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“architecture and urbanity: theory, insight and inspiration”

14/08/2011 Architectural Curvilinearity: The Folded, the Pliant and the Supple [G. Lynn]

In Brian Massumi’s “Sensing the Virtual, Building the Insensible” he writes, essentially, that virtuality (the insensible new potential) is not manifest in material, but in mode, as it is the catalyst of confluence. Confluence is the relationship facilitator, nebulous connection-maker. Greg Lynn further implies that complexity in architecture is achieved not through contrast and contradiction and their implicit visual and physical violence, but through pliant flexibility, fluidity. Thus a cunning, folding, pliant architectural strategy (not architectural form) is that which elicits a smooth response. Systems, as such, are pliant; form is not. Systems of shifting confluences give rise to processes which, in their shifting virtualities, demarcate relationships that can be further fused or plicated to fold in new connections enabling smooth shifts as the system of connections dictates.

It may very well be that I do not understand the concept of the architectural fold, or perhaps it has a dual definition in the lexicon but, it seems that the concept of “folding” is practiced both as a geometrical, form-creation strategy and also as a theoretical, pliant generative strategy which I think is more in line with Lynn’s argument. I do not think that any physical fold, flip, or inversion of an existing form is equivalent to the “fold” as it is discussed in Lynn’s paper. Yet, I see this physical, literal “folding” peddled as a legitimate smoothing strategy. As I approach the conclusion of my M.Arch, and the conclusion of this course, I find myself increasingly questioning architectural potentials and perhaps the inefficacy of strategies we as designers read into our practice—is folding really folding? Does architecture really do all that we hope it does?