Architecture remains as the last refuge for members of the flat-earth society

I fell outta my chair, or should I say sofa, with laughter after reading that sentence (Sorry Ambrose, I just had to start it this way). I feel that this sentence captures the whole essence of what the chapter (Animate Form) is about. The whole world is in motion, we are experiencing technological breakthroughs almost everyday now. I'm sure that we have all been in a position where we get morph into our inner child, with jumpy excitement when we purchase a new gadget: laptop, dvd player, or ipod, only to be crushed a few days later by finding out about a newer, better, faster, and sleeker model that has just come out. Architecture evolution, for one reason or another, seems to have come to a halt.

Science, mathematics and technology, since the inception of civilized earth, have served as means to achieve both spiritual harmony and efficient craftsmanship in architecture. Artists have always seen mathematical and proportional beauty in nature, and have always thrived to use the same free flowing, seemingly organic, forms of nature into their own work. Whether is the majestic colonnades of ancient Egyptian temples, or the Domes roofing religious architecture, or the curvilinear surfaces of Baroque churches; architecture seeks solace in the mathematics of nature to ascend to a higher spiritual level of consciousness and a heightened sense of experience. It then makes sense that when a mathematical breakthrough occurs, case in point calculus, architects should re-evaluate their process methods. Greg Lynn's curve diagrams shine a great deal of light on this situation. Baroque architecture relies of simple geometrical compositions to achieve the curve needed. The compositional equation from which the curve is derived from should be simple enough and communicable to the builder, and as a result, looks more like a constructed curve and less like a free flowing organic curve found in nature. With the arrival of calculus a century ago, and the later arrival of the computer systems that can now easily calculate these very complex equations, the curve, or spline, becomes a better reproduction of nature. This should open the doors for architects of the 21st century to explore further uncharted domains, allowing their creative process to evolve.

Greg Lynn's curve diagrams should not always be taken literally. When converted in 3d, the geometrical curves form spheres, whereas the splines form blobs. Spheres are literal rigid objects, unaltered and static, whereas the conceptual paradigm for blobs brings the concept of dynamic flexibility. With blobs, if you apply a force to one end of it, a reaction of its opposite side will occur. Imagine a balloon filled with x amount of air; if pressure is applied on one side, the other side will inflate more. In an architecture setting, lets assume that the program is shaped by a number of connected blobs rather than geometrical shapes. During program alteration, it is much easier to reshape blobs that have no geometrical inheritance than it is to reshape rectilinear forms, as they have to adhere to certain mathematical principles. The blobs in this instance take the more literal association of bubble diagrams. They are computated bubble diagrams, the only difference is that they play a more active role in the design process as opposed to free drawn bubble diagrams.

These blobs are easier to control and manipulate when one takes into account Lynn's descriptions of the continuous series. He states that "Architectural space is infinitized by removing motion and time through iterative reduction." They are added back later after the fact, hence not taking part in shaping the form into what it needs to be. Even nature takes part in shape shifting through the ages, why should architecture confirm to static properties? One of the major concerns of the 21st century is diminishing natural resources, land being one of them. Green and sustainable architecture speak of building footprint, and yet our buildings continuously become abandoned, or even worse, torn down due to its inefficiency to flexibility. More materials then become used to replace a building, that didnt comply to today's spatial needs, with another static building, that in twenty years will probably face the same fate as its predecessor. Greg Lynn talks about the use of animation to create dynamic spaces that will help eliminate this phenomenon (an example of using technology to solve our times problems). This by no means that the building should develop legs and runaway whenever a bulldozer comes its way, or whenever it feels like moving to another location (although some mobile structures are exploring this concept), or even doing a transformers "autobots...transform" trick (although, Lynn's conceptual idea does exactly that). Taking example from a boat's/ship' s hull, animation allows topology to incorporate a multiplicity of vectors and times, in a single continuous surface.