Reading synopsis_Skin and Bones-Folded Forms from Leibniz to Lynn

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.

1. Lynn’s spatial morphologies are generated to offer potential evolution to architecture if not to the species.
2. Lynn’s informe is highly formalized. What is being sought is more a rejection of the formal dialectical method.
3. 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.