Skin and Bones, folded forms from Leibniz to Lynn
The characteristic of Baroque space and
thought-------implication for the fold.
“fold” a material phenomenon and metaphysical .---Gilles
Deleuze
Definition:The fold is at once abstract, disseminated as a
trait of all matter, and specific, embodied in objects and spaces; immaterial,
and elusive in its capacities to join and divide at the same time, and physical
and formal in its ability to produce shapes, and especially curved and
involuted shapes.
Unique properties of folds: join all levels and categories
at the same moment.
“Baroque House”, Illustration by Deleuze, , connection between
lower floor and upper floor. The curtain, between body and mental. Five openings, the five sense impressions, operates
as a kind of bodily anteroom to the monadic soul.
Formal analysis of Wolfflin, baroque---matter tends to spill
over in space, to be reconciled with fluidity at the same time fluids
themselves are divided into masses.---------an architecture of endless folds. Delineate
an architecture of substances and masses, a curved architecture always in
virtual motion, an architecture of waves and infinite spatial extension.
Leibnizian model:
1, characteristics and forms of the monad;
2, an imaginary dialogue with the British philosopher John
Locke, which provides the architectural structure for the pli-House.
Analogy : dark room, little opening, like a pinhole camera
Screen/canvas/curtain/membrane in the darkened room to
receive the species and that is not uniform but is diversified by folds. ------Receptor
of image or things representing knowledge.
This is how brains work.
Such screen is not the flat picture plane of classical
representation; it is from the start ridged and folded, in ways that depict
innate ideas. It is not a passive instrument of the “real”. It moves or “oscilloscope”
like a plucked string, according to the nature of the images coming in from
outside. These movements in turn create new folds in the surface of the screen,
turning it into something like a diaphragm, elastic and mobile, a
two-dimensional oscilloscope responding to the activity of the brain. The brain
also constructs new images of combinations of those already received.
The soul would be the dark room, somewhat like a monad,
having no windows.
The consequences of these distinctions for “folded”
architecture are significant. The Leibnizian fold is in continuous movement,
enveloping former folds and creating new ones on the surface of the diaphragm.
As an interior mechanism it is more of a mediating device, a spatial
instrument, than an object acted on from one side or another.
The nature of Leibnizian space:
no distinctions between the solid and the void, and no real division between
the inside of a fold and its outside. The matter out of which a fold is
constituted is after all the same matter as forms the space in the pleat, under
the pleat, and between pleats.
Animistic Architecture
An architecture that might better remain insubstantial to
retain its psychic dimensions, its alliance with dreams and drives.
A form of architectural utopianism proposed a form of “allegorical
surrealism” built up out of mathematical topology and psychological fantasy.
Marcel Jean’s ideal city. Design of office blocks was built
up out of elliptical formulas. Bridges without destination, cupolas, spiral pyramids,
a mathematical monument. This fantasies influence architects who developed a
new alliance between spatial theory and biotectonics, using digital modeling
and drawing.
Deleuze’s theory of the “fold” interested Greg Lynn. Since
then, “Reductive typologies” are replaced in Lynn’s practice by an open-ended
set of mathematical/topological experiments that disturb the formal paradigms
of postmodernism.
Lynn deploys the investigations of nineteenth- and
twentieth-century biologists, morphologists, and mathematicians against the
static geometries of modern and postmodern typologies. Forms are now “proto-geometric,”
“anexact,” “bloblike,” “pliable.” Form is conceived as seamlessly
countercontradictory, a topological
surface the movements of which register the synthetic result of forces applied
by computer models.
The biotechnological informe differs from the informe of
Bataille at three levels.
- Lynn’s spatial
morphologies are generated to offer potential evolution to architecture if
not to the species.
- Lynn’s informe is highly
formalized. What is being sought is more a rejection of the formal
dialectical method.
- Lynn focuses on Elegant play
of topological mutation according to the “natural” permutations of models.
The “inside” of architecture would be shaped by its
profoundly residual character. An interiority for architecture, one “without
windows”
The space inside, residual, formed by the dictates of the
outer skin, and structured according to the needs of that skin’s support, was
occupiable.
Gilles Deleuze, this forced separation between inside and
outside, this “severing”, was a property of the baroque. “Baroque architecture
can be defined by this servering of the façade from the inside, of the interior
from the exterior, and the autonomy of the interior from the independence of
the exterior.”
The outside may have windows, but they open only to the
outside; the inside is lit, but in such a way that nothing can be seen through
the “orifices” that bring light in. Joining the two, as we have seen, is the
fold, a device that both separates and brings together.
