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“Why have these essays been assigned together?
1986 1_
Jacques Derrida “Point de folie – Maintenant I’architecture” Essay accompanying the portfolio
Bernard Tschumi, La Case Vide: La Villette 1985 (london: Architectural Association,
1986), essay trans. Kate Linker
What Jacques Derrida calls his double writing (ecriture double) provokes, on the one
hand, an inver!iion of the general cultural domination he everywhere identifies with
Western metaphysics and enacts, on the other hand: a new text that, necessarily,
P~ni<:ipClte!iin the very principles it decon~tru_~~s, but participates as an invasion, releasing the dissonance of the inherited order. In his essay on Bernard Tschumi's La Case Vide- the "folio-folie" that presents the conceptual structure of Tschumi's Parc
(de la Villette- Derrida projects onto architecture the same formulation: I’ architec
t ture double disrupts the entire given architectural system and, j~st for a mome,nt,
~ takes over the field.
i
Architecture theory had already constructed for itself an account
of meaning based on a generalized system an architectural langue – understood as
necessary for the production and intelligibility of architectural events-parole, the
messages, usages, and effects of the generalized code. But the relationship between
langue and parole produces an aporia. The norms and regularities of the language,
its structure, are a product of all the prior architectur.a ..1eve.nt.s..; yet e ..ach event is itself
made possible by the prior structure. There can be no ~!tginary_~v~N that might have
produced the structure – an event comprising, say, a point, a line, and a surface – for
such an event is already structurally distributed and arranged. Neither is the structure
ever present; there are no full, positive elements of meaning but only differentiati
on
and referral to other elements. A point, for example, can function as a signifier only
insofar as it differs from a line and a surface and, moreover, traces those forms, refers
~, 1\ to those forms, which it is not. Thus meaning is not a presence but rather is the effect
, of a generalized economy of absences.
Derrida’s term for this g~~a.b.s.e!1~J.s_ctL@r:qEf~ (differ
ence-differing-deferring), which alludes to the undecidability of this altern’ation
of
structure and event and to the nonoriginary origin of meaning’s infinite play. Meaning
;L is not inexhaustible in the sense t. ha.. t ther.e are infinite possible interpretations; rather
\ meanings are maintained in tb.f..<;![re!:ttofJ.mrogaoi.ng. An analogous term is ~,
which he uses throughout the following essay. “Differance, then, is a structureaii-d a
movement no longer conceivable on the basis of the opposition presence/absence.
Differance is the systema!iC;Ql~LQf differences, of the traces of differences, of the
spacing by means of which elements-ar; related to each other. This spacing is the
simultaneously active and passive … production of the intervals without which the
‘full’ terms would not signify, would not function.'” I Deconstruction ordinarily does its work by locating the moment
in a text where meaning is supposed to be antecedent to differance, exposing the
I
i
untenable metaphysics of that supposition, and reversing the hierarchy. In the in
stance of La Case Vide, however, the architecture’s complex signifying practice is al
ready divided against itself; the undecidability of its meanings (though meaning is
the wrong word) is built into the architecture and its workings. Such a text cannot
be deconstructed, since its repetitions, substitutions, and gaps have already been
“marked” by its author and by the architecture. What Derrida shows, then, is the
text’s exorbitance- not only its effacements, tracings and retracings, but its excesses,
itsburstTngtnrough conceptual repressions.
Derrida graphs the function of architecture as four points, four
traits-traces, four corners of a frame: what he elsewhere terms a parergon.’ Together,
“they translate one and the same postulation: architecture must have a meaning, it
must present it and, through it, signify. The signifying or symbolical value of this
meaning must direct the structure and syntax, the form and function of architecture.
It must direct it from outside, according to a principle (arche), a fundamental or foun
dation, a transcendence or finality (te/os) whose locations are not themselves archi
tectural.” A parergon of architecture is against, above, and beyond the work of(
architecture, but it is not incidental; rather it cooperates in the inside operati~~ of (
architecture from the outside. The logic of the parergon is the logic of th~ment.
It must be convoked because of a lack in the work – its internal indetermiri-acy-that
it comes to frame. The lack that produces the frame is also produced by the frame,
and in the moment, precisely, when the work is considered from the point of view of
architecture. Thus, like differance, architecture is never present as an event (not pres
ent, not even for a moment) but nevertheless can be recovered by a kind of Nachtrag
lichkeit, a deferred action in which architecture is constructed and maintained for a
moment in the work of architecture by what can be called a textual mechanism-
a transcription and a translation.3
One example of this textual mechanism is the graft, inserti!!& 4 _____
M
.__ • –_,_•• ‘ __ ••S=~
~J1~!_~i:>_~Q.yrses .intQ.on~.,as. itsjteIat,i!lJ,!_~n~.~~plo!j~!~~P!!I/~re.eetitionslth(It Iset’ Eisenman I 531-532ensue. “The invention, in this case, consists in crossing ttie–arcFiHecturalmotif with
~
what is most Singular and most parallel in other writings which are themselves drawn
into the said madness, in its plural, meaning photographic, cinematographic, choreo
graphic, and even mythographic writings …. An architectural writing interprets …
events which are marked by photography or cinematography:’ Even the points, lines,
and surfaces are here understood as grafts insofar as each system conflicts with and
is superimposed on the others.
The graft is included in what Derrida calls “a typology of forms
of iteration.”4 In La Case Vide it operates along with other forms of iteration like the
signature (“the maintenant that I speak of will be this, most irreducible, signature”)
whose “authenticity” paradoxically depends on its reiterability – and the performa
tive (“the event that I make happen or let happen by marking it”), whose very produc
tive success depends on its repetition of an already iterable code.s Architecture
maintenant is a signing of the architectural contract (“it does not contravene the char
ter, but rather draws it into another text”), an j!eration_9f.
But Derrida attributes a more generalized disruption to
Tschumi’s text, for its thematic figure, the point, comes to both describe and arrest
the general series to which it belongs and is, therefore, not a theme at all but the
arche-theme behind all the thematic effects. This is the point at which the strains to
sustain architecture’s contract, its promise, its “charter or metaphysical frame” can
http:j!eration_9f.
/ disruptions and disjunctions, maintains the undecidability of its architecture not in
‘polysemousness but in the affirmative power of its infinite generality and unorganiz
able energy. This is Tschumi’s madness (or better, the madness of La Case Vide, for
. such a system cannot have an intending author): “it maintains the dis-jointed per se.”
of reiteration without exhaustion and, importantly, without keeping
in reserve.
A final point. Derrida hints at the nontextual nature of institutions
be involved in architecture or deconstruction: “Deconstructions would
did not first measure themselves against institutions in their solid
their greatest resistance: political structures, levers of economic
the material and phantasmatic apparatuses which connect state, civil society,
bureaucracy, cultural power and architectural education.” But he does not re
solve how deconstruction can reckon with the forces of an extratextual institu
tional
Notes
“Point de folie – Maintenant l’architecture” was reprinted in AA Files 12 (Summer 1986).
1. Jacques Derrida, Positions, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981),
P·27·
2. See Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chi
cago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).
3. According to the Freudian theory of deferred action, precocious sexual stimulation normally
has no psychopathological repercussions at the time of its occurrence, due to the child’s
psychical incapacity to comprehend the act of seduction. With the physiological change of
puberty, however, the mnemic-psychical trace – inscribed in the unconscious as if in an un·
known language – would be transformed (rewritten, reiterated) as trauma and displaced as
symptom in neurosis.
4. Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs,
trans. David B. Allison (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), p. 192.
5. The promise is the standard case of a performative utterance, which constitutes the very act
to which it refers. Derrida points out that for a promise to constitute itself, however, it must
be recognizably a repetition of an iterable model of promising. Ibid., pp. 191-192.
UlRRIDA I 1986 I 571
1 986 Jacques Derrida Point de folie-Maintenant r architecture
Maintenant: 1 this French word will not be translated. Why? For reasons, a whole se
ries of reasons, which may appear along the way, or even at the end of the road.
For here I am undertaking one road or, rather, one course among other possible
and concurrent ones: a series of cursive notations through the Folies of Bernard
Tschumi, from point to point, and hazardous, discontinuous, aleatory.
Why maintenant? I put away or place in reserve, I set aside the
reason to maintain the seal or stamp of this idiom: it would recall the Pare de la
Villette in France, and that a pretext gave rise to these Folies. Only a pretext, no
doubt, along the way-a station, phase, or in a trajectory. Nevertheless, the
pretext was offered in France. In French we say th~t~~hance is offered, but also,
do not forget, to offer a resistance.
2
Maintenant, the word will not flutter like the banner of the moment, it will not intro
duce burning questions: What about architecture today? What are we to think
about the current state of architecture? What is new in this domain? For architecture
no longer defines a domain. Maintenant: neither a modernist Signal nor even a salute
to post-modernity. The posl-S and posters which proliferate (post-structuralism,
(post-modernism, still surrender to the historicist urge. Everything marks an
( era, even the decentering of the subject: It is as ifone again wished
to put a linear succession in order, to periodize, to distinguish between before and
after, to limit the risks of reverSibility or repetition, transformation or permutation:
an ideology of progress.
3
Maintenant: if the word still designates what happens, has just happened, promises
aSV\l~!1 asthrO!lg!Lil!cllit~C!ure, this imminence of the
(just happens, just happened, is just~bo~t to happen) n~’ longer lets itself be inscribed
in the ordered sequence of a history: it is not a fashion, a period or an era. The
maintenant [just now] does not remain a stranger to history, of course, but the rela
tion would be different. And if this happens to us, we must be prepared to receive
these two words. On the one hand, it does not happen to a constituted us, to a
human subjectivity whose essence would be arrested and would then find itself
affected by the history of this thing called architecture. We appear to ourselves only
through an experience of spacing which is already marked by architecture. What
happens through architecture both constructs and instructs this us. The latter finds
itself engaged by architecture before it becomes the subject of it: master and pos
sessor. On the other hand, the imminence of what happens to us maintenant an
nounces not only an architectural event but, more particularly, a writing of space,
a mode of spacing which makes a place for the event. If Tschumi’s work indeed
describes an architecture of the events it is not only in that it constructs places in
which something should happen or to make the construction itself be, as we say,
an event. This is not what is essential. The dimension of the event is subsumed in
the very structure of the architectural apparatus: sequence, open series, narrative,
the cinematic, dramaturgy, choreography.
4
]s~~rc~i!ecty~~,< not in the sense of what would finally allow us to arrive at meaning, but
i”‘If.’fJ’C,”” to it, to meaning, to the meaning of meaning. And so-and this
is the event-what happens to it through an event which, no longer precisely or
falling into the domain of meaning, would be intimately linked to some
like madness rIa folie].
5
Not madness [Ia folie], the allegorical hypostaSis of Unreason, non-sense, but the
madnesses [les We will have to account with this The folies, then, Bernard
Tschumi’s folies. Henceforth we will speak of them through metonymy and in a
metonymically metonymic manner, since, as we will see, this carries itself
away, it has no means within itself to stop itself, any more than the number of Folies
in the Pare de la Villette. Folies: it is first of all the name, a proper name in a way, and
a signature. Tschumi names in this manner the pOint-grid which distributes a non
finite number of elements in a space which it in fact spaces but does not fill. Meton
ymy, then, since folies, at designates only a part, a series of parts, precisely the
weave of an ensemble which also includes lines and surfaces, a “sound
track” and an “image-track.” We will return to the function assigned to this multi
plicity of red points. Here, let us note only that it maintains a metonymic relation
to the whole of the Parco Through this proper name, in fact, the folies are a common
denominator, the “largest common denominator” of this “programmatic decoIl
struction.” But, in addition, the red point of each folie remains divisible in turn,
a point without a point, offered up in its articulated structure to substitutions or
combinatory permutations which relate it to other folies as much as to its own parts.
Open point and closed point. This double metonymy becomes abyssal when it de
termines or overdetermines what opens this proper name (the “Folies” of Bernard
to the vast. semantics of the concept of madness, tbe great name or com
mon dellominator of all that happens to when it leaves itself: alienates and
dissociates itself without ever been exposes itself to the outside and
spaces itself out in vvhat is not itself: not the semantics but first of all, the asemantics
of Folies.
6
The folies, then, tbese folies in every sense-for once we can say that they are not on the
road to ruin, the ruin of defeat or nostalgia. do nor amount to the “absence of
the work” -that fate of madness In the classical of wh ich lioucauJt speaks. Instead,
make up a work, put into How? How can we think that the work
can possibly mointain itself in this madness? How can we think the mainlenant of the
architectural work? Through a certain adventme of the we are corning to it,
maintenant the work-maintenant is the very instant, t.he point of its implo
sion. The folies put into a general they draw into it everything
that, until maintenant, seems to have architecture meaning. More precisely, every-
that seems to have given architecture over to meanin2. Thev deconstruct first
of all, bu I not only. the semantics of architecture.
7
Let us never that there is an architecture of architecture. Down even to its
archaic fC)[lI1dation the most fundamental concept of architecture has been constructed.
This naturalized architect me is hequeathed to us: we inhahit it, it inhahits us, we
think it destined f()I habitation, and i.t is no an object lIS at alL But we
must in it an a construction, a monument. It did not fall from the
not even if it informs a scheme of relations to the sky, the
tbe human and the divine. This architecture of architecture has a history, it is
historical through and tbrough. Its heritag(‘ inaugurates the intimacy of our econ
omy, the law of our hearth (oHws). our familial, religiOUS and “oikonomy,”
all the of birth and death, stadium, agora, square.
goes right through us [noliS transitl to the point that we forget its very
we take it f()[ nature. It is common sense itsel f.
8
The concept of architecture is itself an inhabited constructum, a which compre
hends us even before we could submit it to thought. Certain invariables remain, con
stant. all the mutations of architecture. Impassable, imperturbabJe, an
axiomatic traverses trw whole history of architecture. An axiomatic. that is to say, an
ensemble of fundamental and evaluations. This bierar
has fixed itself in stone; henceforth, it informs the of social space. VVhat
are tbese invariables;> I will artificial charter of four traits,
: let us say, rather, of four translate and the same
\ (liTe must have [J meaning, it mLlst present it through it, Signify. The or
ical value of this must direct the structure and syntax, the form and function
of arcbitecture. It must direct it from according a principle , a funda
mental or fClUndatioIl, a transcendence or finality whose locations are not
themselves architecturaL The anarclIitec:tural of this semanticism from which,
four points of invariallce derive:
of
men
other arts)
must be dwelling, the lavl! of oikos, the economy of
pi~sence which distinct from the
the architectural work seems to have
RRiDA 1986 I 573
been destined for the presence of men and gods. The arrangement,
and investment of locations must be measured against this economy.
still alludes to it when he bomelessness (Heim[Jtlosigkeit) as the symptom
of onto-theology more of modern technology. Behind dw hons
crisis he encourages liS to reflect properly on the real distress poverty and
destillltion of dwelling itself (die Not des . Mortals must first learn
to cJ\;vell das WiJhnen erst lernen miissen), listen to what calls them to dwe! L This is
a deconstruction, but rather a call repeat the very fundamentals of the
architecture that we inhabit that we should Jearn again how to inhabit, the
of its meaning. of course, if the folies think through and dislocate this
they should not in either to the jll bilat ion of modern technology, or to the
maniacal mastery of its powers. That would be a new turn in the same metaphys
ics. Hence the diffic]] lty of what,
Centered and hierarchized. the architectural had to fall in lme
the anamnesis of the origin and the of the foundation. Not
the time of irs foundation on the ground of the earth, bl.lt also since its
f()umlation, the institution which commemorates the of the
heroes or fCJUnding Despite appearances, this religious or political mem .
ory, tllis historicism, has not deserted architecture. Modern architecture retains :/
nostalgia for lt IS Its to be a guardian. An hierarchizing nostal
architecture will matericllize the hierarchy in SlOne or vmod , it is a
of the sacred (hieros) and the JJrincipJe (arche), an mhi -hieratics.
subscribes to all
service. This
which is true.
that of the coherent
a network
on
ory and criticism of architecture, from the most to the most triviaL
Such evaluation inscribes the hierarchy in a as well as in the space of a
formal distribution of values. But this architectonics of invariable points also
an of what is called Western culture, far its arcbitecture. Hence
the contradiction, the double bind or antinomy which at once animates and dis
nubs this history. On the one hand, this general architectonics effurfs or exceeds the
of it is valid for other arts and of expCl’i
ence as welL On the other hand, forms its most
ymy; it gives it its most solid objective suhstance. By I do
not mean logical coherence, which all dimensions of human
in the same network: there is no of architecture without inter
or even economiC, religious, political,
cree. Rut I also mean duration, hardness, the mOllumental
mi neral or suhsistence, the of tradition. T-Ience the resiswnce: the
resistance of mat.erials as much as of consciOllsnesses and uflconsciollses which
instale this architecture as last fortress of metaphysics. Resistance and trans
ference. Any consequent deconstructioIl would he if it did not take
account of this resistance and this transference, it would do little if it did not go
after architecture as much as architectonics. To go after it: not in order to attack,
,
or dc-route it, to eriticize or it. Rather, in order to think it in
fact, to detach iLsdf to thought vvhich beyond
the lheort~m-alld becomes a work in its turn.
9
M(jintenant we “,-ill take the measure the folies of ,vhat otbers would call the immea
surable hybris of Bernard Tschumi and of what it offers to our thought. These /()lies
destabilize meaning, the of the ensemble of this pow
erful architectonics. They put question, dislocate, destabilize deconstruct the
edifIce of this configuration. It will be said that are “madness” in this. For in a
which is without aggression, without the destructive drive that would still
a reactive affect within the hierarchy, do battle with the very of
architectural meaning, as it has been bequeathed to us and as we still inhabit it. \Ve
should not avoid the issue: if this over what in the West is
called do these folies not raze Do they not lead back to the desert of
of architectural where this writing wmdd
aesthetic aura, fundamentals, hierarchical
short, in a prose made of abstract, neutral,
volumes?
and engage their affirmation be-
this ultimatelv annihiiatillQ. secretlv nihilistic renetitiol1 of archi
maintain, renew and
reinscribe architecture. They revive, an energy which was infinitelv anaes
buried in a common grave
this: the charter or metaphYSical frame whose
has just been sketched \vas already, one could say, the end of
of ends” the figure of death.
This charter had come to arrall’U ttw worK, It 1I1100ses on nurms
or meanings which were extrinsic, if not accidental. made its attributes into an
essence: fi>rrnal beauty, filulitv. utility, Ull<..L1Ul"Ul~1l1, inhahitable valli e, its
tbe services, so many nonarchitectural or meta-architect.ural
architecture mailllenant-what J keep referrinQ to ill this
way, using a paleonym, so as to maintain a l11llffied
these alien norms on the work, tht~ fillies return architecture, to what archi
tecture, since the very eve of its origin, should have The m(Jin!cnallt that J speak
of will be this, most It does not contravene the but
rather draws it into another text, it even subscribes to, and directs others to subscribe
to, wllat we will again later, a contract, another play the trait, of attractIon
and contraction.
These
struction,”
A that I do not make without caution and
Tschumi al ways talks about” deconstruction Irecon
the folie and the generation of its cube
mal combinations transkmnational relations). What is in question in The
Manhattan Tramcripts is the invention of “new relations, in which the traditional
components of architecture are broken down and reconstructed other
axes.” Without nostalgia, the most act of memory. Nothing, here, that
nihilistic gesture which would fulfill a certain theme of
of values aimed at all unaesthetic, LlIlinllabitable, unusable,
architecture, an architecture left vacallt after the retreat of
and men. And the folies-like la folie in·are anything bill anarchic
RRIDA I 1986 I 575
chaos. Yet, witbout proposing a “new order,” locate the architectural vvork
in another where, at least in its
these external
its essential impetus, it will no
Tsclmll1i’s “first” concem will no
be to space as a function or in view of economic,
or teelmo-utilitarian norms, These norms will be taken into
will find themselves sllbordinated rein scribed in one
and in a space which they no longer command in tbe final instarlCe.
“architecture towards its limits,” a will be made for
will be destined for a “llse,” with its own
scientitlc ane! finalitIes. We \’\,UI say more later about its powers
“attraction.” All of this answers to a program of transbrmations or
which these external norms no hold the final word.
will not preSided over the sillce Tschumi has folded them
Yes, f()lded. What is the I a pmist or integratist obsession. it to its inalienahle presence, a presence which, which would thus to reconcile a formalism and a scman and even , a narrative mOIltage of great comnlpy captured, in any case always mobilized in a passage writing another, . Neither architecture nor anarchitec· am aware of a murmur: but doesn’t event you speak unique ip their isn’t it what takes each time not in a church or takes place when, for the eucharistic evenl goes [tranlir] church, on the body of stone, this time in the movement of its Bernard Tschumi, Pare
10
Therefore, we can no longer speak of a properly architectural moment, the hieratic permutation or substitutions. In the folies of which we speak, on the traverses: voyage, trajectory, translation, transference. Not with the object (cinema, botanical garden, video workshop, library, skating rink, cubes-leaves opportunity for chance, formal invention. combinatory transforma user or the architecturaltheorist, but to whoever engages, in turn, in architectural
de La Villette, Paris, mil 11& .. – 11&
I 577
. 2~ motions by giving rise to it would receive from this other spacing 11 supplementary illustrations, preparatory or pedagogical notes-hors reminds me of Littre’s suspicion. Regarding the second of the 12 what The Manhattan Transcripts and the Folies of La Villette urge us towards is necessary implementations. Not deconstruction itself, since there never was such a “‘~llJA I 1986
; and ideologies. concepts or texts. in the traditional sense of the term. Deconstruc the old and new. All these are so many forces which harden or and involves transactions with the State. This is the case here.
13 crosses of furthermore. such
does not move through an texture; it weaves this texture. it tillie” holds out a net, A weave the threads of a chain,
of matrices or cells whose transformations will never let themselves be or rather anachromies or aphoristical
gaps, t.he point of point de folie = no together wbat it has Resemblance and chromoarallhic reminder
a necessary part in it. For it suspends it in this movement, brings it to a halt. but as folie. Arrest of folie: settles the question, but which decree. which arrest-and whicll arrests division; divisiO!l and individuation which no lom’er pertains to the domain of
We are
through one more
14
after a detour. We must pass
non-coincidence. Bm who would ever have built in this
manner) Wbo would have counted on only the in dis- or de-) No work results 1986 579
Without tbe deconstructive affirma would be both the task and the wager, preoccupa· dissociation ceived norms, tbe economic powers of architectonic, the mastery of the system, The red of folies is tbe focus of this dissociated space,” 15 metonymy. These points mil!ht fral’menr. but would not define understand how it also without
order to what can bind a double bind to
On the one hand, the concentrates, folds back towards within a which is also autonomous, it fascinates and same time. magnet attraction through its very punctuality, the of instantaneous IIlainlenant to ofiolie the attractions of the Pare, useful or their program, Bound energy and semantic Hellce, and deviation of the folies. Each point is a it rupture (lnd the relation to the other, which is itself structured as both attraction and DERRIDA 1986 I 581
interruption, interference and difference: a relation without relation. What is con (Encyclopedie, §256-257). Here I permit myself to refer to my text, “Ousia et mark the interruption of this dialectic. point from outside, it is because the point is both divisible and indivisible. It appears that is bestowed on tile geometrical point. Opened inside to a void that articulating that are more than pieces-pieces of a
game, theatre pieces, pieces of an “a-partment” piece, roomJ at once places and to take
16 here by an architectural pragmatics (for example, the value of presence, of tile ( denominator” or “hearth,” to other points of rupture as well, but first of all to the This Other never presents itself; he is not present, maintenant. He can he represented users, representatives of domains of cultural domination, and here, in particular, of the promise, who first answers for the the to-come of an event which would 7 Overlaid by the entire history of architecture and laid open to the hazards of a future nor an ethics of architecture. Not even a narrative, although it opens this But if it presents neither theory, nor ethics, nor politics, nor \f t1′ Notes upholding; from se maintenir, v., remaining, lasting; from main tenant, the hand that holds. In general, the French spelling of the word folie has been kept in this translation, according 2. Trame, Fr., n., woof, weft, web, thread; also plot. conspiracy; (phot. engr.) screen. INTRODUCTION and the Supple / Greg Lynn
In 1993, Greg Lynn guest-edited an issue of Architectural Design
dedicated to an emerging movement in architecture: folding.
Lynn, a Los Angeles-based architect/educator with a background
in philosophy and an attraction to computer-aided design, was
the ideal person to organize this publication and, in effect, define
the fold in architecture, a concept that generated intense interest
during the remainder of the decade.
In his contributory essay, ”l\rchitectural Curvilinearity: The
Folded, the Pliant and the Supple,” Lynn ties together a variety
of sources-including the work of Gilles Deleuze, Rene Thom,
cooking theory, and geology-to present an alternative to
existing architectural theory and practice. He states that since
the mid-1960s architecture has been guided by the notion of
contradiction, whether through attempts to formally embody
heterogeneity or its opposite; in short, postmodernism and decon
structivism can be understood as two sides of the same coin. Yet,
for Lynn, “neither the reactionary call for unity nor the avant-garde
dismantling of it through the identification of internal contradic
tions seems adequate as a model for contemporary architecture
and urbanism.” Rather, he offers a smooth architecture (in both a
visual and a mathematic sense) composed of combined yet dis
crete elements that are shaped by forces outside the architectural
discipline, much as diverse ingredients are folded into a smooth
mixture by a discerning chef. This new architecture, what Lynn
calls a pliant, flexible orchitecture, exploits connections between
elements within a design instead of emphasizing contradictions
or attempting to erase them all together. Of equal importance
is that this architecture is inextricably entwined with external
forces, both cultural and contextual. Architects deploy various
.. ,JJiJIIIiIIIIliii.
,j'”‘ngies-including a reliance on topological geometry and
“‘u”al software and technologies-in the creation of their designs,
II,,’ Ihe resulting works tend to be curvilinear in form and inflected In addition to Lynn’s essay, Folding in Architecture, as the
A/. hitectural Design issue was titled, included other texts by fig
,,·os such as Deleuze, Jeffrey Kipnis, and John Rajchman, and
”’presentative projects by architects like Peter Eisenman, Frank
( inhry, and Philip Johnson. This list of distinguished collaborators
(“fl’ weight to the publication, intimating that the phenomenon
“I the fold was already entrenched within architectural design.
If Indeed it was, Folding in Architecture cemented the shift in
(lfchitectural thought by identifying and highlighting this new
mchitecture of smoothness. The importance of Lynn’s special
.,sue of Architectural Design was underscored by its reprinting in
2004 as “a historical document,”1 complete with new introductory
nssays analyzing and situating the original publication as a guid
Ing force within twenty-first-century architectural discourse.2
Notes
Helen Castle, “Preface,” in Folding in Architedure, ed. Greg Lynn 2 See Greg Lynn, “Introdudion,” in Folding in Architecture, 8-13; and 30 31 GREG LYNN
ARCHITECTURAL
CURVILINEARITY:
THE FOLDED, THE PLIANT
AND THE SUPPLE
First appeared in Architectural Design 63, no. 3/4 (1993): 8-15·
Courtesy ofGreg
For the last two decades, beginning with Robert Venturi’s
Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture,’ and Colin Rowe heterogeneous, fragmented and conflicting formal systems. texts in formal conflicts. When comparingVenturi’s Complexity
and Contradiction or Learning from Las vegas with Wigley and identify at least one common theme. continuous, fragmented, heterogeneous, and diagonal formal ,nult from a logic which tends to identify the potential con I”, Ihe contradictions within contemporary culture. From the ‘hI’ National Gallery, Peter Eisenman’s Wexner Center, Bernard II ad iction, architecture represents difference in violent formal Contradiction has also provoked a reactionary response .1Il’hitecturallanguages that can stand against heterogeneity. mates, materials, traditions or technologies (Regionalism). Ilt’gionalism conventionally repress the cultural and contextual ditions from which they proceed to evolve either a homogeneous GREG LYNN 33 In response to architecture’s discovery of complex, dis Smoothing does not eradicate differences but incorporates3
free intensities through fluid tactics of mixing and blending. Both pliancy and smoothness provide an escape from the 34 ‘ ARCHITECTURAL CURVILINEARITY
pn””ihlc to neither repress the complex relations of differences If there is a single effect produced in architecture by folding, Folding employs neither agitation nor evisceration but a GREG LYNN 35 A folded mixture is neither homogenous, like whipped heterogeneous. In both cooking and geology, there is no pre through ajoint manipulation. Disparate elements can be incor including fulling: ferently, as an anti-fabric. It implies no separation of threads, What becomes entangled are the microscales of the fibres. An space of fabric (it is in principle infinite, open and uninhibited it does not assign fixed or mobile elements but distributes a The two characteristics of smooth mixtures are that they
are composed of disparate unrelated elements and that these are intricate, they affiliate local surfaces of elements with one tions. The heterogeneous elements within a mixture have no
proper relation with one another. Likewise, the external force individual elements control or prediction.
Viscous Mixtures
Unlike an architecture of contradictions, superpositions and 36 ARCHITECTURAL CURVILINEARITY
unpH’dicted connections with contextual, cultural, program
nutl ito, structural and economic contingencies by vicissitude. trt'(IUcntly in the service of a tactical cunning.9 Vicissitude is trAry nor predictable but seem to be accidental. These events “”Il’rnal forces. For instance, when an accident occurs the .” I hese events occur by vicissitude; a confluence of particular (If local forces is altered the nature of the event will change. In alludes” is linked with Gregory Bateson’s “continuing plateau “hie events through intensity. These occurrences are difficult to prcssure exerted on those elements by external contingencies,
Nl’ither the intrications nor the forces which put them into rela hy vicissitude develop identity through the exploitation of local Viscous fluids develop internal stability in direct propor GREG LYNN 37 behave with two types of viscidity. They exhibit both internal Viscous space would exhibit a related cohesive stabil Curving Away from Deconstructivism
Along with a group of younger architects, the projects that best 38 ARCHITECTURAL CURVILINEARITY
Just as many of these architects have already been inscribed Already in several Deconstructivist projects are latent sug GREG LYNN 39 emerged from within the house.”” The house is seen to provoke of cohesion. ally portrayed as a collision of the conflicting geometries of the 40 . ARCHITECTURAL CURVILINEARITY
multiple organisations simultaneously. In Eisenman’s project Immersed in Context
The contradictory architecture of the last two decades has This recent work may be described as being compliant; in folded, pliant and supple in order to incorporate their GREG lYNN 41 external influences into a pliant system. Distinct from a whole In both Learning from Las Vegas and Deconstructivist curvilinear logics.
The Supple and Curvilinear
1 supple\adj [ME souple, fr OF, fr L supplic-, supplex
submissive, suppliant, lit, bending under, fr sub +plic 42 . ARCHITECTURAL CURVILINEARITY
to the point of obsequiousness b: readily adaptable or
responsive to new situations 2a: capable of being bent or
folded without creases, cracks or breaks: PLIANT b: able to
perform bending or twisting movements with ease and
grace: LIMBER c: easy and fluent without stiffness or
awkwardness. 14
At an urban scale, many of these projects seem to be some Anexact geometries, as described by Edmund Husserl,15
nrc those geometries which are irreducible yet rigorous. These GREG LYNN 43 http:awkwardness.14 Jeffrey Kipnis has argued convincingly that Peter Eisenman’s In a similar fashion Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum 44 . ARCHITECTURAL CURVILINEARITY
!Cullery and support space with the scale of the pedestrian and The unforeseen connections possible between differenti The Pliant and Bent
pJiable\adj [Me fr plieirto bend, fold-more at PLY] 1a: supple
enough to bend freely or repeatedly without breaking b: yield
ing readily to others: COMPLAISANT 2: adjustable to varying
conditions: ADAPTABLE, syn see PLASTIC, ant obstinate.17
John Rajchman, in reference to Gilles Deleuze’s book Le pli GREG LYNN 45 http:obstinate.17 advertising through contradiction, compliancy involves these Pliant systems are easily bent, inclined or influenced. An A plexus is a multi-linear network of interweavings, inter 46 ARCHITECTURAL CURVILINEARITY
bet described with rigorous probability. Geometric systems have Alternative types of transformation
I ,Iscounting the potential ofearlier geometric diagrams ofprob Both Rudolf Wittkower-in his analysis of the Palladian Like Rowe, Thompson is interested in developing a math GREG LYNN 47 dynamic and fluid set of geometric relations. The deformations than continuous evolution. ing and film industry may already have something in common 48 . ARCHITECTURAL CURVILINEARITY
surgeries and his surface through skin bleachingand lightening. A similar comparison might be made between the liq GREG LYNN . 49 http:whole.23 http:system.22 multiple between states are possible. Gehry’s and Johnson’s Folding and Other Catastrophes for Architecture
3 fold vb [ME folden, fro OEfoaldanj akin to OHGfaldan to part, 2: to reduce the length or bulk of by doubling over,
3: to clasp together: EN1WINE, 4: to clasp or embrace
50 ‘ ARCHITECTURAL CURVILINEARITY
closely: EMBRACE, 5: to bend (as a rock) into folds, 6: to
incorporate (a food ingredient) into a mixture by repeated
gentle overturnings without stirring or beating, 7: to bring
to an end.24
Philosophy has already identified the displacement presently Despite potential protestations to the contrary, it is more GREG LYNN 51 either Venturi’s decorated shed or the more recent conflicting “Topology considers superficial structures susceptible to These geometries bend and stabilise with viscosity under Thorn’s nets were developed to describe catastrophic events. tude is replaced by a geometry of multiple probable relations. 52 . ARCHITECTURAL CURVILINEARITY
As t he topological surface folds over and into itself multiple pos If there is a single dominant effect of the French word pli, “mooth systems are highly differentiated by cusps or zones of GREG LYNN 53 this manner presents a space of co-presence with multiple adja Before the introduction of either Deleuze or Thom to archi Like the John Hancock Building, the Allied Bank Tower 54 ‘ ARCHITECTURAL CURVILINEARITY
I’r(‘dator II, a similar alien is capable of disappearing into both Like Henry Cobb, Peter Eisenman introduces a fold as a GREG LYNN 55 perimeter of the site and pushed through the typological bars. 56 . ARCHITECTURAL CURVILINEARITY
und the lateral structural walls is such a space of mixture and With structure itself, Chuck Hoberman is capable of So far in architecture, Deleuze’s, Cobb’s, Eisenman’s and Despite the differences between these practices, they share GREG LYNN 57 manners which are: submissive, suppliant, adaptable, con and incorporation. The attitude which runs throughout this which are externally plied. Perhaps, in this regard only, there anexact forms and topological geometries primarily-can be formal integrity through deformations which do not internally as these gain strength through flexible connections that occur speak of the forms of folding autonomously, it is important to affinities of these projects result from their pliancy and ability to asked in different ways by the group of architects and theorists found to be plied?
58 ARCHITECTURAL CURVILINEARITY
Notes Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (New
York: Museum of Modern Art Papers on Architecture, 1966).
Two ideas were introduced in this text that seem extremely relevant
to contemporary architecture: typological deformation and the
continuity between objects and contexts. Both of these concepts
receded when compared with the dominant ideas of collision cities
and the dialectic of urban figure/ground relationships. Curiously, they
illustrate typological deformations in both Baroque and early modern
architecture: “However, Asplund’s play with assumed contingencies
and assumed absolutes, brilliant though it may be, does seem to
involve mostly strategies of response; and, in considering problems
of the object, it may be useful to consider the admittedly ancient
technique of deliberately distorting what is also presented as the
ideal type. So the reading of Saint Agnese continuouslyfluctuates
between an interpretation of the building as object and the building as
texture . .. Note this type of strategy combines local concessions with a
declaration of independence from anything local and specific.” 77.
See Sanford Kwinter and Jonathan Crary, “Foreword,” Zone 6:
Incorporations (New York: Urzone Books, 1992), 12-15.
.1 (rilles Deleuze, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia
(Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, 1987),478.
Mark Wigley and Philip Johnson, DeconstructivistArchitecture: The
Museum ojModernArt, New York (Boston: Little, Brown, 1988), 15.
” Marion Cunningham, The Fannie Farmer Cookbook, 13th edition (New
York: AlfredA. Knopf, 1990),41-47.
Deleuze, Plateaus, 475-6.
H An application ofvicissitude to Kipnis’ logic ofundecidability and
weak form might engender a cunning logic of non-linear affiliations.
This seems apt given the reference to both undecidability and
weakness in the definition of vicissitudes.
II Ann Bergren’s discussions of the metis in architecture is an example
of cunning manipulations of form. For an alternative reading of these
tactics in Greek art also see Jean-Pierre Vernant.
I II Deleuze, Plateaus, 256.
I 1 This concept has been developed by Leibniz and has many resonances
with Sanford Kwinter’s discussions of biological space and epigenesis
GREG LYNN 59 as they relate to architecture and Catherine Ingraham’s logic of the
swerve and the animal lines of beasts of burden.
12 Wigley, DeconstructivistArchitecture, 22.
13 See “0-0” by Robert Somol in the WexnerCenterfor the VisualArts,
special issue ofArchitectural Design (London: Academy Editions,
1990). Company, 1977), 1170 ofGeometry:An Introduction, trans. Jacques Derrida (Lincoln, Neb.:
University of Nebraska Press, 1989).
16 See Fetish, ed. Sarah Whiting, Edward Mitchell, and Greg Lynn (New
York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1992), 158-173.
17 Webster’s, 883. complexifications ofurban space.” John Rajchman, “Perplications:
On the Space and Time of Rebstock Park,” in Unfolding Frankfurt
(Berlin: Ernst &Sohn Verlag, 1991), 21.
19 Asimilar exchange, across disciplines through geometry, occurred
in France in the mid-18th century with the development ofprobable
geometries. Initially there was a desire to describe chance events
with mathematical precision. This led to the development of a
geometric model that subsequently opened new fields of study in professional gambler Marquis de Chevalier influenced Comte de
Buffon to develop the geometric description of the Needle Problem.
This geometric model of probability was later elaborated in three
dimensions by the geologist Dellese and became the foundation for
nearly all of the present day anatomical descriptions that utilise serial
transactions: including CAT scan, X-Ray, and PET technologies. For
a more elaborate discussion of these exchanges and the impact of
related probable and anexact geometries on architectural space refer
to my [A. Krista Sykes] forthcoming article inNYMagazine no. 1 (New
York: Rizzoli International, 1993). (New York: WWNorton, 1971). (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1976).
60 . ARCHITECTURAL CURVILINEARITY
l1. For an earlier instance of discontinuous development based on
environmental forces and co-evolution, in reference to dynamic
variation, see William Bateson, Materialsfor the Study ofVariation:
Treated with Especial Regard to Discontinuity in the Origin ofSpecies
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1894).
l.l Erwin Panofsky has provided perhaps the finest example of this kind
of heterogeneous smoothness in his analyses of Egyptian statuary and
the Sphinx in particular: “three different systems ofproportion were
employed-an anomaly easily explained by the fact that the organism
in question is not a homogeneous but a heterogeneous one.” l;, In Stan Allen’s introduction to the work of Douglas Garofalo 1992) a strategy of camouflage is articulated which invests surfaces
with alternatives to the forms and volumes they delimit. The
representation of other known figures is referred to as a logic of
plumage. For instance, a butterfly wing representing the head of a bird l(, This suggests a reading of Michael Hays’ text on the early Mies van der
Rohe Friedrichstrasse Tower [unbuilt] as a tactic of disappearance by
proliferating cacophonous images of the city. Hays’ work on Hannes
Meyer’s United Nations Competition Entry is perhaps the most critical
in the reinterpretation of functional contingencies in the intensely
involved production of differentiated, heterogeneous yet continuous GREG LYNN 61 ZAHA RADm ARCHITECTS, BEUING
CENTRAL BUSINESS DISTRICT COM
PE TITION PROPOSAL, 2010. STUDIES
OF FORMAL MUTATIONS. ALL IMAGES
COURTESY ZAHA RADIO ARCHITECTS.
Patri!? Schumacher
Editor’s Note: This text is Pararnetricisrn It’s great to be at SCI-Arc. I had two great days to see what’s A comprehensive unified theory of and for architecture 63 you might be saying and doing things that don’t gel, don’t No one has attempted a unified theory for architecture brainstorming, and freewheeling experimentation, new pro So, to raise some curiosity about this idea, let me discuss Thesis one is that the phenomenon of architecture can be Thesis four states there is no architecture without theory. 64 Winter 2011 65 – the autonomy to adapt to an environment and to stay rel I also discovered that only by differentiating the avant Thesis ten suggests that in a society without a control Thesis 16 suggests that avant-garde styles are designed Thesis 17: Aesthetic values encapsulate a condensed for moral sensibilities. I am arguing, for instance, that mini Thesis 19: Architecture depends on its medium enor reality, there is a comoel1lng medium you would never be able to convince find those that are productive and viable and that allow you to 66 Log 21 Winter 2011
projects into a distant future, or to coalesce the enormous 67
ZAHA HADID ARCHITECTS, BEIJING
CENTRAL BUSINESS DISTRICT COMPE
TITION PROPOSAL, 2010. ZAHA RADID ARCHITECTS, BEIJING
CENTRAL BUSINESS DISTRICT COMPE
TITION PROPOSAL, 2010. STUDIES
OF FORMAL MUTATIONS.
in a coordinated effort. Architecture, of course, with its One more thesis, Thesis 23: Radical innovation presupposes ***
Now I want to talk a little about the theoretical sources that 68 Log 21
1980s, I looked at Marxism and historical materialism as the In my search for a credible theory of architecture and 69Winter 2011 contracts, phone calls, emails: communications, upon com Luhmann’s philosophy of history differs from both Marx’s This is Luhmann’s picture of society, which I very briefly Just a few more points about what that might mean. 70 Log 21
mean that these systems become autonomous and adaptive to liberalization of the economy, etc. tems he realized that despite their differences – they share We can identify in every function system a so-called lead Winter 2011 71 of price versus value: price is the internal reference; value is Let me show a few pictures of MAXXI in Rome as a *** So let me define parametricism. First of all, a conceptual 72 Log 21
equilibrium and more freedom that moved these figures from 73
ZAHAHADID ARCHITECTS, MAXXI: MUSEUM OF XXI CENTURY ARTS,
ROME, 1998-2009. PUBLIC PLAZA AT
ENTRY. PHOTO: IWAN BUN.
Winter 2011 ZAHA RADID ARCHITECTS, MAXXI:
MUSEUM OF XXI CENTURY ARTS, ROME, 1998-2009. PHOTO: IWAN BAAN.
‘” ‘” ‘” Winter 201174 Log 21
problems and trying to solve these problems by means of We can think of the history of architecture in terms of It’s important to give a conceptual definition of para 7S ZAHA RADIO ARCHITECTS, NYC 2012
OLYMPIC VILLAGE COMPETITION PRO
POSAL, NEW YORK, 2004. BIRD’S-EYE
VIEW AND PERSPECTIVE.
functions and program. Any.reri()u.r style must take a posi Postmodernism and deconstructivism celebrated collage, We are trying to create a second nature, a complex var The second positive principle, or dogma, which all of you 76 Log 21
will demand of you as students, is differentiation. If you are Once you have a series of these internally differentiated The principles of parametricism, in terms of its heuris Winter 2011 77 cism and self-criticism of project development and project Functional heuristics. There are some taboos in terms of Clearly, parametric systems or techniques could be used 78
PATRIK SCHUMACHER IS A DIRECTOR
OF ZAHA HADm ARCHITECTS AND
PROFESSOR AT INNSBRUCK UNIVER
SITY. HE IS ALSO CO-DIRECTOR OF
THE DESI AT THE ARCHITECTURAL ASSOCIATION
SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE, LONDON.
Winter 2011 change at a certain threshold. This is much more prone to This emphasis on differentiation, the amplification of de The projects now coming out of the office show the rich If we look at the history of parametricism, in fact it’s the 79
its own the immanence of its ec01l .
!lon-mimetic and refers to itself. This autonomy of
tici.sm their extremes, ‘Nould fulfill the metaDhvsics it DIetended to dc-
construct. The invention, in this case, consists in
with what is most and most
selves drawn into tbe said madness, in its
Transcripls demonstrated (the same is true,
which mvtholoQies contracted or efbced
rable” monument. An architectural writing
of active violent, interpretation)
m(Jrked or Marked:
from t() allOlher, from a
ture: transarchitectme. It bas it out with ofiers its work to
users, believers or dwellers, to aesthetes or consumers. Jnstead, it
appeals the other to invent, in turn, the event, comign or
advanced by an advance made at the other –and mmntenant architecture.
which reinvents architect.ure in a ,cries of onces” which are always
a temple, or even in a political in them, but rather 05 them,
them, tt)I example, each Mass when the of Christ, , when the
body the King or of the nation presents or annOUllces itself) Why not, if at
ici, mCiinrennnl Ihere, now I. or when a date, seal, the trace of the other are
impassability of the monument, this hyle-morphic complex that is given once and
for alL permitting no trace to appear on its body because it afforded no chance of
contrary, the event undoubtedly undergoes this trial of the monumental moment;
however, it inscribes it, as in a series of As its name indicates, an
of a final presentation, a face-to-face with the thing itself, nor in order to complete
an odyssey of consciousness, the phenomenology of mind as an architectural
step. The route the folies is undoubtedly prescribed, from point to
to the extent that the pOint-grid counts on a program of experiences and new
But the structure of the grid’ and of each cube-for these points are
-J tion, wandering. opp()rtullity is not given to the inhabitant or the believer, the
1982-1983
~ri~:)without reservation, whichl~.£llie.sap.l~y”e,I!!iY~ r~.~ing,~he restlessness of
a’W1lOle culture and the body’s signature. This body would no longer be con
tent to wulk, circulate, stroll around in a place or on paths, but would transform its
the invention of its gestures.
The folie does not stop: either in the hieratic monument, or in the circular path. Nei
ther impassibility nor pace. Seriality inscribes itself in stone, iron or wood, but this
seriality does not stop there. And it had begun earlier. The series of trials (experiments
or artist’s proofs) that are naively called essays, photographs, models. films
or writings (for what is together for a while in this
belon£s to the of the folies: folies at work. We can no give them the value
d’oeuvre, in or the equivalent of theatrical rehearsals. No-and thiS is what ap
pears as the greatest danger to the architectural desire which still inhabits us. The
immovable mass of stone, the vertical glass or metal plane that we had taken to be
the very object of architecture (die Sache selbst, or “the real thing”), its indisplaceabJe
effectivity, is maintcnant in the voluminous text of multiple writings: su
perimpOSition of a Wunderblock (to a text by Freud-and Tschumi exposes ar
chitecture to psychoanalysis, introdUCing the theme of the transference, for
as well as the schiz), palimpsest grid, supersedimented textuality, bottomless stratig
raphy that is mobile, light and abyssal, foliated, foliiform. Foliated foliage and
folle [mad] not to seek reassurance in any solidity: not in ground or tree, horizontality
or verticality, nature or culture, form or foundation or finality. The architect who
once wrote with stones now places lithographs in a volume. and Tschumi speaks of
them as folios. Something weaves through this foliation whose stratagem, as well as
word that of the houses bearing their name, the name of “the one who
has had them built or of the place in which are located,” Littre hazards the
follOWing, in the name of etymology: “Usually one sees in this the word madness
[folie]. But this becomes uncertain when one finds in the texts from the Middle
foleia quae nat ante and domum and folia ]ohannis one suspects that this
involves an alteration of the word feuillie or feuillee ” The word folie has no
common sense any more: it has lost even the reassuring unity of its
Tschumi’s folies no doubt play OIl this “alteration” and superimpose, against common
sense, common meaning, this other meaning, the meaning of the other. of the other
language, the madness of this asemantics.
When 1 discovered Bernard Tschumi’s work, I had to dismiss one easy hY1Potllesis:
recourse to the language of deconstruction, to what in it has become to its
most insisten t words and to some of its would be an analogi
cal transposition or even an architectural In any case, impossibility itself
For, according to the logic of this hypotheSiS (which quickly became untenable),
we could have inquired: What could a de constructive architecture be? That which
deconstructive strategies begin or end by destabilizing it, is it not exactly the
structural principle of architecture (system, architectonics, structure, foundation,
construction, etc.)? the last question led me towards another turn ofinter
route of deconstruction in one of its most intense, affirmative and
thing; rather, what carries its jolt semantic analysis, critique of discourses
tions would be feeble if they were if did not construct. and above all
if they did not first measure themselves institutions ill their at the place
of their greatest resistance: poJi tical structures. levers of economic the material
and phantasmatic apparatuses which connect state, civil society,
cultural power and architectural education-a remarkably sensitive
dition, those which the arts, from the fine arts to martial arts, science and tech-
architectural particularly when it the
One does not declare war, Another strategy weaves itself between hostilities and ne
gotiations. 1:,ken in its strictest, if not most sense. the grid of folies introduces
a channeL It is tbe
invents the structure of a text, of what one would call in a “fab
ric.” Fabric in English recalls fahrique, a French noun with an entirely different mean
ing, which some decisionmakers proposed substituting for tbe title of
Architect-weaver. He
A network-stratagerr
calmed, stabilized, identified in a continuum, Divisible themselves, these
cells also point towards instant.s of rupture, disjunction, But simultane
dispersion. It cathers into a multiplicitv red
What then, is a point, this of folie? How does it stop folie)
point ddolie. no or more folie, llO more folie, no f()lie at alL At the same time it
ness? What does the law ri(Tomnlish) Who accomDlishes the law? The law divides (md
How can we the architectural chromosome, its color, this lahor of
” from a simple displacement or dislocation, invention is needed, A path
tion whose we have tested Oil lhe contrary so as to giye it new
impetus- tllis maintains the dis-jointed per se; it joins up the dis~ maintaining
(mointenont) the distance; it gathers the difference. This assembling will be
,ingular, What holds together does !lot t.ake the {
dissociation its due. but to imnlement it per se in the
with re
moltres d’oeuvre, Tbis “dif1iculty” is Tschumi’s experience, He does not hide it, “this
is not without “At La Villette, it is a matter of f()rming, of acting out
dissoclation, , , , This is !lot without difficulty. Putting dissociation into form necessi
tates that tbe support structure (the Pare, the institution) be structured a reassem
and the Combinative.” Precis 11; Columbia University. New York,
A fi’)rce joins up and holds together the per se. Its effect upon the dis is not
externaL The dis-joint itself IIlointenont architecture that arrests the madness
in its dislocation. It is not only 0 point: an open multiplicity of red resists its
frapment still
knot the point of lolie
schi:! and madness,
must analyze tile double bind whose
itself the greatest force of attraction, contmcting lines towards the center, Wholly self-
what could be called its
which would “reassemble”
seems
wards whicb everything converges aIld where it seems to indi\-iduate but also
from the fact that, in stopping madness, it constitut(‘s t he point of transaction with
the architecture \vhic11 it in turn deconstructs or divides, A discontinuous series of
economic Of investments, services
the distinction and tbe transaction between what Tschumi terms the
of the text or of the grid, But the maintains hOlh the
tracted here passes a “mad” contract between the socius and dissociation. And this
without dialectic, without the Aufhebung whose process Hegel explains to us and
which can always reappropriate such a maintenant: the point negates space and, in this
spatial negation of itself, generates the line in which it maintains itself by cancelling
itself (als sich aufhebend). the line would be the truth of the point, the surface the
truth of the line, time the truth of space and, finally, the maintenant the truth of the
gramme” (“La paraphrase: ligne, ” in Marges [Minuit, 1972],
[University of Chicago Press]). Under the same name, the maintenant I sneak of would
But on the other hand, if dissociation does not happen to the
atomic, and thus has the function and individualizing form of the point according
only to a point of view, according to the perspective of the serial ensemble which it
punctuates, and subtends without ever its simple support. As it is
seen, and seen from it simultaneously scans and interrupts, maintains and
divides, puts color and rhythm into the spacing of the grid. But this point of view
does not see, it is blind to what happens in the folie. For if we consider it absolutely,
abstracted from the ensemble and in itself (it is also destined to abstract, distract or
subtract itself), the point is not a point any more; it no has the atomic indivisi
play to the it constructs/deconstruct;; itself like a cu be given over to formal
combination. The articulated pieces separate, compose and recompose.
spaces of movement-the dis-joint forms that are destined for events: in order for them
For it was necessary to speak of promise and pledge, of promise as affirmation, the
promise that provides the privileged example of a p.E19r1P3.ti~.[iJ!Il&. More than
an example: the very condition of such writing. Without accepting what would be
retained as presuppositions hy theories of performative language and acts-re
maintenant as present)-and without being able to discuss it here, let us focus on this
single trait: the provocation of the event I speak of (“I promise,” for example), that
I describe or trace; tile event that I make happen or let happen hy marking it. The mark
or trait must be emphasized so as to remove this performativity from the heQeJmc)IlY
of and of what is called human speech. The performative mark spaces is the
event of spacing. The red points space, maintaining architecture in the dissociation
of spacing. But this maintenant does not only maintain a past and a tradition; it does
not ensure a syntheSiS. It maintains the interruption, in other words, the relation to
the other per se. To the other in the magnetic field of attraction, of the “common
‘) Other: the one through whom the promised event will happen or will not. For he is
( called, only called to countersign the pledge [gage]. the engagement or the wager.
what is too quickly referred to as Power, the politico-economic decisionmakers,
a philosophy of architecture. This Other will be anyone, not yet [point encore] a suhject,
ego or conscience and not a man l’homme]; anyone who comes and answers to
maintain spacing, the maintenant in dissociation, the relation to the other per se. Not the
hand being held [main tenue] but the hand outstretched [main tendue] above the
that cannot he anticipated, this other architecture, this architecture of the other, is
nothing that exists. It is not a present, the memory of a past present, the purchase or
pre-comprehension of a future present. It presents neither a constative theory nor a
space to all narrative matrices to sound-tracks and image-tracks (as I write this, I
think of La folie du jour by Blanchot, and of the demand for, and impOSSibility narra
tion that is made evident there. Everything I have been ahle to write ahout it, most
notahly in Pamgcs, is directly and sometimes literally concerned-I am aware of this
after the fact, thanks to Tschumi-with the madness of architecture: step, threshold,
staircase labyrinth, hotel, hospital, wall, enclosure, edges, room, the inhabitation of
the uninhabitable. And since all of this, dealing with tbe madness of the trait, the
spacing of “dis-traction,” will be published in English, I also think of that idiomatic
manner of referring to the fool, the absent-minded, the wanderer: the one who is spacy,
narration (“No, no narrative never again,” La folie du jour) it gives a place to them all. ! ‘
It writes and signs in advance-maintenant a divided line on the edge of 1111:<1.I..'"1);:,
before any presentation, beyond it-the very who engages architecture, its
discourse, political scenography, economy and ethics. Pledge but also wager, sym
bolic order and gamhle: these red cubes are thrown like the dice of architecture. The
throw not only programs a strategy of events, as I suggested earlier; it anticipates the
architecture to come. It runs the risk and gives us the chance.
I. Maintenant, Fr., adv., now; from maintenir, v., maintaining, in position, supporting,
Folie, Fr., n., madness, delusion, mania; folly; country pleasure-house.
to Bernard Tschumi’s own usage, so as to retain the connotation of madness. [Transla
tor’s
lator’s note. ]
Architectural Curvilinearity: The Folded, the Pliant
….Ih the particulars of the project and its environment.
(London: Wiley-Academy. 2004), 7.
Mario Carpo, “Ten Years of Folding,” in Folding in Architecture. See
also Branko Koleravic, ed., Architecture in the Digital Age: Design and
Manufacturing (New York: Spoon Press, 2003), 3-10.
and Fred Koetter’s Collage City,2 and continuing through Mark
Wigley and Philip Johnson’s Deconstructivist Architecture, archi
tects have been primarily concerned with the production of
These practices have attempted to embody the differences
within and between diverse physical, cultural, and social con
Johnson’s DeconstructionArchitecture it is necessary to overlook
many significant and distinguishing differences in order to
Both Venturi and Wigley argue for the deployment of dis
strategies based on the incongruities,juxtapositions and opposi
tions within specific sites and programmes. These disjunctions
1I.IIIit’lions between dissimilar elements. A diagonal dialogue
Iwlween a building and its context has become an emblem
‘, •.1It’ of an urban plan to a building detail, contexts have been
IIl1l1ed for conflicting geometries, materials, styles, histories,
,.lId programmes which are then represented in architecture as
11111′ mal contradictions. The most paradigmatic architecture of
t t1l’ last ten years, including Robert Venturi’s Sainsbury Wing of
I \chumi’s La Villette Park or the Gehry House, invests in the
,II (‘hitectural representation of contradictions. Through con
• 1111 t1icts.
,,, formal conflict. Such resistances attempt to recover unified
I !Ility is constructed through one of two strategies: either by
‘\'(‘onstructing a continuous architectural language through
historical analyses (Neo-Classicism or Neo-Modernism) or by
ldt’ntifying local consistencies resulting from indigenous cli
rhe internal orders of Neo-Classicism, Neo-Modernism and
discontinuities that are necessary for a logic of contradiction.
III architecture, both the reaction to and the representation of
heterogeneity have shared an origin in contextual analysis. Both
Iheoretical models begin with a close analysis ofcontextual con
or heterogeneous urban fabric. Neither the reactionary call for
IInity nor the avant-garde dismantling of it through the identifi
t’:ltion of internal contradictions seems adequate as a model for
l’Ontemporary architecture and urbanism.
32
parate, differentiated and heterogeneous cultural and formal
contexts, two options have been dominant; either conflict and
contradiction or unity and reconstruction. Presently, an alter
native smoothness is being formulated that may escape these
dialectically opposed strategies. Common to the diverse sources
of this post-contradictory work-topological geometry, mor
phology, morphogenesis, Catastrophe Theory or the computer
technology of both the defense and Hollywood film industry
are characteristics of smooth transformation involving the
intensive integration of differences within a continuous yet het
erogeneous system. Smooth mixtures are made up of disparate
elements which maintain their integrity while being blended
within a continuous field ofother free elements.
Smooth mixtures are not homogeneous and therefore cannot
be reduced. Deleuze describes smoothness as “the continuous
variation” and the “continuous development ofform.”4 Wigley’s
critique of pure form and static geometry is inscribed within
geometric conflicts and discontinuities. For Wigley, smoothness
is equated with hierarchical organisation: “the volumes have
been purified-they have become smooth, classical-and the
wires all converge in a single, hierarchical, vertical movement. “5
Rather than investing in arrested conflicts, Wigley’s slipperi
ness might be better exploited by the alternative smoothness of
heterogeneous mixture. For the first time perhaps, complexity
might be aligned with neither unity nor contradiction but with
smooth, pliant mixture.
two camps which would either have architecture break under
the stress ofdifference or stand firm. Pliancy allows architecture
to become involved in complexity through flexibility. It may be
“Ih fixed points ofresolution nor arrest them in contradictions,
btu “ustain them through flexible, unpredicted, local connec
Ikllls. To arrest differences in conflicting forms often precludes
….ny of the more complex possible connections of the forms of
.rc:hilecture to larger cultural fields. A more pliant architectural
k'””ibility values alliances, rather than conflicts, between ele
“‘t”IlIS. Pliancy implies first an internal flexibility and second a
dc-,ll’ndence on external forces for self-definition.
.. will be the ability to integrate unrelated elements within a new
tunlinuous mixture. Culinary theory has developed both a prac
tklll and precise definition for at least three types of mixtures.
l’lll’ first involves the manipulation of homogeneous elements;
bt”lIling, whisking and whipping change the volume but not
.ht” nature of a liquid through agitation. The second method
ur incorporation mixes two or more disparate elements; chop
Pill){, dicing, grinding, grating, slicing, shredding and mincing
rvisl’erate elements into fragments. The first method agitates
• “ingle uniform ingredient, the second eviscerates disparate
Ingredients. Folding, creaming and blending mix smoothly
multiple ingredients “through repeated gentle overturnings
wilhout stirring or beating” in such a way that their individual
l’hnracteristics are maintained.6 For instance, an egg and choco
tilt’ are folded together so that each is a distinct layer within a
c:nntinuous mixture.
.upple layering. Likewise, folding in geology involves the sedi
IUl’ntation of mineral elements or deposits which become
_lowly bent and compacted into plateaus of strata. These strata
Afl’ compressed, by external forces, into more or less continu
IIUS layers within which heterogeneous deposits are still intact
in varying degrees of intensity.
cream, nor fragmented, like chopped nuts, but smooth and
liminary organisation which becomes folded but rather there
are unrelated elements or pure intensities that are intricated
porated into smooth mixtures through various manipulations
“Felt is a supple solid product that proceeds altogether dif
no intertwining, only an entanglement of fibres obtained by full
ing (for example, by rolling the block of fibres back and forth).
aggregate of intrication of this kind is in no way homogeneous;
nevertheless, it is smooth and contrasts point by point with the
in every direction; it has neither top, nor bottom, nor centre;
continuous variation}.”?
free intensities become intricated by an external force exerted
upon them jointly. Intrications are intricate connections. They
another by negotiating interstitial rather than internal connec
that intricates these elements with one another is outside of the
accidental collisions, pliant systems are capable of engendering
Vldssitude is often equated with vacillation, weakness8 and
Intll’l’isiveness but more importantly these characteristics are
• (IUality of being mutable or changeable in response to both
‘.vourable and unfavourable situations that occur by chance.
Vldssitudinous events result from events that are neither arbi
.rt’ made possible by a collision of internal motivations with
vl”1 i m s immediately identify the forces contributing to the acci
dt’1l1 and begin to assign blame. It is inevitable however, that
nu single element can be made responsible for any accident
Inlluences at a particular time makes the outcome of an acci
d(‘111 possible. If any element participating in such a confluence
A Thousand Plateaus, Spinoza’s concept of “a thousand vicis
uf intensity” to describe events which incorporate unpredict
ICIl’alise, difficult to identify. 10 Any logic of vicissitude is depen
tll’nt on both an intrication of local intensities and the exegetic
lion are predictable from within any single system. Connections
iltljacencies and their affiliation with external forces. In this
fil’nse, vicissitudinous mixtures become cohesive through a
log-ic ofviscosity.
lion to the external pressures exerted upon them. These fluids
cohesion and adhesion to external elements as their viscosity
increases. Viscous fluids begin to behave less like liquids and
more like sticky solids as the pressures upon them intensify.
Similarly, viscous solids are capable of yielding continually
under stress so as not to shear.
ity in response to adjacent pressures and a stickiness or
adhesion to adjacent elements. Viscous relations such as these
are not reducible to any single or holistic organisation. Forms
of viscosity and pliability cannot be examined outside of the
vicissitudinous connections and forces with which their defor
mation is intensively involved. The nature of pliant forms is
that they are sticky and flexible. Things tend to adhere to them.
As pliant forms are manipulated and deformed the things
that stick to their surfaces become incorporated within their
interiors.
represent pliancy, not coincidentally, are being produced by
many of the same architects previously involved in the valorisa
tion of contradictions. Deconstructivism theorised the world as
a site of differences in order that architecture could represent
these contradictions in form. This contradictory logic is begin
ning to soften in order to exploit more fully the particularities
of urban and cultural contexts. This is a reasonable transition,
as the Deconstructivists originated their projects with the inter
nal discontinuities they uncovered within buildings and sites.
These same architects are beginning to employ urban strategies
which exploit discontinuities, not by representing them in for
mal collisions, but by affiliating them with one another though
continuous flexible systems.
…hl” a Deconstructivist style of diagonal forms, there will
.”,1), hc those who would enclose their present work within
• Nto-Baroque or even Expressionist style of curved forms.
“JW(“vcr, many of the formal similitudes suggest a far richer
*kJJCil’ of curvilinearity”11 that can be characterised by the
Involvement of outside forces in the development of form. If
Inltrnally motivated and homogeneous systems were to extend
In .tmight lines, curvilinear developments would result from the
IIM’urporation of external influences. Curvilinearity can put into
..hllion the collected projects in this publication [Architectural
,”‘,ign 63], Deleuze’s The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque and Rene
Tholn’s catastrophe diagrams. The smooth spaces described
by these continuous yet differentiated systems result from cur
..linear sensibilities that are capable of complex deformations
In rl’sponse to programmatic, structural, economic, aesthetic,
political and contextual influences. This is not to imply that
Intl’nsive curvature is more politically correct than an unin
volved formal logic, but rather, that a cunning pliability is often
Inure effective through smooth incorporation than contradic
lion and conflict. Many cunning tactics are aggressive in nature.
Whether insidious or ameliorative these kinds of cunning con
IIt’ctions discover new possibilities for organisation. A logic of
rurvilinearity argues for an active involvement with external
(‘wnts in the folding, bending and curving of form.
J(estions of smooth mixture and curvature. For instance, the
(iehry House is typically portrayed as representing materials
Hnd forms already present within, yet repressed by, the subur
hlln neighbourhood: sheds, chain-link fences, exposed plywood,
trailers, boats and recreational vehicles. The house is described
liS an “essay on the convoluted relationship between the conflict
within and between forms … which were not imported to but
conflict within the neighbourhood due to its public representa
tion of hidden aspects of its context. The Gehry House violates
the neighbourhood from within. Despite the dominant appeal
of the house to contradictions, a less contradictory and more
pliant reading of the house is possible as a new organisation
emerges between the existing house and Gehry’s addition. A
dynamic stability develops with the mixing of the original and
the addition. Despite the contradictions between elements pos
sible points of connection are exploited. Rather than valorise
the conflicts the house engenders, as has been done in both
academic and popular publications, a more pliant logic would
identify, not the degree ofviolation, but the degree to which new
connections were exploited. A new intermediate organisation
occurs in the Gehry House by vicissitude from the affiliation of
the existing house and its addition. Within the discontinuities
of Deconstructivism there are inevitable unforeseen moments
Similarly, Peter Eisenman’s Wexner Center is convention
campus, city and armoury which once stood adjacent to the site.
These contradictions are represented by the diagonal collisions
between the two grids and the masonry towers. Despite the dis
junctions and discontinuities between these three disparate
systems, Eisenman’s project has suggested recessive readings
ofcontinuous non-linear systems ofconnection. Robert Somop3
identifies such a system of Deleuzian rhizomatous connections
between armoury and grid. The armoury and diagonal grids
are shown by Somol to participate in a hybrid L-movement that
organises the main gallery space. Somol’s schizophrenic analy
sis is made possible by, yet does not emanate from within, a
Deconstructivist logic of contradiction and conflict. The force
of this Deleuzian schizo-analytic model is its ability to maintain
Iht’ tower and grid need not be seen as mutually exclusive or in
(,()lItradiction. Rather, these disparate elements may be seen
I” distinct elements co-present within a composite mixture.
I%mcy does not result from and is not in line with the previous
luc:hitecturallogic of contradiction, yet it is capable of exploit
Ing many conflicting combinations for the possible connections
Ihilt are overlooked. Where DeconstructivistArchitecture was seen
II) t’xploit external forces in the familiar name of contradiction
And conflict, recent pliant projects by many of these architects
t’xhibit a more fluid logic of connectivity.
t’volved primarily from highly differentiated, heterogeneous
(‘ClI1texts within which conflicting, contradictory and discon
Iinuous buildings were sited. An alternative involvement with
Iwterogeneous contexts could be affiliated, compliant and con
Iinuous. Where complexity and contradiction arose previously
(rom inherent contextual conflicts, present attempts are being
made to fold smoothly specific locations, materials and pro
Jtmmmes into architecture while maintaining their individual
Idt’ntity.
II state of being plied by forces beyond control. The projects are
nmtexts with minimal resistance. Again, this characterisation
lihould not imply flaccidity but a cunning submissiveness that
Is l’apable of bending rather than breaking. Compliant tactics,
Mll’h as these, assume neither an absolute coherence nor cohe
,.ion between discrete elements but a system of provisional,
Intl’nsive, local connections between free elements. Intensity
d{‘scribes the dynamic internalisation and incorporation of
organism-to which nothing can be added or subtracted
intensive organisations continually invite external influence
within their internal limits so that they might extend their
influence through the affiliations they make. A two-fold deter
ritorialisation, such as this, expands by internalising external
forces. This expansion through incorporation is an urban
alternative to either the infinite extension of International
Modernism, the uniform fabric of Contextualism or the con
flicts of Post-Modernism and Deconstructivism. Folded, pliant
and supple architectural forms invite exigencies and contingen
cies in both their deformation and their reception.
Architecture, urban contexts provided rich sites of difference.
These differences are presently being exploited for their abil
ity to engender multiple lines of local connections rather than
lines of conflict. These affiliations are not predictable by any
contextual orders but occur by vicissitude. Here, urban fabric
has no value or meaning beyond the connections that are made
within it. Distinct from earlier urban sensibilities that general
ised broad formal codes, the collected projects develop local,
fine grain, complex systems of intrication. There is no general
urban strategy common to these projects, only a kind of tactical
mutability. These folded, pliant and supple forms of urbanism
are neither in deference to nor in defiance of their contexts
but exploit them by turning them within their own twisted and
(akin to plicare to fold)-more at PLY] u: compliant often
where between contextualism and expressionism. Their supple
rorms are neither geometrically exact nor arbitrarily figural.
I:or example, the curvilinear figures of Shoei Yoh’s roof struc
tures are anything but decorative but also resist being reduced
to a pure geometric figure. Yoh’s supple roof structures exhibit
/I logic of curvilinearity as they are continuously differentiated
Ill’cording to contingencies. The exigencies of structural span
Il’ngths, beam depths, lighting, lateral loading, ceiling height
lind view angles influence the form of the roof structure. Rather
than averaging these requirements within a mean or mini
mum dimension they are precisely maintained by an anexact
),l·t rigorous geometry. Exact geometries are eidetic; they can
bl’ reproduced identically at any time by anyone. In this regard,
they must be capable of being reduced to fixed mathematical
(Iuantities. Inexact geometries lack the precision and rigor nec
t’ssary for measurement.
geometries can be determined with precision yet cannot be
reduced to average points or dimensions. Anexact geometries
often appear to be merely figural in this regard. Unlike exact
geometries, it is meaningless to repeat identically an anexact
geometric figure outside of the specific context within which
It is situated. In this regard, anexact figures cannot be easily
translated.
Columbus Convention Center has become a canonical model
for the negotiation of differentiated urban fringe sites through
the use of near figures. ‘6 Kipnis identifies the disparate sys
tems informing the Columbus Convention Center including:
a single volume of inviolate programme of a uniform shape
and height larger than two city blocks, an existing fine grain
fabric of commercial buildings and a network of freeway inter
changes that plug into the gridded streets of the central business
district. Eisenman’s project drapes the large rectilinear vol
ume of the convention hall with a series of supple vermiforms.
These elements become involved with the train tracks to
the north-east, the highway to the south-east and the pedes
trian scale of High Street to the west. The project incorporates
the multiple scales, programmes, and pedestrian and auto
motive circulation of a highly differentiated urban context.
Kipnis’ canonisation of a form which is involved with such spe
cific contextual and programmatic contingencies seems to be
frustrated from the beginning. The effects of a pliant urban mix
ture such as this can only be evaluated by the connections that
it makes. Outside of specific contexts, curvature ceases to be
intensive. Where the Wexner Center, on the same street in
the same city, represents a monumental collision, the
Convention Center attempts to disappear by connection between
intervals within its context; where the Wexner Center destabilises
through contradictions the Convention Center does so by
subterfuge.
in Bilbao, Spain covers a series of orthogonal gallery spaces
with flexible tubes which respond to the scales of the adjacent
roadways, bridges, the Bilbao River and the existing medieval
city. Akin to the Vitra Museum, the curvilinear roof forms of the
Bilbao Guggenheim integrate the large rectilinear masses of
IlUtomotive contexts.
illl'” sites and alien programmes require conciliatory, complicit,
pliant, flexible and often cunning tactics. Presently, numerous
IIrchitects are involving the heterogeneities, discontinuities and
tli fferences inherent within any cultural and physical context by
IIligning formal flexibility with economic, programmatic and
Ii’ ructural compliancy. A multitude ofpli based words-folded,
pliant, supple, flexible, plaited, pleated, plicating, complicitous,
t’Ompliant, complaisant, complicated, complex and multiplici
tous to name a few-can be invoked to describe this emerging
urban sensibility of intensive connections.
has already articulated an affinity between complexity, or plex
words, and folding, or plic-words, in the Deleuzian paradigm
of “perplexing plications” or “perplication.'”8 The plexed and
the plied can be seen in a tight knot of complexity and pliancy.
Plication involves the folding in ofexternal forces. Complication
involves an intricate assembly of these extrinsic particularities
into a complex network. In biology, complication is the act ofan
embryo folding in upon itself as it becomes more complex. To
become complicated is to be involved in mUltiple complex, intri
(.’ate connections. Where Post-Modernism and Deconstructivism
resolve external influences of programme, use, economy and
external forces by knotting, twisting, bending, and folding them
within form.
anatomical “plica” is a single strand within multiple “plicae.”
It is a multiplicity in that it is both one and many simultane
ously. These elements are bent along with other elements into
a composite, as in matted hair(s). Such a bending together of
elements is an act ofmultiple plication or multiplication rather
than mere addition. Plicature involves disparate elements with
one another through various manipulations of bending, twist
ing, pleating, braiding, and weaving through external force. In
RAA Um’s Croton Aqueduct project a single line following the
subterranean water supply for New York City is pulled through
multiple disparate programmes which are adjacent to it and
which cross it. These programmatic elements are braided and
bent within the continuous line of recovered public space which
stretches nearly twenty miles into Manhattan. In order to incor
porate these elements the line itself is deflected and reoriented,
continually changing its character along its length. The seem
ingly singular line becomes populated by finer programmatic
elements. The implications ofLe pli for architecture involve the
proliferation of possible connections betweenfree entities such
as these.
twinings and intrications; for instance, of nerves or blood
vessels. The complications of a plexus-what could best be
called complexity-arise from its irreducibility to any single
organisation. A plexus describes a multiplicity of local connec
tions within a single continuous system that remains open to
new motions and fluctuations. Thus, a plexial event cannot
occur at any discrete point. A multiply plexed system-a com
plex-cannot be reduced to mathematical exactitude, it must
I distinct character once they have been plied; they exchange
Axed co-ordinates for dynamic relations across surfaces.
Ibility, such as Buffon’s Needle Problem,’9 D’Arcy Thompson
provides perhaps the first geometric description of variable
ddormation as an instance of discontinuous morphological
development. His cartesian deformations, and their use of flex
Ible topological rubber sheet geometry, suggest an alternative
to the static morphological transformations of autonomous
architectural types. A comparison ofthe typological and trans
rormational systems of Thompson and Rowe illustrates two
rlldically different conceptions of continuity. Rowe’s is fixed,
(‘xact, striated, identical and static, where Thompson’s is
dynamic, anexact, smooth, differentiated and stable.
villas of :194920-and Rowe-in his comparative analysis of
Iltllladio and Le Corbusier of:194721-uncovera consistent organ
isational type: the nine-square grid. In Wittkower’s analysis of
twelve Palladian villas the particularities of each villa accumu
late (through what Edmund Husserl has termed variations) to
generate a fixed, identical spatial type (through what could best
be described as phenomenological reduction). The typology of
this “Ideal Villa” is used to invent a consistent deep structure
underlying Le Corbusier’s Villa Stein at Garche and Palladio’s
Villa Malcontenta. Wittkower and Rowe discover the exact geo
metric structure of this type in all villas in particular. This fixed
type become a constant point of reference within a series of
variations.
ematics of species categories, yet his system depends on a
of a provisional type define a supple constellation of geomet
ric correspondences. Thompson uses the initial type as a mere
provision for a dynamic system of transformations that occur
in connection with larger environmental forces. Thompson’s
method of discontinuous development intensively involves
external forces in the deformation of morphological types. The
flexible type is able to both indicate the general morphological
structure of a species while indicating its discontinuous devel
opment through the internalisation of heretofore external
forces within the system. 22 For instance, the enlargement of a
fish’s eye is represented by the flexing of a grid. This fluctuation,
when compared to a previous position of the transformational
type, establishes a relation between water depth and light inten
sity as those conditions are involved in the formal differences
between fish. The flexing grid of relations cannot be arrested at
any moment and therefore has the capacity to describe both a
general type and the particular events which influence its devel
opment. Again, these events are not predictable or reducible
to any fixed point but rather begin to describe a probable zone
of co-present forces; both internal and external. Thompson
presents an alternative type of inclusive stability, distinct
from the exclusive stasis of Rowe’s nine-square grid. The sup
ple geometry of Thompson is capable of both bending under
external forces and folding those forces internally. These trans
formations develop through discontinuous involution rather
The morphing effects used in the contemporary advertis
with recent developments in architecture. These mere images
have concrete influences on space, form, politics, and cul
ture; for example, the physical morphing of Michael Jackson’s
body, including the transformation of his form through various
These physical effects and their implications for the definition
of gender and race were only later represented in his recent
video Black & White. In this video multiple genders, ethnicities
lind races are mixed into a continuous sequence through the
digital morphing of video images. It is significant that Jackson
is not black or white but black and white, not male or female
hut male and female. His simultaneous differences are charac
leristic of a desire for smoothness; to become heterogeneous
yet continuous. Physical morphing, such as this, is monstrous
hecause smoothness eradicates the interval between what
Thompson refers to as discriminant characteristics without
homogenizing the mixture. Such a continuous system is neither
an assembly of discrete fragments nor a whole. 23 With Michael
Jackson, the flexible geometric mechanism with which his video
representation is constructed comes from the same desire
which aggressively reconstructs his own physical form. Neither
Ihe theory, the geometry or the body proceed from one another;
rather, they participate in a desire for smooth transformation.
Form, politics, and self-identity are intricately connected in this
process of deformation.
uid mercury man in the film Terminator 2 and the Peter Lewis
House by Frank Gehry and Philip Johnson. The Hollywood
special effects sequences allow the actor to both become and
disappear into virtually any form. The horror of the film results
not from ultra-violence, but from the ability of the antagonist
10 pass through and occupy the grids of floors, prison bars, and
other actors. Computer technology is capable of constructing
intermediate images between any two fixed points resulting
in a smooth transformation. These smooth effects calculate
with probability the interstitial figures between fixed figures.
Furthermore, the morphing process is flexible enough that
Peter Lewis House is formulated from multiple flexible forms.
The geometry of these forms is supple and can accommodate
smooth curvilinear deformation along their length. Not only are
these forms capable of bending to programmatic, structural and
environmental concerns, as is the roof ofShoei Yoh’s roof struc
tures, but they can deflect to the contours and context of the site,
similar to Peter Eisenman’s Columbus Convention Center
and RAA Urn’s Croton Aqueduct project. Furthermore, the
Lewis House maintains a series of discrete figural fragments
such as boats and familiar fish-within the diagrams of
D’Arcy Thompson, which are important to both the morphing
effects of Industrial Light and Magic and the morphogenetic
diagrams of Rene Thorn, Gehry’s supple geometry is capable of
smooth, heterogeneous continuous deformation. Deformation
is made possible by the flexibility of topological geometry in
response to external events, as smooth space is intensive and
continuous. Thompson’s curvilinear logic suggests deforma
tion in response to unpredictable events outside of the object.
Forms of bending, twisting or folding are not superfluous
but result from an intensive curvilinear logic which seeks to
internalise cultural and contextual forces within form. In this
manner events become intimately involved with particular
rather than ideal forms. These flexible forms are not mere rep
resentations of differential forces but are deformed by their
environment.
fold, Gk di plasios twofold] vt 1: to lay one part over another
occurring to the Post-Modem paradigm of complexity and con
tradiction in architecture, evidenced by John Rajchman’s Out
oj the Fold and Perplications. Rajchman’s text is not a mani
fl’sto for the development of new architectural organisations,
but responds to the emergence of differing kinds of complex
ity being developed by a specific architect. His essays inscribe
spatial innovations developed in architecture within larger
intellectual and cultural fields. Rajchman both illuminates
I’l’ter Eisenman’s architectural practice through an explication
of Le P!i and is forced to reconsider Deleuze’s original argu
ment concerning Baroque space by the alternative spatialities
of Eisenman’s Rebstock Park project. The dominant aspect of
the project which invited Rajchman’s attention to folding was
the employment of one of Rene Thorn’s catastrophe diagrams
in the design process.
than likely that Thorn’s catastrophe nets entered into the archi
tl’cture of Carsten Juel-Christiansen’s Die Anhalter Faltung,
Peter Eisenman’s Rebstock Park, Jeffrey Kipnis’ Unite de
Habitation at Briey installation and Bahram Shirdel’s Nara
Convention Hall as a mere formal technique. Inevitably,
architects and philosophers alike would find this in itself a
catastrophe for all concerned. Yet, their use illustrates that at
Icast four architects simultaneously found in Thorn’s diagrams
a formal device for an alternative description of spatial com
plexity. The kind of complexity engendered by this alliance with
Thorn is substantially different than the complexity provided by
forms of Deconstructivism. Topological geometry in general,
and the catastrophe diagrams in particular, deploy disparate
forces on a continuous surface within which more or less open
systems of connection are possible.
continuous transformations which easily change their form, the
most interesting geometric properties common to all modifi
cation being studied. Assumed is an abstract material of ideal
deformability which can be deformed, with the exception of
disruption. ”
pressure. Where one would expect that an architect looking
at catastrophes would be interested in conflicts, ironically,
architects are finding new forms of dynamic stability in these
diagrams. The mutual interest in Thorn’s diagrams points to a
desire to be involved with events which they cannot predict. The
primary innovation made by those diagrams is the geometric
modelling of a multiplicity of possible co-present events at any
moment. Thorn’s morphogenesis engages seemingly random
events with mathematical probability.
What is common to these events is an inability to define exactly
the moment at which a catastrophe occurs. This loss of exacti
With relative precision, the diagrams define potential catas
trophes through cusps rather than fixed co-ordinates. Like any
simple graph, Thorn’s diagrams deploy X and Y forces across
two axes of a gridded plane. A uniform plane would provide the
potential for only a single point of intersection between any two
X and Y co-ordinates. The supple topological surface of Thorn’s
diagrams is capable of enfolding in multiple dimensions.
Within these folds, or cusps, zones of proximity are contained.
“ible points of intersection are possible at any moment in the
/. dimension. These co-present Z-dimensional zones are pos
liible because the topological geometry captures space within
lis surface. Through proximity and adjacency various vectors of
force begin to imply these intensive event zones. In catastrophic
(‘vents there is not a single fixed point at which a catastrophe
occurs but rather a zone of potential events that are described
hy these cusps. The cusps are defined by multiple possible inter
IIl·tions implying, with more or less probability, multiple fluid
Ihresholds. Thorn’s geometric plexus organises disparate forces
ill order to describe possible types of connections.
II is its resistance to being translated into any single term. It is
precisely the formal manipulations of folding that are capable
of incorporating manifold external forces and elements within
form, yet Le pli undoubtedly risks being translated into archi
Il’cture as mere folded figures. In architecture, folded forms
risk quickly becoming a sign for catastrophe. The success of the
IIrchitects who are folding should not be based on their ability
10 represent catastrophe theory in architectural form. Rather,
Iht, topological geometries, in connection with the probable
(‘vents they model, present a flexible system for the organisa
lion of disparate elements within continuous spaces. Yet, these
(·o-presence. The catastrophe diagram used by Eisenman in the
I{l’bstock Park project destabilises the way that the buildings
meet the ground. It smoothes the landscape and the building
hy turning both into one another along cusps. The diagrams
used by Kipnis in the Briey project, and Shirdel in the Nara
(:onvention Hall, develop an interstitial space contained simul
laneously within two folded cusps. This geometrically blushed
surface exists within two systems at the same moment and in
cent zones of proximity.
tecture, folding was developed as a formal tactic in response to
problems presented by the exigencies of commercial develop
ment. Henry Cobb has argued in both the Charlottesville Tapes
and his Note on Folding for a necessity to both dematerialise
and differentiate the massive homogeneous volumes dictated
by commercial development in order to bring them into rela
tion with finer grain heterogeneous urban conditions. His first
principle for folding is a smoothing of elements across a shared
surface. The facade of theJohn Hancock Tower is smoothed into
a continuous surface so that the building might disappear into
its context through reflection rather than mimicry. Any poten
tial for replicating the existing context was precluded by both
the size of the contiguous floor plates required by the developer
and the economic necessity to construct the building’s skin
from glass panels. Folding became the method by which the
surface of a large homogeneous volume could be differentiated
while remaining continuous. This tactic acknowledges that the
existing fabric and the developer tower are essentially of differ
ent species by placing their differences in mixture, rather than
contradiction, through the manipulation ofa pliant skin.
begins with the incorporation of glass panels and metal frame
into a continuous folded surface. The differentiation of the
folded surface, through the simultaneous bending of the glass
and metal, brings those elements together in a continuous
plane. The manipulations of the material surface proliferate
folding and bending effects in the massing of the building. The
alien building becomes a continuous surface of disappearance
that both diffracts and reflects the context through complex
manipulations of folding. In the recent films Predator and
urban and jungle environments, not through cubist camou
Unge lS but by reflecting and diffracting its environment like an
octopus or chameleon. The contours between an object and
lIS context are obfuscated by forms which become translucent,
rellective and diffracted. The alien gains mobility by cloaking its
volume in a folded surface of disappearance. Unlike the “deco
rnted shed” or “building board” which mimics its context with
a singular sign, folding diffuses an entire surface through a
Ilhimmering reflection of local adjacent and contiguous particu
Inrities. For instance, there is a significant difference between a
limall fish which represents itself as a fragment of a larger fish
Ihrough the figure of a large eye on its tail, and a barracuda
whieh becomes like the liquid in which it swims through a dif
fused reflection of its context. The first strategy invites deceitful
detection where the second uses stealth to avoid detection.
Similarly, the massive volume of the Allied Bank Tower situates
hsclfwithin a particular discontinuous locale by cloaking itself
In a folded reflected surface. Here, cunning stealth is used as a
way of involving contextual forces through the manipulation of
II surface. The resemblance offolded architecture to the stealth
bomber results not from a similarity between military and archi
I(‘ctural technologies or intentions but rather from a tactical
disappearance’6 of a volume through the manipulation of a sur
fnce. This disappearance into the fold is neither insidious nor
innocent but merely a very effective tactic.
method of disappearing into a specific context. Unlike Cobb,
who began with a logic of construction, Eisenman aligns the
fold with the urban contours of the Rebstock Park. The repetitive
Iypologies ofhousing and office buildings are initially deployed
un the site in a more or less functionalist fashion; then a topo
logical net derived from Thom’s Butterfly net is aligned to the
This procedure differentiates the uniform bars in response to the
global morphology of the site. In this manner the manifestation
of the fold is in the incorporation of differences-derived from
the morphology ofthe site-into the homogeneous typologies of
the housing and office blocks. Both Eisenman’s local differen
tiation of the building types by global folding, and Cobb’s local
lUlU11l~ across constructional elements which globally differen
tiates each floor plate and the entire massing of the building are
effective. Cobb and Eisenman “animate” homogenous organi
sations that were seemingly given to the architect-office tower
and siedlung-with the figure of a fold. The shared
of folding identified by both Eisenman and Cobb, evident in
their respective texts, is the ability to differentiate the inherited
homogeneous organisations of both Modernism (Eisenman’s
siedlung) and commercial development (Cobb’s tower). This
differentiation of known types of space and organisation has
something in common with Deleuze’s delimitation of folding
in architecture within the Baroque. Folding heterogeneity into
known typologies renders those organisations more smooth
and more intensive so that they are better able to incorporate
disparate elements within a continuous system. Shirdel’s use
ofThom’s diagrams is quite interesting as the catastrophe sec
tions do not animate an existing organisation. Rather, they
begin as merely one system among three others. The convention
halls float within the envelope of the building as they are sup
ported by a series of transverse structural walls whose figure is
derived from Thom’s nets. This mixture of systems, supported
by the catastrophe sections, generates a massive residual pub
lic space at the ground floor of the building. In Shirdel’s project
the manipulations of folding, in both the catastrophe sections
and the building envelope, incorporate previously unrelated ele
ments into a mixture. The space between the theatres, the skin
intrication.
transforming the size of domes and roofs through a folding
structural mechanism. Hoberman develops adjustable struc
tll res whose differential movements occur through the dynamic
transformation of flexible continuous systems. The movements
of these mechanisms are determined both by use and struc
ture. Hoberman’s structural mechanisms develop a system of
smooth transformation in two ways. The Iris dome and sphere
projects transform their size while maintaining their shape.
This flexibility of size within the static shape of the stadium is
(:apable of supporting new kinds of events. The patented tiling
patterns transform both the size and shape of surfaces,
developing local secondary pockets of space and enveloping
larger primary volumes.
Hoberman’s discourse inherits dominant typologies of organ
isation into which new elements are folded. Within these
activities of folding it is perhaps more important to identifY
those new forms of local organisation and occupation which
inhabit the familiar types of the Latin cross church, the siedlung,
the office tower and the stadium, rather than the disturbances
visited on those old forms of organisation. Folding can occur
in both the organisations of old forms and the free intensi
ties of unrelated elements as is the case with Shirdel’s project.
Likewise, other than folding, there are several manipulations
of elements engendering smooth, heterogeneous and intensive
organisation.
a sensibility that resists cracking or breaking in response to
external pressures. These tactics and strategies are all compli
ant to, complicated by, and complicit with external forces in
tingent, responsive, fluent, and yielding through involvement
collection of projects and essays is the shared attempt to place
seemingly disparate forces into relation through strategies
are many opportunities for architecture to be effected by Gilles
Deleuze’s book Le plio The formal character tics of pliancy
more viscous and fluid in response to exigencies. They maintain
cleave or shear but through which they connect, incorporate
and affiliate productively. Cunning and viscous systems such
by vicissitude. If the collected projects within this publication
do have certain formal affinities, it is as a result of a folding out
of formalism into a world of external influences. Rather than
maintain a logic rather than a style of curvilinearity. The formal
deform in response to particular contingencies. What is being
in this publication is: How can architecture be configured as a
complex system into which external particularities are already
14 Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary (Springfield, Mass.: G&C Merriam
15 Edmund Husserl, “The Origin ofGeometry” in Edmund Husserl’s Origin
18 Rajchman identifies an inability in contexualism to “Index the
other disciplines. The mathematical interests in probability of the
20 RudolfWittkower, Architectural Principles in the Age ofHumanism
21 Colin Rowe, Mathematics ofthe Ideal Villa and Other Essays
l4 Webster’s, 445.
forthcoming in Assemblage 19 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,
invites a deceitful detection. This differs from the disappearance of a
surface by stealth which resists any recognition.
space through manipulations ofa surface.
excerpted from a lecture Patri!?
Schumacher gave in Los Angeles
at SCI-Arc in September 2010.
And the Autopoiesis
Of Architecture
going on here, and I think what I have to say speaks, to a
certain extent, critically to what is going on here. The lecture
is a variation on a lecture I have been giving this year. I’ve
added an element that relates to my forthcoming book, The
Autopoiesis ofArchitecture, which is an attempt to create a
comprehensive and unified theory of architecture, and which
features parametricism as the last chapter of volume two. The
argument is that parametric ism continues the autopoiesis of
architecture, which is the self-referential, closed system of
communications that constitutes architecture as a discourse
in contemporary society. The book is in two volumes. Volume
one, a new framework for architecture, is coming out in
December [released December 7,2010] and then a new agenda
for architecture appears in volume two, probably four to six
months later. It is difficult to summarize, but just to raise a
bit of curiosity about this, I will make an argument for
a comprehensive unified theory is of interest.
is important if you are trying to lead 400 architects across a
multiplicity of projects, touching all aspects and components
of contemporary architecture in terms of programmatic
agendas and at all scales. With a unified theory one is better
prepared to manage the different designs, designers, and
approaches that run in different directions, fight each other,
contradict each other, and stand in each other’s way. I am also
teaching at a number of schools, the Architectural Association
Design Research Laboratory [AA DRL] being one of them, an
expanding group that is now 150 to 160 students. Here again
there is an issue in trying to converge efforts so that people
don’t trip over each other and get in each other’s way. The
need for a unified theory is first of all to eliminate contradic
tions within one’s own efforts – so one doesn’t stand in one’s
own way all the time. If you go around from jury to jury,
from project to project, you one thing here, another thing
there, and further ideas come to mind; by the third occasion
cohere. You might be developing ideas about architecture’s
societal function. You might be concerned with what is
architecture, what is not architecture, to demarcate against
art, engineering, etc. You might think of yourself as pan of
something like an avant-garde and try to develop a theory of
the avant-garde. Or think about design media, the role of
media theory; about design processes and design process
theory. You wonder about aesthetic values and whether the
notion of beauty is still relevant. Or you try to develop a
theory of beauty, an aesthetic theory. And you’re concerned
with phenomenology. Then there’s perception – how do you
perceive space, subjects in space? Then it goes on. The concept
of style: Is it still relevant? Then you try to develop a theory
of style. You try to read the history of architecture in a cer
tain fashion … and you do all this to position yourself with
respect to contemporary architecture. These are the compo
nents that different authors, different thinkers, might un
dertake and spend half their careers on. Some of us might do
two or three of these. At a certain stage it makes sense to ask
whether these things can be brought into a coherent system
of ideas where they forge a kind of trajectory that has to do
with guiding practice. You can only lead a coherent practice
with a deep and comprehensive theory.
since Le Corbusier, and perhaps the book The International
Sryie, and perhaps the work of Christian Norberg-Schultz.
But for a long time it has been nearly taboo even to start
thinking about such an idea. I find it very interesting that
the concept of style, like the International Style, returned
after it had been abandoned by most of the early modernists.
Modernism – the International Style – dominated the trans
formation of our built environment for 50 years and gener
ated an unprecedented level of material freedom and plenty,
aligned, of course, with the growth of industrial civilization.
In the 1970s it became clear that the principles and values that
had defined modern architecture for half a century were no
longer the principles and values through which architecture
could facilitate the further progress of world civilization.
Modernism experienced a massive crisis, was abandoned.
Everything had to be questioned, rethought, which led to free
rein, freewheeling, browsing, and brainstorming. This also
brought forth a new cast of characters, a sense of pluralism,
and a sense that all systems (grand narratives) are bankrupt.
That doesn’t mean that aU attempts to cohere a unified theory
are to be dismissed forever. After a period of questioning,
visional conclusions must be drawn, decisions must be made
on how to move a project forward in a clear way. The neces
sity of this cannot be denied.
the chapter structure of volume one. After the introduction
there is a chapter on architecture theory, which is put for
ward as an important, necessary component of architecture.
It actually marks the inception and origin of architecture
with Alberti 500 years ago in the early Renaissance. That’s
where I say architecture starts. Everything before that was
not architecture, it was some form of traditional building.
Most of the book is an attempt to observe architecture and
its communication structures, key principles, distinctions,
methods, practices. It’s a comprehensive discourse analysis
of the discipline, and from that develops a normative agenda
of selecting, or filtering out, the pertinent tendencies, the
permanent communication structures, and the variable
communication structures that have been evolving. All this
is elaborated in order to forge a statement and position on
how to move forward. To make this more digestible I extract
poignant theses from the theory, and I will just read a few.
most adequately grasped if it is analyzed as an autonomous
network or auto poetic system of communications. So I am
not talking about architecture as simply a collection of build
ings. I’m not talking about it as a profession or a practice. I’m
not talking about it only as an academic discipline. Rather, I
am concerned with how all of these activities are joined to
gether to create a system of communications.
Thesis six contains the notion that resolute autonomy, or
what I call self-referential closure, is a prerequisite of archi
tecture’s effectiveness in an increasingly complex and dy
namic social environment. The notion of a self-enclosed
autonomy of the discipline means that we as architects, and
as a discourse as a whole, need to define the purposes that
guide us, the conceptual structures and modes of arguments
that are legitimate and meaningful to us, the tasks to focus on
and how to pursue them. The kind of network of communi
cations that we constitute determines this. In contemporary
society there is no other authority we can appeal to which
would instruct architecture with respect to the built envi
ronment and its evolution. Neither politics, nor clients, nor
science, nor morality. We have the burden as a collective to
determine the way forward. That’s what I mean by autonomy
evant in it. And that is not
garde as a specific subsystem can contemporary architecture
actively participate in the evolution of I believe that
institutions like SCI-Arc and the AA, which seem to be one
step removed from the burdens of state-of-the-art
solutions here and now, are a condition for archi
tecture to rethink and upgrade itself continuously.
center, architecture must regulate itself and maintain its own
mechanisms of evolution in order to remain adaptable in an
ecology of evolving societal subsystems. These subsystems
constitute society according to the notion of society underly
ing this discourse. There can be no external determination
imposed upon architecture, neither by political bodies nor by
paying clients, except in the negative, trivial sense of disrup
tion. Yes, they can stop your project. Maybe they can clamp
down and deny permission, but they obviously cannot con
structively intervene. The same occurs with other so-called
subsystems of society, like the legal system, science, the arts,
etc. They are all self-regulating discourses.
research programs. IfI talk about style or use the concept of
style I am not necessarily alluding to all its connotations. I
am making an effort to redefine style as a valid category of
contemporary discourse, because to just let it drop to the side
would be an impoverishment of contemporary discourse.
The notion of style is one of the few ideas that is meaningful
beyond the confines of architectural discourse. For the world
at large it’s the primary category of understanding architec
ture, and we need to engage with that. All avant-garde styles
are design research programs. They begin as progressive
design research programs, and parametricism is now in that
phase. They mature to become productive dogmas, which
happened with modernism. And there is productivity in the
ability to routinize insights for rapid dissemination and ex
ecution. And obviously all styles end up as degenerate dogmas.
That is their trajectory.
collective within useful dogmas. Their inherent
inertia implies that values progress via revolution rather than
evolution. Aesthetic values obviously shift with historical
progress. You need to relearn your aesthetic sensibilities to
malist sensibilities have to be fought and suppressed because
they don’t allow you to adapt to contemporary life.
mously. Parametricism is also a product of the development
of the medium of architecture. Architectural communication
is happening primarily within the medium of the drawing,
becoming the digital model, becoming the parametric model,
and the network of scripts. Architecture depends on its me
dium in the same way the economy depends on money and
politics depends on power. These specialized media sustain a
new plane of communication that depends on the
of the medium, which remains
able to inflationary tendencies. If you overdo make-believe
but without this
or anybody to project complex, large-scale
exist and be oroductive in contemporary life. The same goes
amount of resources and people needed to support and believe
increasing complexity of tasks and agendas, also needs to
upgrade its medium, just as money did. Money is no longer
just coinage; it became paper money, became electronic
money. Administrative power is also benefiting from the
microelectronic revolution in terms of administering,
controlling, connecting, and directing. Each of these social
subsystems has a specialized social medium. All these media
evolve together with the tasks they take on.
newness. Newness is first of all just otherness. The new is
produced by blind mechanisms rather than creative thought.
Strategic selection is required to secure communicative conti
nuity and adaptive pertinence.
allow me to work out a comprehensive unified theory of ar
chitecture with confidence and conviction. To do that, one of
the key things you have to grasp is the societal function, or the
raison d’&tre, of architecture in the world why it came into
being, why it took certain forms and moved toward certain
developments, and what the best bet is for staying relevant
and continuing to play an important role. This requires some
sense of the overall social process and its workings. For the
first decade of my architectural life, beginning in the early
kind of overarching theoretical edifice through which to
think what is going on in architecture. When I went into ar
chitecture at the University of Stuttgart, I was joining the late
modern period. People were still convinced of modernism.
There was still hi-tech – Norman Foster and Richard Rogers
were still the prominent going tendency. I was into it, but one
or two years into my studies, I discovered postmodernism
in the writing of Robert Venturi and in charles jencks’s The
Language of Post-Modern Architecture. And so I changed, and,
in fact, the university changed. And a few years later there
was a radical shift to deconstructivism. It seemed that in the
1980s, every two or three years there was a revolution in style,
in paradigm, in outlook, and in values. I think that period left
a mark on some people’s general philosophical outlook. Soon
there was a pluralism of styles. It seems that since then the
kind of monolithic, cumulative trajectory of modernism is
a thing of a past era and that we’re now living in a world of
continuous flux and splintering, fragmenting trajectories and
ever-changing values, but that it is a historical illusion.
theory of contemporary society I discovered Niklas Luh
mann’s social systems theory. Luhmann’s fundamental prem
ise is that all social phenomena or events depend on systems
of communication. He steps back from Marxist materialism
to a kind of abstraction, but one that I think is plausible. You
always have to abstract to theorize. To focus on communica
tions is interesting, because if you think about everybody’s
life process – where the bottlenecks are, where the crux of
your problems is, your issues – you are always coping with
social systems, your ability to communicate within them, to
find a position within them. Even the physical world only
gets to you through systems of communication. For example,
if you’re struck by illness your main problem will be whether
you have health insurance, whether you have people you can
communicate with, whether you are embedded in a system of
communications with rights and the ability to speak. If you
want to traverse physical space your issue will be whether you
have money, an airline ticket. The bottleneck will be traffic,
other people’s attempts to travel, security controls at airports,
etc. You are protected if you have the ability to buy a hotel
room, an apartment, switch on the heater, pay the bills. Com
munication structures everyone’s interface with the physical
world and our relations with each other. If you think about
architecture as an inverted commerce, we construct projects
only through communications, whether through drawings,
munications, upon communications – that’s what runs this
world. Everything goes through that needle’s eye.
and Hegel’s. I insist that an architectural theorist possess a
philosophy of history, a theory of historical development.
Luhmann looks at history in terms of modes of social or soci
etal differentiation – the mark of epochs. Today societies are
organized in terms of functional differentiation. This is what
Luhmann calls functionally differentiated society, composed
of the great function systems of society, themselves parallel
systems that co-evolve as autonomous discourses, systems of
communication like politics, law, economics, science, educa
tion, health, mass media, and art. A politician has no way
of influencing your voice in terms of scientific truth, just as
issues of law have nothing to say with respect to scientific
knowledge. The economy is separate from politics and has its
own autonomous domain and communication system based
on money and exchange in the market. The reverse is also
true: science can deliver knowledge, but what is to be done
with that knowledge is a matter of the economy, or the
political discourse, and science cannot instruct politics. The
same is true for art and science. The beautiful cannot be sci
entifically determined, etc.
sketch here. Luhmann has in fact written comprehensive
analyses of all these social subsystems, but he did not write
about architecture. He fit architecture anachronistically
– into the art system, but really didn’t talk much about it. I
have been reading Luhmann for about 15 years, and it in
creasingly occurred to me that architecture could be theorized
in the same way. Architecture is one of those great function
systems of contemporary society, our functionally differenti
ated society.
Luhmann discovers a series of important processes that deter
mine these different systems within the era of modernity. The
emerging market-orientation of the economy, the liberaliza
tion of the economy, is the pertinent way for the economy to
become an autopoietic system. The political system has been
evolving and succeeding through democratization, and only
through democratization does it become a truly autopoietic,
self-referentially closed system. The legal system found its
autonomy and forward drive through positivism rather than
natural law or God-given legal discourse. Art discovered its
self-programming in romanticism. All of these mechanisms
each other. They become versatile, innovative, progressive,
and ever-:evolving. All these processes are established some
where between 1800 and 1900. My thesis here is that the
concept of space, or the spatialization of architecture, is the
equivalent of the democratization of the political system, the
As Luhmann was analyzing these different function sys
parallel structures and face parallel, or comparative, prob
lems: How could they demarcate themselves? How could they
cohere around an elemental operation? How could they rep
resent within themselves the differences between them and
their environment? He discovers that each of these systems
has a binary code, programs that elaborate how the code val
ues will be used. Each has its specific medium, such as money
for the economy, and they all have a unique societal function,
which acts as a kind of evolutionary attract or for the differ
entiation and autonomization of that respective system. This
unique and distinct function unfolds in a series of tasks. Each
of these systems projected itself forward through something
Luhmann called self-descriptions. This means that within
each discourse there are theoretical reflections via great
treatises, written accounts of trying to think through and
argue the function, the purpose, the raison d’~tre of each of
the function systems. So within the political system there is
political theory. The legal system developed together with
jurisprudence. Science developed together with epistemology,
the philosophy of science. And architecture has architectural
theory, but only a deep and comprehensive kind of architec
tural theory functions as self-description. In volume two I
go through some of them: Alberti’s Ten Books on Architecture;
Durand’s lectures on architecture for the era of neoclassicism;
Le Corbusier’s Towards a New Architecture for modernism; and
The Autopoiesis of Architecture for our time, for parametricism.
distinction. The lead distinction for architecture is form
versus function. You find it in Alberti. You find it in all major
self-descriptions. This lead distinction is the re-entry of the
system-environment distinction into the system. It represents
the distinction of the system of architecture against its en
vironment – that is, against the totality of society – within
architecture. So with the category of form, architecture rep
resents itself to itself as distinct from function, which is the
category representing the external world reference of archi
tecture. The lead distinction of the economy is the distinction
the external reference. In science it is theory versus evidence,
in the law, norm versus fact, etc. There are further parallels
between these function systems. To identify the respective
structure in architecture that coincides with the structures
found in the other function systems has been a creative
puzzle-solving exercise, but in the end a coherent picture
emerges that allows me to take a position with respect to all of
the partial theories I have been developing over the years.
reminder that there’s a certain credibility in realizing projects
that follow the principles I’m talking about. The Rome proj
ect is a field project. It has a very stringent formalism. At the
same time it is very capable of adapting to contexts, in terms
of continuing field conditions, aligning with an urban grid on
one side and with a separate urban grid on another, incorpo
rating existing architectures, and managing to create a coher
ent space around a corner. I would argue that it does a lot of
difficult things with ease and elegance. Some of the strong
alignments with the context go right through the building.
There’s a sense of bringing together disparate elements under
a single formalism, with flow lines irrigating the space. One
of the ambitions is moments of deep visual penetration, the
legibility and transparency of complex organization. In the
central communication hub, ramps and staircases follow
the formal language of walls and ribs, creating something
coherent. That’s a precondition for generating an overall
complexity without creating visual chaos. Although MAXXI
was designed 10 years ago, it is a kind of early parametricist
project. The proliferation of lines, bundling, converging, and
departing from one another, creates a field space.
definition: all elements of architecture have become para
metrically malleable. That’s both fundamental and profound.
The advantage of this is the intensification of relations both
internally, within a design project, a building, and exter
nally, with its context and surroundings. This is a funda
mental ontological shift with respect to the base components
and primitives constituting an architecture. For the previ
ous 2,000 years, if you like, architecture was working with
platonic solids, with rigid, hermetic, geometric figures, and
just composing them. Compared with classical architecture,
modernism was allowed to stretch proportions, was able
to give up symmetries, and instead had a kind of dynamic
edifice to space with all of the advantages of abstraction and
versatility that entails. But in terms of the base primitives,
it was geometric figures and nothing else. If you look at the
kinds of primitives we are working with today, however, it is
a totally different world splines, blobs, nurbs, particles, all
organized by scripts. I think it started with deconstructivism,
to a certain extent, and then Greg Lynn talking about blobs in
1994-95. When we were teaching at Columbia in ’93, we were
creating dynamic, cross-inflected textures and fields. This
was also the beginning of certain computational mechanisms.
Instead of drawing with ruler and compass, making rigid
lines and rigid figures, we worked with dynamical systems.
That’s a new ontology, which cannot but leave a profound,
radically transformative mark on what we do. If we succeed,
and I have no doubt parametricism will succeed, we’ll change
the physiognomy of this planet and its built environment, just
the way modernism did for 50 years in the 20th century. The
recession over the last two years put a bit of a damper on
but that should not be misunderstood as a failure or refuta
tion of this kind of work. In fact, architecture continues to
invest in digital technology, fabrication systems, etc., and
any prohibitive cost is diminishing as a factor. An economic
recession cannot stand in the way of universalizing these
principles. Parametricism is the way we do urbanism and
architecture now.
So the thesis is clear: parametricism is the great new style after
modernism. I consider postmoderrusm and deconstructivism
to be transitional styles, or transitional episodes. I think that
architectural innovation and history proceed by the succession
of styles. These are the great paradigms and research pro
grams by which architecture redefines itself. Postmodernism
and deconstructivism are temporary phenomena, a decade
each. Parametricism is already 15 years down the line. Design
research programs establish the conditions for the collec
tive design research needed to agree on the fundamentals
that add up to an overall research project. If you are fighting
over fundamentals every time you start a new project, you
cannot progress. Here I draw not on Luhmann so much as
on the philosophy of science as projected by Thomas Kuhn,
theorizing paradigm shifts, and in particular I draw on Imre
Lakatos’s theory of scientific research programs. Science is
founded, or re-founded, with certain paradigmatic categories,
principles, anticipations, and intuitions about how a science
could progress, and on that basis, after a revolutionary period
of paradigm exploration, a new paradigm or research pro
gram has to emerge and win the competitive battle, and then
reconstitute cumulative research. Like a research program,
a shared style implies that you are formulating pertinent
desires, framing and posing problems to work on, and stra
tegically constraining the solution space. We are identifying
parametric systems, by exploring the power of malleability in
the elements. The style imposes a formal a priori. There are
very strong analogies in science. For example, Newton set up
a certain set of principles by which every phenomenon was
investigated, probed, and modeled. From problem to prob
lem, the same principles are held steady, otherwise there is no
testing, no research. Innovation requires this kind of steady,
collective effort. It is the condition of any progress.
cycles of innovation and shifts between revolutionary periods,
when the paradigm is no longer working, as happened in the
late ’60s, the ’70s, and early ’80s. You couldn’t really go on
after Pruitt-Igoe was imploded. The principles that architects
were relying on were exhausted. That’s also why SCI-Arc
was founded because the old university way of doing things
couldn’t continue, it was bankrupt. The situation required
a sense of freewheeling brainstorming. Architecture drew
on philosophers, and fundamental questions were asked. It’s
interesting that today philosophy has receded, we’ve reached
a different stage. We have drawn conclusions and learned
our lessons; we have internalized new forms of thinking and
argumentation, new values, new philosophies, and now we
have to forge ahead, developing a new architecture. Every
new generation has to relearn the raison d’~tre of what we do,
but that doesn’t mean that what we are doing is up for discur
sive destruction or disposition every second year. At the early
stages of a new convergence you have to become accustomed
to living with a lot of failures, a lot of difficulties, a lot of
implausibilities. That’s why we need the avant-garde: where
there is methodical tolerance, where there are dry runs,
experiments, and manifesto projects, and where you can’t
expect to immediately compete with the mainstream state
of the art. You have to stick to your principles and not allow
pragmatic concerns to push you to fall back on old models,
old solutions, which are easy and accepted. You’ve got to go it
the difficult way. You’ve got to go it the consistent way. The
dogmatic way. That’s what Newton did also.
metricism in terms of parametric malleability, but there is
also an operational definition of parametricism. When I first
started to talk about parametricism I was talking about for
mal heuristics, but now I find it necessary also to talk about
functional heuristics, because a style is not just a matter of
form and structured formalisms. Each style also introduces a
particular attitude and way of comprehending and handling
tion on these issues, and I think we have a different attitude
and position with respect to function than the modernists. We
need both functional heuristics and formal heuristics. This is
not something I am dogmatically imposing, I’m just observ
ing that I, my friends, my students, naturally adhere to these
principles without faiL Their hand would fall off rather than
draw straight lines. Is anybody here drawing a triangle, a
square, or a circle? Ever again? No!
interpenetration, and layering in an unmediated way, but
this notion of pure difference and collage, which is in fact the
default condition of spontaneous urban development after
the collapse of modernism, is invested only in just the pro
liferation of pure difference, of piling up unrelated elements
against unrelated elements, etc. But that is taboo within the
discourse of parametric ism. Modernism, seriality, repetition
are out of the question. Instead everybody is putting down
their own shape, form, material- all uncoordinated. So, if
the modernist recipes as well as their spontaneous antitheses
are rejected, where are we going?
iegated order, at Zaha Hadid Architects and at the different
schools where we teach. I am trying to formulate the positive
principles that determine the new physiognomy, that define
a new way of working with parametrically malleable, soft
forms. Soft forms are able to incorporate a degree of adap
tive intelligence. They are no longer just forms, but may have
gravity or structural constraints, material constraints, inbuilt
logics that make them intelligent.
here always demand of yourselves and which your teachers
building differentiated systems, whether you work only with
smooth gradients, or whether you work with thresholds or
singularities, you will always work with laws, with rule
based systems of differentiation. These can be applied mean
ingfully, for instance, in the adaptation of facades to create
an intelligent differentiation of elements. You can do this by
taking data sets like sun exposure maps and make them drive
an intelligent differentiation of brise-soleil elements, which
are scripted off the data set. But you can also apply this kind
of technique to urbanism. We’re talking about urban fields,
about the lawful differentiation of an urban fabric according
to relevant data sets.
systems, you can think about establishing correlations be
tween them, where one system drives the other. These are all
co-present systems, which become representations of each
other. They might be ontologically rather different, radically
other. There will be multiple systems, each differentiated.
Then you can establish correlations. Here, just a simple exam
ple, are our towers for the New York Olympic Village, which
interface with the ground and create a kind of resonance with
it. The way the facade is correlated with the horizontal sec
tion of a tower has to do with the programmatic shift from
an office area to a residential area. And of course you can try
to mechanize these correlations in terms of associative logics.
What is important here for me is that we are moving from
single-system projects, which are a kind of first stage – too
abstract to really grip in reality to the inter-articulation of
multiple subsystems, to multisystem correlations.
tics, its operational definition, provide failsafe tools for criti-
enhancement. You can always identifY where the rigid forms
still persist, where there is still too much simple repetition,
where there are still unrelated elements. You can always ask
for further softening, further differentiation, and further
correlation of everything with everything else. There’s
always more to script and correlate to intensifY the internal
consistency and cross-connections and resonance within a
project and to a context. It’s a never-ending trajectory of
a project’s progression. The intensification of relations in
architecture reflects the intensification of communication
among all of us, everyday and with everything. A building
can no longer be a silo out in the greenfield; it needs to be
connected in an urban texture, needs to be accessible, have
internal differentiation, yet have a sense of continuity.
handling functions. We avoid thinking in terms of essences.
We avoid stereotypes and strict typologies. We also avoid
designating functions to strict and discrete zones. These are
taboos for all of us. Instead, we think in terms of gradient
fields of activity, about variable social scenarios calibrated by
various event parameters. We think in terms of actor-artifact
networks. That’s the way we break down a program, a task.
And that makes sense, because the formal heuristics and func
tional heuristics coalesce, make sense together. To translate
these functions into form you need the formal heuristics I
discussed earlier.
as technologies of design by modernists like Norman Foster;
they could also be used by neoclassicists. The point is that
the tools themselves have great potential, but we need to
drive these potentials and draw decisive conclusions and give
value and direction to the utilization of these tools. That is
the difference between a set of techniques and a style, which
depends on these techniques, albeit not exclusively, but drives
them to a new destiny. Foster’s British Museum dome could
only have been done with parametric tools. Every joint is dif
ferent, every panel is different. The use of parametrics made
this possible, but the spirit of this application is the spirit of
modernism of neutralizing the differences, making them
inconspicuous. Here all elements are different but they want
to appear the same. Against that I put forward a new kind
of “artistic project,” the project of driving the conspicuous
amplification of differences. So a difference in curvature is
transcoded into radically different conditions of ribbing, of
gridding, of dense networking, perhaps engendering a phase
the development of versatile conditions and different atmo
spheres, which bleed into each other instead of establishing
disparate zones. I think our work forms a much more perti
nent image and vehicle of contemporary life forces and pat
terns of social communication than that big Foster dome.
viations rather than neutralization and compensation, is also
related to the difference between exploratory design research
and problem solving. Problem solving is the engineering
side, the side of parametric technique. In contrast, when we
are talking about parametricism as style, we’re talking about
teasing out the as yet unknown potentials of these techniques,
but with the general direction clearly set by the parametricist
heuristic principles. This has been going on for quite a while
now. I believe that we are on the cusp of moving from an
avant-garde condition into claiming the mainstream. Most
of our projects, even most of our built work, are hypotheses,
manifestos, but I think some of our projects go beyond that
and are becoming compelling success stories in the real world.
ness of our formal vocabulary and the richness of types of
structures we are addressing. There’s a kind of unity within
difference, or difference within unity, moving across various
scales: endless forms. But these endless forms are there to or
ganize and articulate life. So formpo”Wers function. That’s the
new thesis. Spatial organization sustains social organization.
Can we demonstrate, control, and predict this? To a certain
extent, I would argue, we can.
history of the whole evolution of architecture. The funda
mental thesis is that social order requires spatial order, that
society doesn’t exist without a structured environment, and
that society can only evolve if it is able to enhance and intri
cately structure its built environment as well. Architecture
provides the necessary substrate of cultural evolution.
