ABSTRACT
Our starting point is a well-known story. During the 1990s, while many American architects were reading the English translation of Gilles Deleuze’s study The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (1993), Greg Lynn edited an issue of Architectural Design (1993) on the topic of Folding in Architecture. In his introduction, “Architecture Curvilinearity: The Folded, the Pliant, and the Supple,” Lynn called for curvilinear forms.3 This invocation led to the provisional assertion of a “blob” architecture, the official birth of which seems to be marked by Lynn’s subsequent article in ANY magazine (1996), where he argued that tectonics was “out” and obsolete, while topology was “in” and sexy.4 Lynn also thumbed his nose at a series of personalities who were fighting rearguard battles, defending what remained of the idea of Semperian tectonics. Moreover, during the 1990s, new tools for 3-D modeling offered by numerous computer applications (Maya, Form*Z, Rhino) made it possible for architects to literally multiply the folds in their projects.
