements.
As copying (for refreshment) and even
mutating files (for normalization) is now
important to the preservation process,
the right to do this must be included in
these agreements. If proprietary software
is needed to activate the files, there are li-
censing issues; it may be necessary to find
open-source software alternatives for vi-
sualizing digital artifacts, or the creation
of new public (as opposed to proprietary)
digital formats designed specifically for
preservation purposes [17]. As the oper-
ability of a digital file is tested well by fre-
quent access, and it cannot be “worn out”
as physical objects can, this might suggest
making archives more easily accessible to
researchers or even the general public.
However, as digital files are easy to copy,
that openness has to be tempered. In the
midst of these changes, preservationists
are likely to find themselves called upon
to write or commission the writing of
code, as a part of the emulation process
or the investigations that go along with
digital research; this was done as part of
this CCA/DOCAM case study.
Such changes imply, as we have seen,
not just technical challenges but a rec-
ognition of the epistemological and
ontological differences between conven-
tional objects of preservation and digital
works. The new importance of transla-
tion, transformation and by implication
interpretation implies a new role for
curators and conservators. Tradition-
ally, one class of professionals—con-
servators—have been responsible for
maintaining preservation objects intact.
Other groups of professionals—curators
and researchers—have been responsible
for the interpretation of the works in a
cultural context. In the case of digital
preservation, however, making a digital
work accessible—for example choosing
or writing script for an emulator—will re-
quire reflection on the characteristics of
the artifact and which of these character-
istics are important to a given research or
dissemination project. Cultural experts
will need to be involved in preservation
decisions, and their decisions will have
to be informed by a solid knowledge of
the technical issues involved. The result
is likely to be a blurring between the two
roles. These new professionals will be fa-
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miliar with the demands and potential of
programming, open-source software and
technological environments in constant
flux, as well as their cultural significance.
The Embryological House itself played
upon the blurred and dynamic condi-
tion implied by today’s technological
and cultural environment (Fig. 8). The
same embrace of ambiguity and flux will
be required of the institutions and pro-
fessionals charged with preserving such
works for the future—a future for which
the works themselves seem to yearn with
agitation and passion.
Acknowledgments
The authors would like to acknowledge those most
closely involved in the Embryological House case
study, including: Greg Lynn (Greg Lynn FORM);
Karen Potje and Howard Shubert (CCA); and Sylvie
Lacerte, Alain Depocas and Andrea Kuchembuck
(DOCAM). The authors acknowledge the CCA’s
help in obtaining the illustrations that accompany
this paper.
References and Notes
Unedited references as provided by the authors.
1. Alain Depocas, Jon Ippolito, and Caitlin Jones,
eds. Permanence through Change: The Variable Media Ap-
proach (New York & Montreal: Guggenheim Museum
Publications and the Daniel Langlois Foundation for
Arts, Science and Technology, 2003).
2. See for example Frédéric Migayrou, Architectures
Non Standard (Paris: Editions du Centre Pompidou,
2003).
3. The few well-developed preservation efforts at
the time included those of the Art Institute of Chi-
cago Department of Architecture, documented in
Collecting, Archiving and Exhibiting Digital De-
sign Data (Chicago: The Art Institute of Chicago,
2004); and the Europe-wide Gau:di project Archi-
tecture Archives Europe, <www.archivesarchitecture.
gaudi-programme.eu/>.
4. Greg Lynn, Animate Form (New York: Princeton
Architectural Press, 1999).
5. See for example Brian Massumi, “Interface and Ac-
tive Space: Human-Machine Design,” in Proceedings
of the Sixth International Symposium on Electronic Art,
Montreal, 1995, <http://everybodys.be/node/25>.
6. Greg Lynn, “Going Primitive,” public lecture as
part of Canadian Centre for Architecture / Daniel
Langlois Foundation for Art, Science, and Technol-
ogy conference Devices of Design (18 November
2004). Note that peripheral experimentation with
the House’s landscaping involved the application
of principles of animate form to iconic European
houses (notably the Villa Cornaro by Andrea Palla-
dio, 1552–1553).
7. A mock-up of the design selection process Lynn
envisioned for this project is at <www.glform.com/
embryonic/Build%20your%20own/entry_wire
HOUSEweb.htm>.
8. Thérèse Tierney, Abstract Space: Beneath the Media
Bird and LaBelle, Re-Animating Greg Lynn’s Embryological House       249
Conserving the Media Arts
Surface (Oxford and New York: Taylor & Francis,
2007), passim.
9. Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems
(CCSDS), Reference Model for an Open Archival
Information System (OAIS) (Washington: CCSDS
Secretariat NASA, 2002).
10. For example Jeffrey Darlington, Andy Finney,
Adrian Pearce, “Domesday Redux: The Rescue of
the BBC Domesday Project Videodiscs,” Ariadne,
No. 36 (30 July 2003), <www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue36/
tna/intro.html>.
11. See for example Sheila Anderson, Mike Pringle,
Mick Eadie, Tony Austin, Andrew Wilson, Malcolm
Polfreman, Digital Images Archiving Study, Arts and
Humanities Data Service, <www.jisc.ac.uk/uploaded_
documents/FinaldraftImagesArchivingStudy.pdf>
2006; and Andrew Wilson, Richard Wright, Mal-
colm Polfreman, Sheila Anderson, Simon Tanner,
Emma Beer, Moving Images and Sound Archiving
Study, Arts and Humanities Data Service, <www.ahds.
ac.uk/about/projects/archiving-studies/moving-
images-sound-archiving-final.pdf>, 2006.
12. Since Pythagoras, geometrical relationships have
been understood to have a much more than prag-
matic significance: They impinge on the nature of
things and on what is essential in an architectural
work. Alberto Pérez-Gómez and Louise Pelletier,
Architectural Representation and the Perspective Hinge
(Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1997) p. 89.
13. Today’s computer tools have replaced a math-
ematical knowledge that was inherently assumed
in every work of architecture. Jean-Francois Rotge,
L’Arithmetique des Formes: une Introduction a la logique
de l’espace, PhD Thesis, Université de Montreal, 1997.
As a result the geometry of an object is no longer
self-evident.
14. One international standard defining infor-
mation to be included in file metadata is the
Dublin Core Metadata Element Set, compris-
ing ISO Standard 15836-2003 of February 2003
[ISO15836], ANSI/NISO Standard Z39.85-2007
of May 2007 [NISOZ3985], IETF RFC 5013 of Au-
gust 2007 [RFC5013]. See <http://dublincore.org/
documents/dces/>.
15. For a more detailed discussion of the implica-
tions for the CCA’s cataloguing system, see <www.
docam.ca/en/?p=421>.
16. C.E.B. Reas, “Beyond Code,” in Network Practices:
New Strategies in Architecture and Design (New York:
Princeton Architectural Press, 2007), pp. 166–177.
17. Advocates of open-source software argue that
one of the reasons for the rapid obsolescence of file
formats is that they are proprietary.
Manuscript received 1 June 2009.
Lawrence Bird is a postdoctoral fellow at the
University of Manitoba’s Faculty of Architec-
ture. His work focuses on the mediated image
of the city.
Guillaume Labelle is a Ph.D. student at the
Design and Media Lab, Ecole Polytechnique
Federale de Lausanne (EPFL). His work fo-
cuses on programming for architectural design
and art.