METAMORPHOSIS
Folding architecture relates not only to transformations of form and space but also of process and thought.
Metamorphosis is essentially concerned with transformations; transformations of thought, flows, body, appropriation and politics. Everything is transforming all the time and all at once. This abstract explores metamorphosis through the theme of folding architecture.
“the fold is more important for the development of new methods to arrive at a new architecture, than it is for the development of an individual architectural form. It is therefore, as Gilles Deleuze claims, an ‘absolute internalisation.’”7
Greg Lynn is a leading exponent of metamorphosis in architecture and has developed a language of “folds, bodies and blobs”. He develops architecture by setting up certain parameters then applying topological forces to forms in an idealised transformational process. This in its purest sense correlates to ‘homeomorphism’, a term applied to certain metamorphoses where there is no cutting, only transformation, such as the classic example of the doughnut morphing into a coffee mug.
The process involves a transformation of understanding; re‐thinking the way forms are created, manipulated and explored. So too, the way parts are connected as a whole, even the way we perceive gravity is challenged through the consideration of the “oblique plane”.8
Analysing the forces which occur within the context of a matchbox it is apparent that pulling and pushing movements are the most active. Thus the idea for the matchbox architecture was to create a parametric intervention which transformed in response to pushing and pulling the forces acting on it.
Literally the matchbox architecture does transform when forces are applied to it, it is pliant, it shrinks and grows, rises and falls, bends and straightens. The folds are transforming but so too is the space formed around and between them. However more significantly, the matchbox architecture reflects a dynamic process of creation where folding was as such a ‘means to a means’
The folding architecture movement, in which Greg Lynn has played a significant role, takes metamorphosis as a foundational concept. Folding architecture operates with “a more fluid logic of connectivity”1. It is a “pliant architecture”2 Lynn,the architecture of “smooth space”3.
The question becomes where to stop, where to draw the line, when to print the rendered model, when to glue the matchbox ‐ in an ideal folding architecture you wouldn’t, the metamorphosis would continue infinitely.
“The paperfold can be considered an event, defined by Leibniz as an extension, where the object expands into an infinite series of variability containing neither a final term nor a limit”4
“The fold: the infinite work in process, not how to conclude but how to continue, to bring to infinity”5
“Folding as a generative process in architectural design is essentially experimental [...] Our interest lies in the morphogenetic process, the sequence of transformations that affect the design object.”6