Integration and Incompletion

Housing for Venice

2009-06-21T12:36:00.000-07:00

3 unit aggregation

Low water and flooding configurations. In low water, floors rest on pilings. In a flooding situation, monocoques lift off from pilings and float, sliding up and down along mooring posts which direct plumbing and electrical wiring into the ground.

15 unit aggregation

Zcorp print, structural frame with rectangular and round members

Morphological skips and transitional patterns within gradient environments

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Shown here are several experiments conducted with a structural optimization software program (topological optimization based on finite element analysis). In each test case, the locaton of restraints, the magnitude, location and direction of loads, and material properties are specified. A an optimized structure (of minimum volume) is computed, given maximum von Mises stress. I was interested in creating a gradient environment and then observing how optimal structure evolves along this gradient as a critique of operations of morphing or blending, which I would argue offer an impoverished understanding of transitional mechanisms within complex systems. Above is an environmental gradient from a paradigmatic cantilever condition to catenary condition: from exposure to entirely lateral loads to vertical loads. Note that the optimized structure which develops as one moves between these two paradigmatic conditions is not a simple morphing of extreme shapes, but that there are unexpected jumps or shifts in morphology as one moves across this gradient.

Above (top row): a gradient between an ideal case of exposure to tensile force and to twisting. Bottom row: from lateral force to twisting.

A larger plot of a gradient from vertical to lateral force exposure.

Exposure of a surface to pure tensile force, plot of von Mises stress (far left), optimized structure (second from left), exposure to pure transverse force, von Mises stress plot (second from right) and optimized structure (far right).

Above, bottom row: The exposure of a surface to a gradient field, from tensile to transverse force. Plot of von Mises stress. Top row: At each extreme, optimized structure under exposure to transverse force (left) and tensile force (right), and the transitional pattern that develops between which is not a simple blend or morph between these extremes.

A surface exposed to a gradient voiding pattern which shifts from orthagonal to hexagonal in organization and loaded in tension. Left: von Mises stress plot. Right: optimized structure. Note transitional pattern.

Variation of optimized structure of a dome with a distributed vertical load as aperature size varies.

A 3-dimensional elaboration of the first experiment: exposing a structure to a gradient environment from cantilever to catenary condition. A structure supported by piles which wrap around its length,such that it cantilevers at one end and is vertically supported at the other. The structure is optimized to minimize volume based on maximum allowable stress. Blue piles may be removed from the optimized structure. The result is not a gradient pattern of pilings from the cantilevering to the vertically supported end. Gradient environmental conditions thus do not result in gradient (ie smoothly morphing) structures.

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Figure 104. Istituto veneto di scienze,lettere ed arti, ed. La Ricerca Scientifica Per Venezia: Il Progetto Sistema Lagunare Veneziano, Venezia: Istituto veneziano di scienze lettere ed arti, 2000.
Figure 105. Romanelli, Giandomenico. Venezia Ottocento: L’Architettura, l’Urbanistica. Venezia: Albrizzi, 1988.
Figure 106. Pavanini, Mario. Traditional house construction. In issue “Venice: Problems and Possibilities.” Architectural Review 149, (05, 1971).
Figure 107. Goy, Richard. The House of Gold: building a palace in medieval Venice. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
Figures 108-110: Istituto veneto di scienze,lettere ed arti, ed. La Ricerca Scientifica Per Venezia: Il Progetto Sistema Lagunare Veneziano, Venezia: Istituto veneziano di scienze lettere ed arti, 2000.
Figures 111-114. Goy, Richard. The House of Gold: building a palace in medieval Venice. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
Figure 118: Fletcher, Caroline. The Science of Saving Venice. Torino: Umberto Allemandi, 2004.
Figure 119-122: Istituto veneto di scienze,lettere ed arti, ed. La Ricerca Scientifica Per Venezia: Il Progetto Sistema Lagunare Veneziano, Venezia: Istituto veneziano di scienze lettere ed arti, 2000.
Figure 123: Dura Vermeer, www.duravermeer.nl

Chapter 6: Venice: Climatic variability, local construction methods

2009-06-18T23:20:00.000-07:00

Figure 118: Flooding at + 8 cm above sea level (light blue) and at + 10 cm (dark blue.)

Venice is a city of dramatic variability of environmental conditions, both tidal and topographical. The architecture of Venice has developed in response to these environmental contingencies. Piles allow construction on earth with low bearing capacity, as do lighter Venetian bricks, 2 inches thinner than Roman brick, and special Venetian techniques of light roof construction. The traditional Venetian house is composed of two or three bays, the narrow width of these bays limited to a few standard dimensions by the low carrying capacity of the sandy or silty soil beneath. Light brick walls were protected from moisture erosion with a facing of marble reaching just above the highest expected tide level at time of construction.

Figures 108-110: Typical wall sections of canal and residence. In blue, the highest expected water level at time of construction as evidenced by the height of the marble facing.

Figure 105: 18th century design proposal for Venetian abbatoir, note highly specific program and soil contingent arrangement of foundation piles.

Figures 111-114: Ca’ d’Oro: a typical 2 bay residence. Facade; plan of ground floor and levels 1 and 2.

Figure 107: Ca’ d’Oro: section showing thin, closely spaced floor beams typical of traditional Venetian residential construction.

Figure 106, 107: Typical Venetian residential roof construction, note thin purlins and plaster cieling to reduce weight of structure.

Figure 103: Map of Venice, 1346. Settlement of Venice began on areas of soil of high bearing capacity. Architecture built at this time utilized conventional foundations. By the end of the 14th century, settlement advanced over soils with poor bearing capacity, and from this time on, pile or raft foundations were utilized.

Figure 104: Soil types, Venice lagoon

The existing architecture of Venice has reached a limit condition wherein strategies utilized to manage environmental variability can no longer effectively accomodate the increasing rate of change brought on by global warming. Lagoon water now routinely rises above the marble facing protecting building and canal walls, causing bricks to erode. Piazza San Marco has been repaved, stacking layer upon layer, as sea levels rise, but now paving has been installed at a level where it has begun to interfere with the thresholds of Saint Mark's. The paving cannot be raised again, yet the piazza is flooded an ever increasing number of days each year.

Figure 120: Erosion and sedimentation patterns in Venice lagoon. Erosion is occuring at an ever increasing rate each year.

Figure 119: Remaining stands of sea grass, Venice lagoon. Poisioning of sea grass by industrial pollutants has increased the rate of erosion.

Top left to bottom right: Flooding pattern at current sea level, at +1 M, +2 M, and +3M. Greater Venice is located on an enormous flood plane which could become entirely submerged if the polar icecaps continue to melt.

Figure 122: MOSES flood gate. The MOSES rests at the bottom of the ocean near the lagoon inlet and is raised pneumatically during high tides. It is estimated that within 25 years, it will be raised so many days per year that it will interfere with the natural tidal flushing of the lagoon, allowing a dangerous level of bacteria and pollutants to concentrate in the canals.

Figure 121: Current velocity at lagoon inlet. The reconfiguring of the inlets of the Venice lagoon have increased the current velocity, thus increasing rates of erosion.

Figures 115-117: Flooding in Venice

Chapter 5: The monocoque and multiplicity, Structural patterning, Multi-scale optimization

2009-06-18T21:02:00.000-07:00

Principle lines of stress created by loading a vault with internal beams and columns

Figures 99-101. Theodor Teichen, Market Hall
Placement of reinforcing along lines of tensile stress. Plan, Detail section of reinforcing.

Research Proposal
This thesis is a reconsideration of concepts of openness, integration, and multiplicity within architecture. Recognizing that contemporary algorithmic and morphogenetic architectural projects which seek to critique modernist modularity fail to offer a compelling alternative vision of integration which does not rely on reduction and homogenization to foster coherence, this project seeks to integrate elements which fundamentally differ in kind, exploring such phenomena as the catastrophe and phase shift as mechanisms which bridge between singularities which produce fundamentally different qualities, behaviors, patterns and protocols. The project seeks an alternative both to building systems based on standardized building components and those based on a single building component which is varied to produce a rhetorical parametricism (unable to productively respond to multiple independent environmental variables, and thus ultimately nothing more than an aesthetic of self-similarity). The closed self-consistent organism based either on compulsive repetition of standardized modules, or on a formally driven production of self-similar components is to be countered through the insertion of foreign codes (patterns, logics, protocols which regulate parts-to-whole relations) into an architectural body, building new potentials, competencies, and affiliations with systems outside of its interior.

Flow of principle lines of stress on a surface around two holes, tensile loading.

Interrogating the Singularity of the Monocoque
A new interest in material elegance, achieved via the resolution of multiple performative requirements within a single coherent formal system, as well as an interest in appropriating versioning(108) techniques and technologies used in the automotive industry has made the monocoque an increasing popular focus of architectural research. The monocoque integrates surface and structure, ergonomics and aerodynamics. A closer study of the automotive monocoque, however-- to its joints, material transitions, and pragmatic hybridizations, reveals that the constructed monocoque is never simply a realization of monocoque as pure concept: a singular continuous totalizing system. In practice, the monocoque is composed of various materials with different performative capabilities, each with their own logic of assembly and local densities (fiberglass strands within resin for instance), is often, for ease of production, designed as multiple assembled parts, and often feature non-surface based structural elements which make the monocoque more a hybrid than pure type. Conceptually an absolute or limit condition, a closed body, a singular totality and yet in practice a malleable type-- the monocoque may be used as a vehicle to explore the limits of openness and diversity within a coherent architectural body. By forcing the monocoque to incorporate multiple material and connective logics based on local conditions and requirements, one may test the limits of its coherence and determine the moments when the monocoque dissolves, divides, or multiplies into something beyond itself.

Figure 59. KVA monocoque frame hybrid chassis

Figure 60. The Jaguar XK monocoque
Red: cast aluminum
Blue: extruded aluminum
White: stamped aluminum
Sections joined by welding and blind rivets

Geometric versus structural patterning
To the left is a geometric tesselation which attempts to maximize difference within a continuous field: difference of size and placement of apertures, density, and base geometry. Geometry is a closed system, depending upon its own internal logics for consistency and rigor. To the right are five figures generated by structural analysis and optimization software. A rectangular angle bracket with three holes develops different stresses in each case according to the different applied loads and restraints. The shape of the angle bracket is optimized in each case to minimize stresses, given maximum mass. Unlike geometrical patterns, structural figures and patterns are open bodies, contingent upon external conditions and forces.

Figure 61-76, C. Mattheck.
Column 1 (left): Design space, loads and restraints.
Column 2 (middle): von Mises stress
Column 3 (right) Design proposal
Row 1 (top): Tensile loading
Row 2: Twisting
Row 3: Shear loading
Row 4: Transverse loading
Row 5: Transverse loading, moment connections

Topological optimization algorithms input various environmental contingencies (support/restraint conditions, forces, specific material properties, clearance zones within the design domain which must be free of material, maximum deflection and typically the maximum allowable mass of the part/body to be designed). Goals are typically to minimize stress, or maximize stiffness. These algorithms, therefore allow an interaction between external logics (nature of restraints, position and size of loads, etc) and internal logics (material behaviors due to elasticity, plasticity, isotropic or non-isotropic composition, etc.)

Figure 81,82. Arata Isozaki, Automobile Museum
Above: Increasingly refined iterations (stresses progressively decreased) created through a topological optimization algorithm.
Below: Sections, elevation

Arata Isozaki’s Automobile Museum is one of the few architectural projects which utilizes topology optimization. Its topologically optimized roof and supports are developed as a monolithic body subject to generalized forces. (See Mike Xie’s very similar bridge structures below, which utilize the same ESO algorithm and are based upon a simple design scenario: 4 supports and an equally distributed load.) A structure which is subject to varied local loading conditions, rather than a generic distributed load, would be more highly differentiated. In addition, a field of linked components, rather than a monolithic structure, would create a finer grain of resolution, more clearly registering the effects of local stress gradients. This thesis will explore the creation of pattern, which, like the above geometric tesselation, is a highly differentiated, yet continuous field of modules, and a fusion of different regimes with different rules and behaviors, but unlike the geometric pattern, informed by material and environmental conditions.

Figures 90-95, M.P. Bendsøe.
Objective: Find optimal arrangement of tiles to minimize the weight of the structure while retaining sufficient structural stiffness.
Given: Four tiles of varying material density.
Top left to bottom right:
1. Four tiles available to build structure
2. Design space, loads and restraints
3. Topology optimization result
4. Magnification of result

Multi-scale optimization
Bendsøe, Diaz, and Chellappa have worked on the problem of introducing multi-scale modularity into a topological optimization algorithm.(109) They introduce a finite number of modules which vary in density/mass into an optimization algorithm. Predetermining the arrangement of mass within the module and limiting the number of different variables creates a compromise between optimization and standardization. It creates a microscale weave which anticipates fabrication to a greater extent than monolithic optimization solutions, breaking it into assemblable components, but does not allow optimization to inform/deform this microstructure. This thesis will seek to design an architecture that achieves optimization at both the scale of the global and at the scale of the component/microweave.

Figures 86-89, M.P. Bendsøe.
Objective: To find optimal arrangement of perforated modules to minimize the weight of the structure while retaining sufficient structural stiffness.
Given: A finite collection of modules with varying perforation radii
Top light to bottom right:
1. Design space, loads and restraints
2. Conventional topology optimization result.
3, 4. Results using perforated modules, varying allowable radii range.

Seeding a field with multiple logics
This thesis will develop multiple unique localities which will together constitute an environment for the development of structure. These may include ground conditions allowing edge support and those requiring point supports, a locality required to channel water for drainage purposes, localities in which a structural interruption/discontinuity is required, a locality characterized by the necessity for cantilevering structure, a locality requiring minimal shell curvature, and thus evolving a structure which carries loads primarily in bending, a locality in which structure is required to bifurcate to partition space, a locality in which a space which is shaded, yet open to the air is desirable, necessitating the use of tension structures, localities subject to high levels of torque and areas subject to large shear stress. Unique components and connective protocols will be developed for each locality. Research will also be directed towards the margins between and overlap of localities and the special conditions created in these areas.

Figures 51-54, C. Mattheck.
Right to left: Growth a of tree around a railing
Finite element mesh, loads and restraints
Initial von Mises stress plot
Optimized design with stress plot

Figures 47-50, C. Mattheck.
Left to right: Growth a of tree constricted by a rope.
Initial von Mises stress plot
Optimized design with von Mises stress plot

Exploration of mechanisms of phase shift/catastrophe
Taking example from the grid shell/diatom research of Frei Otto detailed above, this thesis will explore the convergence of conditions which precipitates phase shifts and catastrophes. The transition between localities, each governed by different singularity, will likely be the location of a phase shifting between patterns. These phase shifts may be seamless; however they may also contain unique morphologies which are not simply a blend between patterns (what Otto terms “net defects.”)

Konrad Wachsmann, Aircraft hanger

Materiality
This thesis will develop several interdependent, behaviorally distinct material systems in order to create a structure which is highly responsive to local edge conditions, lines of stress, and local methods of load transmission (i.e. via membrane stresses). Material systems will at a minimum include a system of components developed to carry tensile forces (steel or fiber-based components), a system which carries compressive forces and glazing components.

Figure 102. BX-58 Grid, 3-way Tetrahedron

Integrated tensile and compressive systems
Reinforcement meshes are typically placed along principle lines of stress. A net system of tension components must be capable of local densification, shifts in weave direction, and local unstitching and reorientation to accommodate apertures. Principle lines of compression run at right angles to principle lines of tension. Weaving together tension and compression meshes requires a contingent connective system at right angle intersections.

Figure 97,98. George Wimberly, Howard Cook Windward City Shopping Center, Elevation, roof plan, reinforcing plan

Above: Tension and compression component couple, with principle directionality perpendicular to one another
Middle: Partial mesh oriented to principle lines of tensile stress (middle). Partial mesh oriented to principle lines of compressive stress (right).
Below: Principle lines of stress on a vault. Component based meshes following lines of principle tension (right) and compression (middle).

_________________

108 see Architectural Design: Versioning, vol.72, n.5, (2002 ), particularly Ingeborg Rocker, Versioning: evolving architectures, dissolving identities - ‘nothing is as persistent as change’, p.[10]-17 for a discussion of versioning.
109 M.P. Bendsøe, Department of Mathematics, Technical University of Denmark and A. R. Diaz S. Chellappa, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Michigan State University, Design Optimization in a Multiscale Setting.

Figures 77-80. Top left to bottom right:
1, 2. E. Saarinnen, MIT Kresge auditorium
3. E. Lamm, structurally optimized shell
4. Deformation plotted against self-weight, original and optimized design

Saarinnen’s Kresge auditorium is a dome that is trimmed such that it rests on point supports rather than continuous edges. As Martin
Bechthold explains in Innovative surface structures: technologies and applications, this trimming created engineering difficulties that required undesirable design compromises. Removing segments of the dome created interruptions in the path of hoop forces, inducing bending moments that necessitated large edge beams. In plane shearing stresses developed at the junction between these edge beams and shell edges. These issues lead Saarinnen to add vertical supports in the glazed facades. E. Ramm later digitally modeled and analyzed the auditorium’s shell, optimizing its shape through FEA (finite element analysis) such that neither edge beams nor the added vertical support would be necessary. In this case, departing from primitive geometry by adding local curvature, it may be argued, rationalizes the structure.

___________

Bechthold, Martin. Innovative surface structures: technologies and applications. New York Taylor & Francis, 2008.

Figures 83-85, E. Ramm.
Topology optimization of point loaded dome
Objective: Maximum stiffness
Constraint: Given mass
Top left to bottom right:
1. Loads and restraints
2-4. Optimized structure, reducing mass at each step

Figures 55-58, M. Xie.
Initial design domain with loads and restraints
Optimized structure
Revised design domain (gap inserted in domain)
Revised optimized structure

Chapter 4: Cho, Andrasek, and Ocean North

2009-06-18T20:43:00.000-07:00

Figure 36. Symbolic representation of the physical universe in terms of bits, John Wheeler

Multiplicity versus wholism
Greg Lynn, Jeffrey Kipnis, Cecil Balmond, and Frei Otto all reconceptualized architectural parts-to-whole relationships through research into self-organizing systems and dynamic relationships between elements; Frei Otto researching phase shifts between patterns in far from equilibrium systems, Cecil Balmond developing synergies between multiple coexisting structural logics, Jeffrey Kipnis and Bahram Shirdel severing traditional relations between massing and section, and part and whole, in order to facilitate the proliferation of weak networks of contingent affiliations, and Greg Lynn developing the concept of the architectural multiplicity. Though based on an integrative, rather than oppositional model of parts-to-whole relationships, their research acknowledged the importance of the skip (Balmond) the defect (Otto) the transitory weak affiliation (Kipnis) the catastrophic cusp (Kwinter) and the gap (Lynn) within the integrative system to initiate and maintain the production and of difference. In Lynn’s early work, for instance, the maintenance of a gap in representation between parts and whole was considered to be imperative to his conceptual project, resisting homogenization and the creation of a closed architectural organism(87). His blobs were intended “to seep into those gaps in representation where the particular and the general have been forced to reconcile - not to suture those gaps with their sticky surfaces, but to call attention to the necessary existence of gaps in representation.”(88)

Today, many architects claiming an interest in self-organization or morphogenetic design are far less concerned with maintaining representational gaps than creating an image of coherence through formal simplicity or elegance. These architects value self-sufficiency and completeness over openness, contingency, and incompletion, which were goals of the previous decade’s architectural research of the multiplicity. Gaps, catastrophic phase shifts, the layering and integration of multiple material systems, morphologies, external logics, the rupturing of internal boundaries, the minute mechanisms which provoke massive change, rather than being understood as fundamental to the formation of multiplicitous bodies, are often absent from contemporary work because they threaten an image of coherence founded on closure and reduction.

Karl Chu
Chu’s virtual architecture is intended to function as a world unto itself, in his words, a “proto-architectural universe”(89) which is both authored by and authoring code, and thus self-organizing, self-replicating, self-synthesizing.(90) The task of the architect, according to Chu, is to get “involved in the messianic projection of possible worlds to come.”(91)

Figure 37, 38. Karl Chu, Planetary Automata

Chu views the material actualization to be a non-essential process within architecture, envisioning a future (unthinkable within Deleuzian philosophy[92]) wherein architecture is actualized in the virtual. Under Chu’s formulation, even architecture’s dependence on the earth as context and as frame for self-definition may be severed. “Architecture has always been a theory of the surface of the Earth. As such, it is a form of machinic in vivo, a mechanism for territorialization and colonization that alters the biography of the surface culture of Earth.... In contrast, architecture in the sphere of simulation can be effectively thought of as architecture in vitro, i.e. inside the simulated glass of cyberspace or virtual reality.”(93) The relationship on architecture to ground, as well as its material actualization, which produces of architectural effects via the manipulation of spatial and material relationships, is characterized as a supplemental (or even vestigial) architectural concern, rather than a fundamental one. Simulation is judged to be equally as real as the material domain, and thus just as legitimate a context upon which to found architecture as ground: simulation “is its own reality...and does not merely function as a representation of nature.”(94) Chu’s virtualization of architecture is related to an understanding of codes, rather than materials, as the fundamental building blocks of nature. “The underlying premise of Artificial Life” as Christopher Langhton writes, “states that the origin of life is inherent within the structure of formal principles and not in carbon-based materials.”(95)

Leibniz, Turing, and Computability
It was Leibniz, perhaps, with his calculus of indiscernibles(96), that initiated a shift in scientific inquiry from the substance of things to the substance of relations. The Turing/Church principle(97) then speculated that all nature could be a function of computation. David Deutsch’s Turing Principle(98) then posited that there exists a universal model of computing system whose repertoire includes every physically possible environment. The material world in this formulation became a subset of the virtual world of simulation. As Chu writes, it follows from the Turing principle that “the concept of buildability, be it that of architecture or otherwise, is an extension of the logic of constructability, which is now reformulated as a function of computability.”(99) The virtual thus becomes the ultimate testing ground for buildability. Even more than this, the virtual becomes the realm of experience and embodiment: “The experience of reality is the experience of simulation. The effects of simulation, in turn, are the experience and embodiment of theory.”(100)

The material realm, previously the arena of actualization, of embodiment and experience, becomes redundant as the virtual paradoxically assumes these functions. Freed from its dependence on earth and equipped with code, the fundament of life itself, architecture becomes a closed, self-sufficient and self-replicating universe. Completely uninterested in engaging social and cultural complexes, indeed completely uninterested in humanity itself, architecture “rises as a new species”(101) entirely, becoming an architectural organism far beyond (and far more literal) any of Lynn’s formulations of the organic.(102)

Alisa Andrasek
Alisa Andrasek, a student of Karl Chu, shares Chu’s understanding of the virtual as having displaced/made irrelevant the realm of material actualization by becoming a realm of experience and affect. Digital effects are posited as equivalent to architectural effects. Andrasek’s Invisibles, a sound and video animation installation, seeks to produce affect within the realm of the virtual, to induce physical sensations despite an absence of the physical. As described by Pia Edie Brown, the installation “washes through you. Caressing the senses nonsensically, sensuous waves unfurl and curl, nonsensuously foaming perception. It strokes in plush gushing tones.”(103) Andrasek’s ambitions are similar to Chu’s: the liberation of architecture from its dependence on the physical in preparation for its transformation into an independent self-sustaining organism with a life of its own. In fact, Andrasek often refers to her projects as “creatures.” She likens the design process to the training of a pet: one begins by “‘teaching it, guiding it, stirring in certain directions, but at the same time learning from IT.’ The compositional process reaches a breakthrough point and enters another phase when IT’s ‘life’ first flickers forward and the compositional event bifurcates into a clarity of differentiation between her and IT. It is at this moment that it also develops a ‘pattern of preferential headings,’ or an abstract ‘personality,’ and starts to lead as well as being led.”(104)

Figure 39. Alisa Andrasek, Invisibles

Andrasek’s Reticulars and Cellular partition system cultivate an appearance of complexity without producing complex systemic behaviors or responses to environmental inputs. Ednie-Brown describes Andrasek’s design process as an “event of negotiating an undulating ground of criteria-meeting potential, the designer becom[ing] part of a depth of complex relationality.”(105) Ednie-Brown’s “undulating ground” seems to invoke Waddington’s epigenetic landscape: a landscape connected to networks of parameters that pull it into ever shifting configurations of hills and valleys, claiming for Andrasek’s work a complexity derived from processes of emergence. But while... her ultimate self-stated goal is, “an all-over, over-all consistency” which she describes as the “aesthetics of emergence.”(106)

Figure 41. Alisa Andrasek, reticulars (smart) surface accessory

Andrasek’s constructions appear complex in that each of their components is highly articulated, and the constructions aggregate many of these components together. At the level of systemic behavior, however, the works are not complex. Faced with a number of local environmental inputs, their only possible response is local densification or de-densification, and thus their response to localized luminous, sonic, structural, and thermal conditions and requirements, is always the same: densify to reduce daylighting, densify to reduce sonic transmission, densify to reduce thermal flow, densify to carry increased structural loads. Despite claiming to respond intelligently to several parameters, these systems often collapse into a single gradient (dense to skeletal).
Andrasek’s strategy of producing the appearance of complexity through component formal articulation and number, while creating a single gradient of change at the level of systemic behavior, maintains an image of coherence and completeness, thus supporting her claim that her pieces are self-sustaining ‘creatures.’ Systemic simplicity and performative reductivism, by producing an image of cohesive formal elegance, paradoxically appears to create a complete and comprehensive system that a more idiosyncratic, variably specialized surface would not.

Figure 40. Alisa Andrasek, Cellular Partition System

Ocean North
Though the stated goal of Hensel and Menges’ research is the creation of parametric morphologies/material systems which are able to adapt and respond to all relevant environmental contingencies, the maintenance of the image of a singular coherent system, utilizing a single material and single method of differentiation (i.e. branching, spiraling), becomes far more important ensuring that the system may effectively adapt and respond to multiple external contingencies.

Figure 42. Ocean North,Czech National Library competition entry

Michael Hensel and Achim Menges’ design for the Czech National Library competition suffers from a desire for formal elegance and coherence at the expense of performance similar to Andrasek’s. The project attempts to find one formal system that can do it all, in this case branching logics are supposed to both create an optimized structural lattice and a system of modulating light which is sensitive to local programmatic needs. Though it is clear that branching logic is unable to accommodate both performance criteria simultaneously, Hensel and Menges choose not to create secondary systems that could help fulfill performative criteria, choosing to maintain an image of elegance and efficiency rather than effectively meet performance needs. In the end, the branching lattice, rather than meeting stated daylighting goals: shading stacks towards the center of the volume and providing more light at the edges where reading areas are located, can only create larger blocks of light and dark in the stacks, and a finer grain of light and shadow transitions in the reading areas.

Figure 43. Image of lungs from Michael Weinstock, Metabolism and Morphology, in Architectural design, vol.. 76, no. 2, 2006.

In addition, the lattice is not optimized for given structural loads and supports, but rather, loads and supports are distributed such that principle lines of stress (which are used to position structure) will create a bolder, more “complex” pattern. Support points for the cantilevering volumes are deliberately irregularly placed, and volumes are cantilevered, forcing structure into conditions of extreme stress for the express purpose of creating a complex graphic branching pattern on the project’s facade.In addition, though Hensel and Menges adamantly deny any metaphorical or representational link to natural forms in their work, the library design, published in an AD issue which they edited(107), bears a striking resemblance to a photo of lungs published in a neighboring article within that same issue.

Figure 44. Ocean North, Czech National Library, Cantilever support points (top), FEA (middle), structure (bottom)

In the Czech National library design, structural analysis was used iteratively to adjust the graphic appearance of the project without substantively optimizing daylighting conditions. Other projects created by students of Hensel and Menges published in the same AD and in the book Morpho-ecologies present images of various simulation plots analyzing structure via FEM or daylighting or fluid dynamic analysis, however multiple simulations are not shown in sequence documenting the development of the design through iterative simulation and revision. The simulations thus act not as design tools so much as design alibis, lending scientific authority without demonstrably informing the design.

Figure 45, 46. Ocean North, Paper strip morphologies,
Daylighting analysis and FEA results (below left) are not demonstrably used to evolve the design

__________________

87 see Lynn, Multiplicitous and Inorganic Bodies for a discussion of the organism: “...the logic of the organism is the logic of self-enclosure, self-regulation and self-determination. Organic types that are whole to the fullest extent are full to the point of exclusion.”p.41
88 Greg Lynn, Blob Tectonics, or why tectonics is square and topology is groovy, first published in Any Magazine, no. 14, in Folds, bodies & blobs: collected essays, (Bruxelles, 1998), 169.
89 Chu, Metaphysics of Genetic Architecture and Computation.
90 see Chu, Metaphysics of Genetic Architecture and Computation, p. 42: “the emerging conception is that architecture is the art of putting two bits together, at least bits that are programmed to self-replicate, self-organise and self-synthesise into evermore new constellations of emergent relations and ensembles.”
91 Karl Chu, as quoted in Emmanuel Petit, Botox-ing architecture’s hermeneutical wrinkles: from differential to integrative thinking in architecture, 1965-2005. Perspecta, n.38, (2006), 39.
92 see Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism. This essay must be read more as a record of Deleuzian thought as developed through Bergson’s theories, rather than as a simple historical exegesis of Bergson’s position. Deleuze writes in the introduction that he approaches “the history of philosophy as a kind of buggery or, what amounts to the same thing, immaculate conception. I imagined myself getting onto the back of an author, and giving him a child, which would be his and which would at the same time be a monster. It is very important that it should be his child, because the author actually had to say everything that I made him say. But it also had to be a monster because it was necessary to go through all kinds of decenterings, slips, break-ins, secret emissions, which I really enjoyed.”
In Bergsonism, Deleuze describes the virtual as that which is actualized through movement along lines of differentiation. “What coexisted in the virtual ceases to coexist in the actual and is distributed in lines or parts that cannot be summed up.” p. 101 Thus, under his formulation, actualization may not occur within the virtual; instead actualization is the process by which the virtual is differentiated.
93 Chu, The Unconscious Destiny of Capital, 127.
94 Chu, The Unconscious Destiny of Capital, 131.
95 Chu, The Unconscious Destiny of Capital, 128.
96 see Gottfried Leibniz, On the Principle of Indiscernibles, 1696.
97 see A. M. Turing, On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, vol. 2 no. 42, 1937.
98 see David Deutsch, The Fabric of Reality: The Science of Parallel Universes and Its Implications, (London, 1997).
99 Chu, The Unconscious Destiny of Capital, 131.
100 Chu, The Unconscious Destiny of Capital, 131.
101 Chu, Metaphysics of Genetic Architecture and Computation.
102 see Lynn, Multiplicitous and Inorganic Bodies for a discussion of the organic: “The terms organic, organism, and organization can be used interchangeably to the extent that they all delimit things which are whole... It is important to qualify these ideal bodies as whole to the fullest extent, complete to the point of exclusion.” p.37.
103 Pia Ednie-Brown, Over-All: biothing and Emergent Composition, Architectural Design, vol. 76, no. 4, (2006), 75.
104 Ednie-Brown, Over-All: biothing and Emergent Composition, 79.
105 Ednie-Brown, Over-All: biothing and Emergent Composition, 80.
106 Ednie-Brown, Over-All: biothing and Emergent Composition, 80.
107 Michael Hensel, Achim Menges, and Michael Weinstock, eds. Architectural design, vol. 76, no. 2, 2006.

Chapter 3: Balmond and Otto

2009-06-18T20:31:00.000-07:00

Figure 25. Vierendeel beams for Kunsthal I design, C. Balmond for R. Koolhaas
“The vierendeels form a catalog: each one is different, from the regular and closely spaced to a logarithmic sequence of ever-increasing intervals and structural dimensions.” Rem Koolhaas and Bruce Mao, S,M,L,XL, (New York, 1995), 429.

Cecil Balmond and the informal
Cecil Balmond’s informal architecture seeks to free structure from “compulsive repetition”(79) and to embody a new ontology founded on chaos theory. Balmond’s design method often begins with multiple local improvisational interventions, seeds around which crystallize logics. These logics spread, and, upon meeting, overlap to create an ambiguous and multiplicitous order. “The informal is opportunistic, an approach to design that seizes a local moment and makes something of it.... Ideas are not based on principles of rigid hierarchy but on an intense exploration of the immediate. It is not ad-hocism, which is collage, but a methodology of evolving start points that, by emergence, creates its own series of orders... What is an improvisation is in fact a kernel of stability, which in turn sets sequences that reach equilibrium.”(80) Balmond’s design method is bottom up, the local informs the global. “Answers begin on a small and intimate scale, these local actions multiply, spreading outwards to inform the whole.”(81) His understanding of the crystallization of order derives from the logic of cellular automata: “A single move, a local action, is all that is needed to get started. Surprisingly the haphazard begins to ‘shake-down’ into pattern and, the open and unconfined leads to network and coherence.”(82)

Figure 26. Vierendeel study for Tres Grande Bibliotheque, C. Balmond for R. Koolhaas
“Playing with the make-up of the columns to increase/vary stiffness leads to endless variation. Thus the make up of a Vierendeel girder becomes an excursion into the science of material, proportion and aesthetics. The efficiency tag of a truss becomes distant, an industrial echo.” Cecil Balmond, Last Apples, in Rem Koolhaas and Bruce Mao, S,M,L,XL, (New York, 1995), 680.

Balmond’s description of a design process (and precipitation of order) initiated at several discrete, arbitrarily chosen points of intervention, as opposed to a design process which is initiated by exposing a multiplicitous body to gradient intensities, marks his understanding of emergent systems as more heavily influenced by chaos theory than Deleuzian materialist philosophy. Balmond’s understanding of the hybrid as “one action overlapping the other, a co-sharing of separate natures”(83) shares with Lynn’s smooth mixture a definition as a coexistence of disparate elements which allows for both a shared identity and an appreciation of their distinctness or difference, though intrication implies a synthesis that overlap does not. Balmond’s concept of the juxtaposition: “Two actions, side by side, clashing and influencing each other to give a new entity by virtue of adjacency. The close relation of one event to another. Agitation by proximity...”(84) shares with Deleuze’s body without organs an understanding of a composite entity which is created via the interaction and adjacency of multiple individual elements. But whereas Balmond’s composite entity is formed via the clashing of various elements, Delueuze’s entity is formed via less oppositional transactions between elements. While Deleuze and Lynn, forming their positions and strategies as alternatives to post-modern collage and deconstructivist collisions, were careful to avoid such terms as “clash” and “overlap”, Balmond, writing in 2002, felt no compunction to define his methods in relation to post-modern and deconstructivist practice. There is a violence and apparent legibility of Balmond’s transactions between elements, but these transactions are clearly not deconstructivist collisions, occurring always within a framework of interdependence. On the other hand, these transactions are not purely affirmatory, nor are they immediately legible, but rather serve to cast doubt upon participating systems.

Figure 23, 24. Horizontal arched truss, Kunsthal, Cecil Balmond and Rem Koolhaas

Central to Balmond’s aim is the production of ambiguity, disbelief and surprise. Relationships between systems are not immediately comprehensible and explicit. Structure at moments appears to be non-structural, relations between elements and systems appear irrational. To some extent, the production of ambiguity is reflective of contemporary ontology: “In the past beauty was conditioned by aspects of purity, fixed symmetries and pared minimal structure being accepted as norms... Now that the world is being accepted as not simple, the complex and oblique and intertwining of logic strands gain favor.”(85) However it is also an invitation to inspect and reflect upon the work, resisting the production of immediately assimilable affect.

Figure 27. Cecil Balmond

Balmond’s definition of the informal fluctuates between polyphony and chaos: at times, the informal is described as the seeding of a regular structural field with expanding alternative logics or patterns, at other times, it is described as the creation of skips and upsets within a generic structural logic. The former is a more compelling model for design, seeking to understand irregularity as a result of the layering of logics and inviting the creation a protocol of interaction for multiple adjacent patterns, while the latter understands irregularity as a deficiency of logic.

Figure 28. Institut für Leichte Flächentragwerke
The inclusion of an out-of-scale element in a regular packing system creates a defect which is propagated throughout the system (above). Defects caused by non-ideal boundary conditions and influenced by origin point of the pattern (in the case of the heptagonal boundary, the pattern originates along each side of the boundary simultaneously), (below).

Frei Otto
Frei Otto and the Institut für Leichte Flächentragwerke’s analytical studies of diatom shell geometry(86) explore the mechanisms of pattern generation and phase shifting between patterns. Otto’s research shares with catastrophe theory the recognition that all form is the result of strife and conflict. Of particular interest are moments when pattern generating areas regulated by a local singularity (hexagonal packing logic) encounter a disturbance in the form of a tensile force, edge condition, partial obstruction, or global curvature change, and must shift to an entirely new behavior which radically changes the pattern generated. These local pattern changes are called net defects, a term borrowed from crystallography. The use of the word ‘defect’ is interesting because, while clearly these local changes are not so much understood simply as malfunctions of the original logic so much as the result of the interaction between initial logic and external force, at the same time the initial logic is clearly conflicted and confounded. The result is not a blend, but a violent eruption of change resulting from force and logic, each offering resistance to one another.

Figure 32. Institut für Leichte Flächentragwerke
A packing pattern created by bubbles in a curved dish. Imperfections in the form of Frenkel patterns (pairs of pentagons and heptagons), marked in the photo, are created both my the introduction of the large bubble and the curvature of the dish.

Figure 33. The slope of a gridshell which allows for both the even distribution of stresses and the use of a regular hexagonal pattern

Figure 35. The effect of changing degree of shell curvature on cell pattern, given even distribution of stresses throughout the shell. Increasing the slope of a gridshell requires the use of a less and less regular pattern of hexagons to maintain equal distribution of stresses.

Figure 34. View of the area of the regular pattern preserved for each shell and the pattern of the inserted correcting mesh

Figure 30, 31. Institut für Leichte Flächentragwerke
The effect on diatom shell patterns of compressive stress along concentric lines. The effect on diatom shell patterns of tensile stress along radial lines.

__________________
79 Cecil Balmond, Informal, (Munich, 2002), 75.
80 Balmond, Informal, Manifesto.
81 Balmond, Informal, 115.
82 Balmond, Informal, 120.
83 Balmond, Informal, 117.
84 Balmond, Informal, 120.
85 Balmond, Informal, Introduction.
86 see Klaus Bach and Berthold Burkhardt, ed. Diatomeen I: Schalen in Natur und Technik. IL. Universität Stuttgart. Institut für Leichte Flächentragwerke. 28. (1984).

Chapter 2: Kipnis, Kwinter, and Yoh

2009-06-18T18:15:00.000-07:00

Figure 18, 19. Conrad Waddington, Epigenetic Landscape

Jeffrey Kipnis
In the early 1990’s Jeff Kipnis identified a set of architectural strategies which created what he described as new form by forging new architectural definitions of parts-to-whole. These strategies, which Kipnis grouped under the name DeFormation, avoided, on the one hand, modernist erasure of local particularities via the imposition of the universal homogenous space, and on the other, techniques of post-modernist collage, which juxtaposed incoherently contradictory parts within and against a dominant compositional frame.

DeFormational strategies, according to Kipnis, created “a coherence forged out of incongruity.”(59) Traditional relations (of part-to-whole as dictated by traditional systems of harmony and proportion, or between plan, section and facade, or between detail and organization, between section and massing) were often severed in order to facilitate the proliferation of new kinds of affiliations. Context is often engaged by integration with what Kipnis terms its “minor organizations” rather than its “dominant modes.” “Rather than reinforcing the dominant modes of the site... affiliations amplify suppressed or minor organizations that also operate within the site, thereby re-configuring the context into a new coherence. Because they link disjoint, stratified organizations into a coherent heterogeneity, the effect of such affiliations is termed ‘smoothing’”(60) Because of the weakness of minor organizations, architecture’s affiliations with them are always provisional: affiliations are easily and frequently displaced by others. Thus, architecture does not “settle into stable alignments or hierarchies.”(61)

Figure 14. Bahram Shirdel, Jeffrey Kipnis, Scottish National Museum competition

The Scottish National Museum
Kipnis, in his article Towards a new Architecture uses his and Bahram Shirdel’s design for the Scottish National Museum competition as an example of an architecture which produces a number of provisional weak affiliations with its context. Shirdel catalogs these affiliations: “the footprint of the building suggests the three regions of the country. The general massing echoes features such as the Great Glen, the Grampian Mountains, the Caledonian trend and the ancient and mysterious Standing Stones. The spatial organization is derived from a synthesis of the complex geometries of the Broch with the vernacular architecture of Edinburgh, such as its bridges and fous...”(62) While Shirdel describes these affiliations as planned, one to one formal equivalences, Kipnis admits that these formal echoes were not planned, but rather, discovered after the design was already completed. The accidental nature of these affiliations, according to Kipnis, is crucial to their provisionality -- were they planned for, they would be permanently inscribed into form, disallowing formation of new affiliations throughout the lifespan of the building: “by predetermining the contingent influences to be addressed, the process simply redefines the dominant architectural influences on the site. The test of whether or not the results are DeFormative, therefore, will not depend on the success of the project in embodying responses to those influences, but on the other contingent effects it continuously generates.”(63) While the challenge to create an architecture which conceptually reorganizes its site through the production of weak affiliations is provocative, Kipnis’ examples are disappointing, suggesting that these affiliations are accidental formal sympathies between architecture and landscape created by organicising architectural form. Kipnis, however, provides a more satisfying mechanism for the creation of provisional affiliations in his discussion of the fold and its creation of multiple adjacencies. Smoothing, the creation of provisional affiliations with weak, stratified organizations, is according to Kipnis, accomplished by DeFormation via several formal strategies, including morphing, lofting, and folding. These strategies, according to Kipnis, integrate disparate figures and systems while retaining their complexity.

Figure 15. Jeffrey Kipnis, Catastrophe diagram

In addition to confounding established relations between interior and exterior via folding/involution, Kipnis and Shirdel, in their design of the Scottish Museum, upset relations between form and program through sectional manipulations: “The typical section of such museums partition the space into well-defined compartments determined by the categories of the different collections. In order to counter this alignment between form and programme, we devised a circulation system in which elements of differing collections would enter into various and shifting associations as one moved through the museum.”(64) A break, sectional shift, and interleaving of floorplates bring different collections into proximity and view of one another, creating an ever shifting landscape of visual cross-contaminations.

Sanford Kwinter
Beginning in the early 1990’s, Sanford Kwinter saw a shift occurring in architecture from “a classical mechanical paradigm” to “a new organic, thermodynamic informational view of architectural form,”(65) following a general trend in which human technics increasingly studied the “human and organic milieux” with a will towards the “mastery, knowledge and control of human nature.”(66) According to Kwinter, architects during this period attempted to align architecture with natural material processes, reconceptualizing architecture as a set of dynamic, non-linear, relationships and self-organizing systems. Architecture thus became a vehicle with which to gain intimate knowledge of nature.Two avenues of scientific research in particular, according to Kwinter, profoundly impacted architecture’s understanding of materiality and processes of formation: catastrophe theory and embryology/morphogenetics.

Figure 16. Catastrophe diagram, Control space and Event Space

Thom and Catastrophe Theory
Catastrophe theory, as expounded by Rene Thom(67), describes a geometry of probable outcomes based on multiple adjacencies. Catastrophes are events that occur due to a confluence of factors, and which appear out of scale in relation to these contributing factors. The time and location of potential catastrophes can not be precisely predicted, and thus catastrophes are defined in the diagrams through cusps or zones of proximity rather than fixed points. Kipnis’ understanding of contingent affiliation through folding is influenced by catastrophe theory; the fold in catastrophe diagrams creates multiple zones of adjacencies, thus making possible a number of affects generated by local affiliations (catastrophes) without defining them deterministically.

Figure 17. Rene Thom, Swallowtail Catastrophe

Waddington and the Epigenetic Landscape
Conrad Waddington’s epigenetic landscape(68), discussed by Kwinter in his article Landscapes of Change(69), is a conceptualization of the plane upon which matter is actualized. The surface of the landscape is connected to networks of parameters that exert influence upon it, pulling it into ever shifting configurations of hills and valleys. Valleys are attractors, possible paths along which flows of matter actualize and differentiate. As energy flows across the system, tensioning certain guy ropes which tethering the surface and thus shifting its networks of valleys, matter accreting in these valleys is destabilized, pushed to follow new trajectories and thus evolve into new forms. Kipnis’s ambition for DeFormation, in effect, is to maintain architecture upon such a plane of actualization even after the design process has been completed and the form has been evolved, such that it may continue to transform in response to changes in contextual forces (if only perceptually/conceptually.) Both Waddington and Thom’s formulations of material systems understand the fundamental character or quality of matter to be determined by contextual forces. Thom understands the behavior and quality of matter as determined by its proximity to various singularities within a material system, noting that the position of matter with respect to these singularities is easily shifted by the introduction of energy into the system (a catastrophe). Thus, both the epigenetic landscape and catastrophe theory seem to offer the possibility of an architecture which may radically shift in quality in response to or as a result of contextual forces.

Many of Kwinter’s essays which discuss organic form(70) make no mention of specific architects or projects, describing broader cultural or scientific trends and the formation of a new ontology without detailing how this ontology is architecturalized. Even after the close of the 90’s, there are far more examples of projects which make visual/metaphorical references to organicism(71) than projects which make productive use of the architectural consequences of this new ontology. Kwinter does, however, make a short reference to early projects which seem to mark this shift in ontology within architecture. They are projects which understand architecture in relation to duration, as continuous transformation, event, self-organizing soft form:

“Witness Peter Eisenman’s recent move towards the use of drifting, pulsating forms, self-regulating systems, and continuous, as opposed to discrete mappings and transformations. Witness Bernard Tschumi’s use of multi-level diffusion systems in which points, lines and surfaces are transformed, like printed directions on a musical score, into activities of intensification, relay, and diffusion. And, finally, witness Rem Koolhaas’s embrace of fluctuations, instabilities, and interference and continuous self-updating systems, and his insight that it is soft form, not hard, that bears the maximum of active structure.”(72)

Ultimately architecture becomes the “conditions of possibility of what takes place around us,”(73) facilitating the development of the “culture of congestion”(74) or the construction of event.(75)

Shoei Yoh and the Odawara Sports Complex
Shoei Yoh’s Odawara Sports Complex has been described by Greg Lynn(76) as an example of the smooth mixture or intricated body which maintains both local specificity and global continuous form. Yoh unites different programs under one roof, but rather than averaging requirements for ceiling heights, lighting, span lengths and beam depths to create a homogenous structure, these variable requirements are maintained by what Lynn calls an anexact yet rigorous geometry.”(77) While for Lynn, Yoh’s mapping and preservation of contingencies within a globally continuous form creates a positive relationship between the general and the specific, Kipnis judges Yoh’s mapping of contingencies as overly deterministic. Rather than predetermining and fixing contingencies, Kipnis advocates the use of formal techniques such as folding which create multiple adjacencies, facilitating the creation of contingent affiliations without fixing them, and thus allowing for the shifting and emergence of new affiliations. According to Kipnis, Yoh’s strategy assumes a static context, inscribing fixed relations in form, while DeFormation assumes a dynamic context, and thus works to multiply adjacencies without adapting form to their specific content.Kipnis’ sole reliance entirely on fortuitous accident to create affiliations between the Scottish National Museum design and its cultural and geographic context, his insistence that architecture which addresses itself to particular site conditions or relations creates a fixed (read entrenched, hegemonic) reading of the site(78), seems unreasonably skeptical of the architect’s ability to embed a multiplicity of readings within a work, to construct a network of shifting “weak” readings rather than a singular definitive one. Leaving the construction of contextual affiliations entirely to chance seems a foolish abdication of design responsibility.

Figure 20, 21. Shoei Yoh, Odawara Sports Complex

____________________

59 Kipnis, Towards a new architecture: 43.
60 Kipnis, Towards a new architecture: 45.
61 Kipnis, Towards a new architecture: 45.
62 Bahram Shirdel, Bahram Shirdel: Scottish National Heritage, a living museum, Architectural design, vol. 63, no. 3-4, (1993), 55.
63 Kipnis, Towards a new architecture: 47.
64 Kipnis, Towards a new architecture: 46.
65 Sanford Kwinter, Architecture and the Technologies of Life, AA Files, no. 27, (1994), 4.
66 Kwinter, Architecture and the Technologies of Life, 3.
67 see Rene Thom, Structural Stability and Morphogenesis, (Reading, Mass., 1975).
68 see Conrad Waddington, The Strategy of the Genes. New York, 1957.
69 Sanford Kwinter, Landscapes of change: Boccioni’s ‘Stati d’animo’ as a general theory of models. Assemblage, 1992, no.19.
70 I am referring here to Kwinter’s Landscapes of change. Assemblage, (1992); Soft Systems, Culture Lab 1. (1993); Architecture and the Technologies of Life. AA Files. (1994); Confessions of an Organicist. Log. (2005).
71 see Kwinter, Confessions of an Organicist, Log no. 5 (2005), 72: “Life was described as ‘a pattern in time’ (Schrodinger), and what made living matter different from that which was not alive was simply organization.... Organization and organism were therefore conceptually inseparable from the moment of the term’s genesis (and their twinship is apparent in their shared root).”
72 Kwinter, Architecture and the Technologies of Life, 4.
73 Kwinter, Confessions of an Organicist, 71.
74 see Rem Koolhaas, Delerious New York, (1978).
75 see Bernard Tschumi Architecture and Disjunction, p.1: “The event here is seen as a turning point—not an origin or an end—as opposed to such propositions as form follows function. I would like to propose that the future of architecture lies in the construction of such events.”
76 see Greg Lynn, Shoei Yoh: From nature to a new vitalism. Quaderns d’arquitectura i urbanisme, 1998, no.220 and Greg Lynn, Blob Tectonics, or why tectonics is square and topology is groovy.
77 Lynn, The folded the pliant and the supple, 118.
78 see Kipnis, Towards a new architecture: 47: “predetermining the contingent influences to be addressed... simply redefines the dominant architectural influences on the site.”

Chapter 1: Greg Lynn

2009-06-18T17:30:00.000-07:00

Figure 5. Statue of Liberty, Levels 5-10

Greg Lynn
Greg Lynn’s work in the early 1990’s sought a method to engage its cultural context that neither regressed into a neo-modernist attempt to found a new totalizing vision upon a context treated as tabula rasa or resorted to post-modernist or deconstructivist simplification of difference in to binary oppositions. Simple oppositions, according to Lynn, stripped difference of information, of specificity, disallowing a sophisticated understanding and instrumentalization of context: “To arrest differences in conflicting forms often precludes many of the more complex ways of connecting forms of architecture to larger cultural fields.”(13)

Bergson and qualitative difference
Lynn’s critique of negativity owes much to the philosophy of Henri Bergson (often via Deleuze). In Time and Free Will(14) Bergson sought an alternative to philosophical methods of inquiry based in negativity, dualism or dialectics in a careful observation of difference. His concept of the multiplicity hinged on a refusal to position monism in a dialectical relationship with dualism, it was a refusal define elements through simple oppositions, but to examine in detail their uniqueness. Lynn’s intuitive method of exploring the potentials of new digital tools may also have been influenced by Bergson’s philosophical understanding of intuition, which he writes is the only way that man may conduct productive ontological inquiries without being led astray by the intellect into negative or binary thought. Perhaps most profoundly, Lynn’s understanding of multiplicitous parts-to-whole relationships is informed by Bergson’s concept of the qualitative multiplicity. Bergson defined two types of multiplicities: quantitative multiplicity, which can be divided into elements which differ in degree, and which remains the same no matter how many times it is divided, and qualitative multiplicity which can be divided into elements which differ in kind (which differ in their individual methods of and capacity for changing), and which changes as it is divided. Bergson’s multiplicity was thus defined at two different scales: at the scale of the element (does the element differ in degree or in kind from other elements) and at the scale of the multiplicity (does the multiplicity differ in quality according to the number of times it divides.) Lynn’s concept of the smooth mixture(15) as an integration (intrication [16]) of elements which vary in kind due to external forces (Bergson also refers to the qualitative multiplicity as contracted as opposed to relaxed or extended(17) quantitative multiplicities) and his understanding of smooth mixtures as bodies in which changes at the local scale have global consequences: “If I change one thing that would have been a second or third level decision it can ripple through the entire structure and change every aspect of the building including the control geometry”(18) thus owe much of their conceptual development to Bergson’s qualitative multiplicity.

Canetti, Leibniz, and the Complex Composite
In addition to Bergson concept of the qualitative, one may identify many other formative influences which shaped Lynn’s understanding of the smooth mixture or intricated body, including Elias Canetti’s analysis of crowd and pack behavior(19), which revealed that the behavior of intricated elements is influenced by its adjacencies: “the composite entities develop behavior and traits that cannot be reduced to any one of the individual members but result from the differential alliances of the composite.”(20) Leibniz, too, had a profound impact on Lynn’s understanding of parts-to-whole relationships. Leibniz’s Ars Combinatoria initiated an understanding of combination as the primary method by which identity is constructed. “While Cartesianism is associated with the isolation and reduction of systems to their constitutive identities, Leibniz’s combinatorial universe is founded on the changes in identity that take place with greater degrees of complexity and connection.”(21) The intricated body cannot be decomposed or added to without changing it in kind, because its intrications - its connections - are constitutive of its identity.

Deleuze and the Multiplicity
Perhaps the most profound and evident influence on Lynn’s development of the concept of the intricated body or smooth mixture is the philosophy of Deleuze. Intrication(22) and the smooth(23) were in fact concepts originally developed by Deleuze. Smooth space, according to Deleuze’s conception, is not homogenous, but “a crazy quilt of juxtaposed pieces that can be joined in an infinite number of ways”(24), or in another description, a space of vectors which constantly change direction due to their participation in local operations. What matters in these descriptions is not so much the identity of the individual pieces, but their relations with one another, which are both provisional and promiscuous. Intrication, a kind of felting of elements within smooth space, is a process of forming contingent, reconfigurable relationships through adjacency which is opposed to weaving(25), the act of inscribing a permanent directionality into space. Lynn’s conception of multiplicity is also heavily influenced by Deleuzian thought. As with Bergson’s qualitative multiplicity, Deleuze’s multiplicity is defined at two scales: at the scale of elements, which change in nature due to internal trajectories, adjacencies with other elements, and environmental conditions, and at the scale of the body without organs(26), which changes in nature when its constituent elements change in number. Deleuze’s multiplicity is both a noun and a verb, it is a wolf-pack and a becoming-wolf(27), more a trajectory than a thing. Multiplicity, as verb, is deterritorialization(28), an opening of the element to exterior influences and an allowing of individual behaviors to impact larger scales of aggregation.

Deleuze and Guattari’s formulation of the multiplicity, like Lynn’s development of the concept of the intricated body, was an attempt to find a method of organizing thought which neither defaulted to cynical acceptance of worn-out modernist ideals, or to an oppositional attitude that refused to affirm or construct anything. Guattari asked, “Rather than joining the fashionable crusades against the misdeeds of modernism, or preaching a rehabilitation of worn-out transcendent values, or indulging in the disillusioned indulgences of postmodernism, we might instead try to find a way out of the dilemma of having to choose between unyielding refusal or cynical acceptance of this situation?”(29) Neither brute opposition nor forced disingenuous unity, according to Deleuze and Guattari, could effectively counter the widespread expansion of fixed hierarchical organizations, referred to in A Thousand Plateaus as arboreal multiplicities. An arboreal multiplicity channels transmissions from superior to inferior elements via branching operations. It is both totalizing and disjunctive, imposing a comprehensive order which forces certain relations between elements while disallowing others. The arboreal multiplicity, as Guattari describes in his essay Regimes, Pathways, Subjects, is constituted by a singular flow of information and a complex of power differentials, paradoxically both singular and factional, resulting in “a planetary intermixing of cultures [unity/connection created by the singular flow], paradoxically accompanied by a rising tide of particularisms, racisms and nationalisms. [factionalism created by power differentials]”(30) Deleuze and Guattari opposed the arboreal with the concept of rhizomatic multiplicities(31), which are described as acentered and nonhierarchical, allowing communication to run from any one element to any other, is intended to have radical social and political repercussions, up-ending philosophical foundations and liberating thought from hierarchically-imposed templates. The reconceptualization and theorization of parts-to-whole relationships is a fundamental step towards the achievement of Deleuzian philosophy’s cultural ambitions. The Deleuzian concept of deterritorialization(32) was similarly intended to effect cultural change, opening closed systems of thought to exterior influences and recognizing the individual’s impact on larger scales of organization.

The Colossus as Multiplicitous Body
The architectural implications of the Deleuzian concept of deterritorialization were well recognized by Lynn, who instrumentalized the concept in an effort to open architecture to more profound affiliation with material, structural, economic and cultural systems outside of its boundaries. Deterritorialization is fundamental to the process of becoming a multiplicity according to Lynn: “The loss of internal boundaries allows both the influence of external events within the organism and the expansion of the interior outward.”(33) Multiplicitous architecture, according to Lynn, requires an internal dislocation, a dissociation with values and methods assumed native, even fundamental to the discipline. According to Lynn, a multiplicitous body accepts direction from logics not internal to it. Thus Robert Venturi’s duck is considered to be a multiplicitous body, allowing foreign sculptural logics of figuration to coexist with native structural and pragmatic requirements. This non-native insertion resists closure and completion of the body by denying “any possibility for a complicitous relationship between decoration and structure.”(34) A “contingent and compliant”(35) substructure fills the gap, linking skin and structure through various unpredicted localized solutions. That a multiplicitous condition is achieved through a two-fold process, one violent (a tearing away of the roots -- deterritorialization) one integrative (a growth of new, finely intricated connections), is here made manifest. Lynn’s formulation of the foreign insertion (in the case of the colossus/Statue of Liberty, the sculptural logics of figuration), its territorialization and deterritorialization of the body, and its capacity to open the body to a host of new affiliations is informed by Michel Serres’ description of the parasite.

Figures 6-8. Statue of Liberty,Typical shapes of horizontal bars and vertical bars; typical armature diagram of secondary structure of skin

Figure 9. Statue of Liberty armature, Construction details through shoulders

Serres and the Parasite
The parasite, according to Serres, is not an agent of destruction, but rather builds new structures or logics within its host. “The parasite invents something new. Since he does not eat like everyone else, he builds a new logic.”(36) The parasite invites new affiliations within the host and between the host and its environment by building connective structures. “The parasite discovers unity and stability within an entropic system through connectivity. A parasite does not attack an already existing host but invents a host by configuring disparate systems into a network within which it becomes an integral part... the parasite is the active agent of unification.”(37) The parasite-host relationship, understood by deconstructivism as a purely destructive, oppositional relationship (see Wigley, Deconstructivism) is within this new theoretical paradigm as a generative relationship. Thus the insertion of foreign genetic logic into the body, initially creating a gap or interruption within the flesh and code of the host, ultimately creates a greater continuity between host and environment as well as new circuits between previously unrelated portions of the host body.

The Blob, the Informal, and the Anexact
Lynn’s formulation of the blob is in some ways an elaboration of his research into deterritorialization and multiplicitous bodies. In the case of the blob, traditional logics of architectural proportion are replaced by anexact(38) geometry, a geometry which is dependent on external forces for its configuration. This disavowal of proportional systems creates a dislocation or deterritorialization, destroying architecture’s status as a closed internally coherent system. Lynn borrows the concept of the anexact from Husserl.(39) Anexact geometry, which is neither inexact or exact, was, according to Husserl, much more adept at describing complex local conditions than exact geometry: “geometric exactitude...tends to transform particularities, no matter how precise they may be, into inexactitudes through mathematical reduction. It renders particularities and difference as mere variations beneath which subsists a more fixed and universal language of proportions.”(40) Geometric exactitude grafts an artificial system of organization onto difference, stripping difference of anomalous (yet vital) information so that it may fit comfortably within an imposed unity.

The blob must also be understood in relation to Bataille’s notion of writing. In Against Architecture(41), Bataille uses architecture against which to define writing. While architecture is “reducible, static, exact, fixed, proportional, and identically reproducible”(42); writing, according to Bataille is “indeterminate, nonideal, heterogeneous, and undecidable.”(43) Writing is thus potentially transgressive, while architecture is hopelessly locked in convention. According to Lynn, “Bataille’s and Hollier’s rejection of architecture as a potential practice of writing depends on the assumption that proportional order originates in and is natural to architecture.”(44) Lynn’s refusal to use traditional systems of proportion to order part-to-whole relationships is thus an effort to create an architecture that writes, as is his research into animation and iterative form making, which introduce temporality into architecture such that it loses its fixity, becoming dynamic and undecidable.

Figure 10. D’Arcy Thompson, Cartesian deformation of one species into another

Lynn’s blobs are also informed by D’Arcy Thompson’s Cartesian deformations,(45) which illustrate the need for a geometry beyond the Cartesian to describe the dynamics of differentiation. Cartesian space locks forms into an artificial stasis, while a geometry of continuous deformation (Lynn’s anexact geometry) may describe dynamically changing form.

Gestalt Theory
Lynn’s early blobs seem to share an understanding of form and formal transformations with Gestalt psychology. Gestalt psychology, according to David Katz,(46) seeks to describe the principles of perception, posits that the entirety of an object - its Gestalt – is perceived all at once, not by first identifying parts and inferring the whole from the parts.(47) Gestalt psychology describes the brain’s ability to track the Gestalt through a series of transformations including elastic deformation, translation, rotation, scaling, and partial obstruction, in which individual parts may change dramatically. Wertheimer’s Gestalt theory opposed atomistic thinking, which in physiology represented the organism, “as a combination of the smallest elements, namely cells; if one could achieve insight into the function of a single cell, comprehension of the work of the whole organism would come about automatically, to a certain extent, by summation.”(48) In contrast, he understood the Gestalt as “a whole whose characteristics are determined, not by the characteristics of its individual elements, but by the internal nature of the whole.”(49) The Gestalt must be understood as a set of dynamic indivisible internal relationships.(50) The idea that the whole is different from the sum of its parts, and that a Gestalt may be tracked through a series of dynamic transformations seem to underpin Lynn’s blob research. Lynn is however less interested in analyzing and manipulating perception than in through formal transformations than in creating an architecture which is dynamically responsive to contextual forces.(51)

The Embryological House
Lynn’s later projects move away from an understanding of form as an index of processes of transformation to explore the implications of replacing traditional systems of proportion with calculus-based relationships to regulate parts-to-whole relationships.(53) The Embryological House, through its incorporation of calculus-based logics, gains a whole new order of connectivities, such that a change in one coordinate point sends a ripple of change through the entire structure. The pliancy afforded by calculus based relations allow a flexible, responsive connection between landscape and house as well. “The surface envelopes are connected to the ground so that any alteration in the object is transmitted outward into the landscape. For instance, a dent or concavity in the envelope generates a lift or plateau in the ground.”(54) The deterritorialization of architecture via calculus thus allows the house to create an interactive relationship with its context, to self-territorialize.

Figure 12. Greg Lynn, Embryological House

The Kleiburg Housing Project
Lynn’s more recent Kleiburg housing project approaches the idea of deterritorializing and opening the architectural organism to new external affiliations through more overtly architectural means. Lynn reconfigured the internal organization and circulation of an existing residential block, displacing internal circulation to the exterior and multiplied the number and variety of accesses to the units. At Kleiburg, existing systems of connectivity (architectural systems of proportion, single-entry interior circulation) are replaced with connective systems offering a higher level of interactivity and density of connection (calculus based relationships between structural members, escalator linkages with various entry points.)

Figure 13. Greg Lynn, Kleiburg Housing

The notion of deterritorialization becomes fully architecturalized in Kleiburg. Deterritorialization, characterized by the “motion of diffusion and fusion”(56) and the “loss of internal boundaries... within the organism and the expansion of the interior outwards,”(57) trades its metaphorical associations with wolf packs, embryogenesis or symbiotic wasp/orchid exchanges for concrete architectural applications: the fusion and diffusion of neighbor groups via diversified circulation, entries and subgrouping; the expansion of the interior outwards via exteriorization of circulation.

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13 Lynn, The folded the pliant and the supple, 111.
14 Henri Bergson, Time and free will: an essay on the immediate data of consciousness, (Mineola, NY, 2001).
15 see Lynn, The folded, the pliant, and the supple, p.112 regarding smooth mixtures: “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..”
16 see Lynn, The folded, the pliant, and the supple, pp.112-113 regarding intrication: “Intrications are intricate connections that affiliate local surfaces of elements with one another by negotiating interstitial rather than internal connections.”
17 see Bergson, Time and free will, and Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism, pp 86-87 for discussion of extensity.
18 Greg Lynn, Dynamic space, Architecture d’aujourd’hui, n.349, (2003): 108.
19 see Elias Canetti, Crowds and power, (1988).
20 Greg Lynn, Body Matters, first published in Journal of Philosophy and the Visual Arts, 1993, in Folds, bodies & blobs: collected essays, (Bruxelles, 1998), 144.
21 Greg Lynn, Blob Tectonics, 173.
22 see Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia, p. 475 for discussion of intrication: “Felt is a supple solid product that proceeds altogether differently, as an anti-fabric. It implies no separation of threads, no intertwining, only an entanglement of fibers obtained by fulling (for example, by rolling the block of fibers back and forth). What becomes entangled are the microscales of the fibers. An aggregate of intrication of this kind is in no way homogenous...”
23 see Deleuze, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 477-492 for discussion of the smooth.
24 Deleuze, A Thousand Plateaus, 480.
25 see Deleuze, A Thousand Plateaus, pp. 477-492 for discussion of weaving and striated space in relation to smooth space.
26 see Deleuze, A Thousand Plateaus, p.30 for discussion of the body without organs.
27 see Deleuze, A Thousand Plateaus, pp.29-32 regarding the multiplicity as wolf pack and becoming wolf .
28 see Lynn, Multiplicitous and Inorganic Bodies for a discussion of deterritorialization. “There is a two-fold deterritorialization in becoming a multiplicity: the loss of internal boundaries allow both the influence of external events within the organism and the expansion of the interior outward.” p.44.
29 Felix Guattari, Regimes, Pathways, Subjects in Incorporations, Jonathan Crary and Sanford Kwinter, eds. (New York, 1992), 16.
30 Guattari, Regimes, Pathways, Subjects, 16. Text in brackets added by author.
31 see Deleuze, A Thousand Plateaus, pp 1-21 for discussion of the arboreal versus the rhizomatic multiplicity.
32 see Deleuze, A Thousand Plateaus, p.10 for discussion of deterritorialization.
36 Michel Serres, The Parasite, (Baltimore, 1982), 35.
37 Greg Lynn, Body Matters, 138.
38 see Greg Lynn, Body Matters, p. 136. Anexact “...forms which are neither exact (they cannot be reduced to mathematical statements) nor inexact (they cannot be measured with precision)... This category of the anexact is capable of describing the vague characteristics of bodies that are not fixed statically.”
39 see Edmund Husserl, Origin of Geometry, (1936)
40 Lynn, Multiplicitous and Inorganic Bodies, 41.
41 see Denis Hollier, Against Architecture: The Writings of Georges Bataille, 1989.
42 Greg Lynn, Probable Geometries, first published in Any Magazine, no.0, in Folds, bodies & blobs: collected essays, (Bruxelles, 1998), 82.
43 Lynn, Probable Geometries, 82.
44 Lynn, Probable Geometries, 82.
45 see D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, On growth and form. New York, 1992.
46 see David Katz, Gestalt Psychology, New York, (1950).
47 see Katz, Gestalt Psychology, p. 45.
48 Katz, Gestalt Psychology, p.4.
49 Wertheimer, as quoted in Katz, Gestalt Psychology, p. 91.
50 see Katz, Gestalt Psychology, p. 7.
51 see Rocker, Calculus-based form.
52 Lynn, Blobs,164.
53 see Rocker, Calculus-based form.
54 Greg Lynn, Embryologic Houses, Architectural design, vol. 70, no. 3, (2000): 32.
55 Rocker, Calculus-based form, 92.
56 Lynn, Body Matters, 143. Lynn here describes the process of deterritorialization: “The motion of diffusion and fusion continuously redefines the boundaries between interior and exterior. Internal territories are intensively influenced by forces beyond their control while bodies extend their interiors outward to extend and reconfigure their territory.”
57 Lynn, Multiplicitous and inorganic bodies, 44.
58 Lynn, Blobs, 166.

Introduction: A reconsideration of integration

2009-06-18T15:57:00.000-07:00

Figure 1. Greg Lynn,
Line based on primitives versus spline

In the early 1990’s a number of architects and architectural theorists, dissatisfied with the oppositional methods of post-modernism and deconstructivism which failed to engage context in a nuanced or productive manner, and recognizing the impossibility of reconstituting a positive modernist project grounded in consensus, sought out new methods to engage context which neither imposed an artificial unity nor limited itself to the identification and creation of facile oppositions. During this time, Greg Lynn criticized post-modern and deconstructivist architecture’s representation of difference through “violent conflicts”(1) as well as Neo-Classicism, Neo-modernism, and Regionalism’s strategy of repressing of discontinuities to maintain the appearance of coherence, commenting, “Neither the 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.”(2)

At the same time, Jeff Kipnis identified the need for new architectural forms and formal methods which would act as alternatives to the modernist free plan (anachronistic remnant of a lost unity/consensus) and “the finite, hierarchical space of more traditional sectional strategies”(3) (resigned return to long-lived hierarchical organizations). Unlike Lynn, Kipnis judged post-modern collage a defunct practice not so much because it had failed to productively engage its context, but because it had eventually been absorbed into institutional practice and had been drained of its radical content: “Post Modernism’s most virulent practices, those that use reiteration and recombination to insinuate themselves into and undermine received systems of power post-modern collage is an extensive practice wholly dependent on effecting incoherent contradictions within and against a dominant frame. As it becomes the prevailing institutional practice, it loses both its contradictory force and its affirmative incoherence.”(4) Whether fundamentally flawed as a method or drained of its radical content by institutional powers, opposition was no longer considered a viable architectural method of producing architectural meaning(s) or response to context, any more than modernism’s imposition of artificial unity/ homogeneity through the production of universal space and treating of context as tabula rasa.

Central to this search for new relational methods, for a third way between opposition and unity, was an interrogation of traditional systems of proportion and a radical reconceptualization of parts-to-whole relationships in architecture. According to Greg Lynn, the definition and expression of parts-to-whole relationships was a fundamental task of architecture: “Architecture has a disciplinary history and responsibility to express parts-to-whole relationships and hierarchy...its design history is based on the continuity and hierarchy between interior and exterior and parts and whole, thus the discourse of facades, detailing, modularity, proportion, symmetry, and so on...The relationship between parts and whole is essential to the evaluation of quality, meaning and experience of any architectural design.”(5) The task, then, was to create a new relational system for architecture, a new understanding of parts-to-whole, which neither enforced homogeneity through compulsive repetition (modernist modularity) nor collapsed into a system of binary oppositions between parts (eccentric deconstructivist collisions).

Lynn’s early theorization of the blob (6) was an effort to open architectural form to new contextual affiliations through the reconceptualization of parts-to-whole relationships. Lacking the scaffolding of traditional proportional relationships which lend the architectural body consistency and coherence, the blob was dependent on external conditions for its internal organization. The blob was a complex aggregate which underwent dramatic changes in identity as external forces reconfigured internal relational constellations. Lynn’s development of the concept of the multiplicitous body (7) was a further effort to formulate an architecture which broke with fixed a-priori systems of internal organization such as Vitruvian principles of symmetry or Wittkower’s theory of harmonic proportions based on the nine-square grid. (8) Lynn’s analysis of the Statue of Liberty as a multiplicitous body, a body which integrated disparate systems and elements through contingent affiliations (9), argued for an architecture which engaged difference without reducing, homogenizing, or creating internal oppositions.

During this same time period, Shoei Yoh’s Odawara Sports Complex provided a model of integrated difference, creating a continuous global roof-scape while allowing local differentiation of structure due to multiple independent requirements. And Bahram Shirdel’s Nara Convention Center resisted traditional facade-section and section-massing relationships, confounding traditional part-to-whole organizational systems to cultivate unprecedented affiliations between interior spaces and external organizations.(10)The concept of the multiplicity offered architecture a method with which to integrate disparate elements into a continuous, yet heterogeneous field.(11)

The architectural multiplicity was formulated to resist homogeneity, maintaining complexity while gathering elements into an incomplete, provisional unity. It neither erased difference nor forced it into simplified binary relations of opposition. In the 1990’s the concept was instrumentalized to productively engage changing and locally variable context, and embodied an understanding of parts-to-whole relationships which was congruent with contemporary science and ontology. As Stanford Kwinter in his introduction to Incorporations wrote in 1992, the individual was, in this new ontology, understood as an element which becomes affiliated with various multiplicities, incorporating into the corpus of the multiple before leaving it for another: “Everything, and every individual emerges, evolves and passes away by incorporating and being incorporated into, other emerging, evolving or disintegrating structures that surround and suffuse it. Indeed, incorporation may well be the name of the new primary logic of creation and innovation in our late modern world.”(12)

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1 Greg Lynn, The folded the pliant and the supple, first published in Architectural Design, no.102, in Folds, bodies & blobs: collected essays, (Bruxelles, 1998), 109.
2 Lynn, The folded the pliant and the supple, 110.

3 Jeffrey Kipnis, Towards a new architecture. Architectural design, vol.63, no.3-4, (1993): 40.
4 Kipnis, Towards a new architecture: 40.
5 Ingeborg Rocker, Calculus-based form: an interview with Greg Lynn. Architectural design, vol.76, no.4, (2006): 92.
6 see Greg Lynn, Blob Tectonics, or why tectonics is square and topology is groovy and Blobs in Folds, bodies & blobs: collected essays, for discussion of the blob.

7 see Greg Lynn, Multiplicitous and Inorganic Bodies, in Folds, bodies & blobs: collected essays, for a discussion of the multiplicitous body.

8 see Lynn, Multiplicitous and Inorganic Bodies, 33.

9 see Lynn, Multiplicitous and Inorganic Bodies, p. 48 for a discussion of affiliation: “I use the word affiliative to describe a system of connections characteristic of a multiplicitous organism against the idea of the filiative. The latter implies the relations of a family, of proper parents and progeny. But proper family values established through evolution often overlook the alliances of different species that develop along lines of involution... Affiliative relations, by contrast, typically exploit possible connections that occur through vicissitude. They cannot be predicted by the global systems of organization present in any single unified organism.”
10 see Bahram Shirdel, Bahram Shirdel: Nara Convention Hall. Architectural design, vol. 63, no.3-4. (1993,): [50-53].
11 In the case of Yoh’s Odawara Sports Complex, differentiated structural elements were integrated into a continuous spatial field, while in the case of the blob, various versions of a differentiating body were integrated into a continuous temporal field.

12 Sanford Kwinter, Introduction, Incorporations, Jonathan Crary and Sanford Kwinter, eds. (New York, 1992), 15.