This weeks reading is:
Lynn, Greg. "The Folded, the Pliant and the Supple." Folds, Bodies & Blobs: Collected Essays. Bruxelles: La Lettre Volee, 1998. 109-34. Print.
Lynn, Greg. "Animate Form." Animate Form. New York: Princeton Architectural, 1999. 8-43. Print.
In reading Greg Lynn’s “The Folded, The Pliant, and The supple,” I was struck by many theoretical ideas within architecture. It seems to be that the time of architecture according to Lynn, is that of blobitecture, such that the form is mutable and changeable. This is turn allows for the structure to have an identity based off if the locality to adjacent inanimate and animate objects.
ReplyDeleteWhen Lynn states “These events are made possible by a collision of internal motivations with external forces,” it seems to appear as if the mutation undergoes external forces it has a more dynamic surface not due just to the external forces but also with the intention and motivation by the architect or designer.
When Lynn talks about a plexus, I’m not too sure if he is referring to a structure that is mutated or reconfigured by the movement and fluctuation of people. Or in general is Lynn describing the form and not the function?
The concept of folding not just structurally but also theoretical makes architecture that much more interesting. It becomes dynamic. However, when designing in terms of buildings must one consider the shell of the building initially, or does the interior of the building come first? If it is pliant in nature and is folded and manipulated, does the interior become part of the exterior or is the exterior then part of the interior?
I thoroughly enjoyed this reading especially the Michael Jackson comment. What also made it interesting was the comparison and multitude use of the base word “pli” and the way it is also part of a means of being folded, however has a complexity in the sense of intensive connections. There were so many words I had no idea what they meant but by searching and understanding the words, it has helped me at least to understand not just the readings but the meaning that goes beyond.
Animation in architecture I understood as a growth and transformation in a design. The birth of an idea that slowly evolves into a more concrete form until the ‘final’ form is reached. Of course nothing last forever and in Lynn’s reading he states that we should not design for permanence. The animation does not end for a building after it’s vacated and just as when we (humans) die our bodies decompose and energy is transferred back to the earth, the same concept should be applied to the materials and deconstruction of a building. The designer is the director and writer of this architectural cinema and is responsible for each frame from beginning to end. The architect must not resist designing the death of his building out of arrogance in thinking the building will live forever and must also remember that denial is the first stage of death. As landscape architects our animation is written into a larger story that is already being told. Our designs must take into consideration the existing animation.
ReplyDeleteI found the particular statement “because of the stigma and fear of releasing control of the design process to software, few architects have attempted to use the computer as a schematic, organizing, and generative medium for design” unusual and unconvincing. Even Lynn states after that statement that this software is a “medium for design” and it’s available to help aid and ease the expression design process.
Blob = a bunch of points connected by a continuous surface
Fully agree with Hany. It isn’t something you think about, even as a landscape architect, even after that design charrette. Designing with the acceptance that your design will transform into something different later on is a powerful, important move.
ReplyDeleteI thought the transition into the subject of blobs was interesting. Talking about the micro-landscape of a boat hull and the macro-landscape of wind and water and how they both form each other. The shape of the boat hull shapes how the water flows around it; the water and wind shape the motion of the boat. Blobs have the ability to “mutually inflect one another and form composite assemblages”. Mutually, reciprocally; this makes me think about grasshopper, one thing affects the other, and vice versa. Maybe that is why we were assigned this reading.
Are we creating blobs?
But why? Why is a blob important, that is my question? Is it just cool, is it the new thing to do, is it justifiable because there can be a mathematical or scientific strategy to the designed “blob”? I kept on reading about this blob… “Rather than an entity being shaped only by its own internal definition, these topological surfaces are inflected by the field in which they are modeled”. Is this the answer to my question? Is Lynn saying that our forms need to come from our animate field, and that the possibility for this is here because of our technology? Is the blob a real tangible object, can it be a tangible object, or is it just a metaphor for how things should be? Am I a blob?
This reading was much easier to read and comprehend than last week’s reading. Although this was still dense at some times because of the fact that it was theory, I got a much better sense to what Greg Lynn was talking about. From what I understand about the new way of thinking in architecture is moving away from deconstructivism and more toward a type of design that blends unlike objects together to become one. Lynn talks about three different ways that the new architecture will work, folding, pliancy and supple. He thinks that the folding part is integrating unrelated elements into a new continuous mixture. This new mixture I think he is talking about the ability for to completely unlike objects to be used in concert with each other and they feel like they are all the same even though you know that the objects are unrelated. In this article unlike last week’s article I believe that Lynn is trying to say that the careful attention to detail should be ignored and instead the larger objects should be the most important part of the design. He says that there should be an active involvement with external events in the folding bending and curving of form. The form is what he says should be the detail of the design I believe. I saw a building one time all though I cannot remember where it was but, this building used different unlike pieces to become the structure and these different pieces are used in concert with each other to create the structural building. These pieces are blended and folded together and showed off as if they were intricate details but yet they are actually all structural.
ReplyDeleteHmm...unconsciously I(and probably others) think of architecture as autonomous from external forces. Structures are masses, occupying space...and as such they need to balance out these forces by counteracting against them (otherwise they deform or collapse). Lynn's advocation of folding as a way of conforming and highlighting external forces seems very superficial, but can make for something pretty theatrical.
ReplyDeleteThe bit about folding as a way of enhancing contextual connections is intriguing, however I also find it very farfetched because again, we are more used to evaluating and percieving buildings within a visual and functional context. The weird form of the blob will most likely catch our attention...not the forces making it that way. We might even misunderstand it as some sort of artistic intention. **headdesk**
For all intents and purposes these readings were cool, but I feel like the process would have little use for anything outside of academic academic and cool installation art. All in all, it felt like Lynn was plugging the second coming of expressionist architecture.
On the plus side though, I think I now have a better idea of how I'm supposed to look at Zaha Hadid buildings.
Well, i guess i should start by saying this: I'm glad that in between writing "The Folded, The Pliant, and The Supple" and "Animate Form" someone told Lynn to start using the language we all agreed on, and to drop that neurotic fixation with seemingly made up words. (Yes I know they are real words, I looked them up. But seriously...)
ReplyDeleteI only had time to flip through "Animate Form", but what I read was an interesting perspective on form and design.
Most of my time was spent failing to fully decipher "The folded, The Pliant, And The Supple." As i began reading, I had just finished writing the list of properties for my material, so as one would assume, many of the things i read i connected directly to the materials we have been assigned for class. For instance, "Smooth mixtures are made up of disparate elements which maintain their integrity while being blended within a continuous field of other free elements." This statement about smooth mixtures sounds almost as if he is describing the properties of concrete, blending the different aggregate within the field on cement and water.
Lynn then writes, "pliancy allows architecture to become involved in complexity through flexibility"...this seems somewhat of an ineffective sentence, no? Doesn't pliancy mean the same thing as flexibility?
"Pliancy implies first an internal flexibility and second a dependence on external forces for self-definition." Here it sounds like he is describing the properties of latex. flexible, but only when acted upon, otherwise retaining its shape.
I like how he describes Shoei Yoh's roof structures being, "neither geometrically exact nor arbitrarily figural." He found a stunning balance between art and utilitarian and completely avoiding decoration.
I also liked looking up pictures of the allied bank tower after he described it (quite well I might add) as, "situating itself within a particular discontinuous locale by cloaking itself in a folded reflected surface." A very poetic way of expressing how the facade of the building functions so well.
Oh, and the MJ reference caught me a little off guard.
Similar to Matt's comment, I think that Lynn provides a contrasted understanding of details and their relevence to architectural form. The details still inform the structure, but they are blanketed by the folding and mixing of the structural systems. In Animate Design, Lynn writes about how the curved line would be derived from a series of connected circles. In The Folded, Pliant and Supple he discusses viscosity and how vicissitude is exegetic, it is an explanation of the contributing internal and external forces. Like latex for example, when stretched over an object it describes the structure of what is underneath but also the qualities of the material and the gravitational snap.
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