After Norman Foster, Yona Friedman, Bernard Tschumi, Peter Eisenman, and Thom Mayne, the protagonist of the next appointment with the most interesting players on the contemporary architecture scene will be the U.S. designer Greg Lynn. He is the subject of the second lecture of Targetti’s Osservatorio sull’Architettura’s 2006 season, which with the critical contribution of Pino Brugellis and Marco Brizzi will explore the lights and shadows of the fascinating world of digital architecture: the frontiers offered by the new technologies and the concrete limits imposed on spatial materializations.

 

Just over forty, Greg Lynn incarnates the latest-generation architect who uses the computer as an extremely “natural” element in developing and giving body to his artistic work. Considered by international criticism to be the top theoretician and exponent of “Blob architecture,” digital architecture, he is now celebrated in the world’s most important museums, collections, and exhibitions, from New York’s Guggenheim to the Beaubourg of Paris and from Vienna’s MAK to the Biennale di Venezia. He teaches at the most prestigious international universities and by now has worksites open throughout the world.

 

Greg Lynn, who trained at Peter Eisenman’s studio after studying philosophy and architecture, interprets architecture as a dynamic process and aims at going beyond the traditional spatial concepts that have always characterized the history of the discipline. Greg Lynn’s architecture develops in strict correlation with the most sophisticated digital production systems used by the aerospace industry and computer animation to dynamically generate forms while the designer-director controls their changing and unpredictable development.

 

Historically, architects have conceived of movement as the travel of a moving eye in space. Architecture - in both the concrete and the abstract - has been considered to be static, fixed, ideal, and inert. The themes of movement and dynamics in architecture are typically addressed through pictorial views of static forms. Not only have buildings been constructed as static forms, but more importantly architecture has been conceived and created based on models of stasis and equilibrium.

 

Computer animation programs have typically reinforced the postulate that architectural design would appertain to static Cartesian space waiting to be animated by a roving eye. Instead of using animation software to breathe picturesque movement into lifeless Cartesian spaces, Greg Lynn’s architecture represents an ongoing attempt to use motion to dynamically generate architectural projects.

“Classical architectural metaphors of stasis and equilibrium are replaced with more vital architectural design processes that are, literally and conceptually, animated. Building forms and organizations are evolved through the interaction of disparate forces and gradients of influence in time based environments within which the designer guides their often undecidable growth, transformation and mutation.” The development of these projects proceeds through the development of prototypes chosen for their flexibility and adaptability. To initiate transformation and mutation, external constraints are exerted on these internally-regulated prototypes. The result of this interaction between a generalized flexible organization and particular external constraints is a design process that has undecidable outcomes and gives free rein to an improvisational design attitude.

Greg Lynn thus investigates the combination of deformable surfaces, external physical forces, and technological computer-aided processes based on computers and biological models of growth, development, and transformation using animation rather than conventional architectural design software. In their search for systems that simulate the appearance of life, the special effects and animation industry is of fundamental importance for this type of investigation. The crossover from determinism to controlled indeterminacy is central to the development of this dynamic design method. Just as the use of topological geometries that can be bent, twisted, deformed, and differentiated while maintaining their continuity is also essential.

 

Despite the methods by which dynamic architecture is incubated, the first buildings constructed by Lynn were not dissimilar from those which Maurizio Fagiolo defined as ArchiSculpture and which in one way or another characterized a good part of the historical avant-gardes of the last century, from Expressionism to Informal Architecture; from the technological utopias to Deconstructivism. The explosive energy of these dynamic forms that embody the logic of computer animation would seem to conflict with the weight and static nature of matter to outflow into what some critics by now define as “classical Baroquism in architecture.”

 As is by now the custom at the Fondazione Targetti’s Osservatorio sull’Architettura, these themes and the limits and potentials of this research, carried forward with such enthusiasm and tenacity, will be addressed at the meeting in a debate between Lynn and several young critics.

 

 

Greg Lynn FORM has been at the cutting edge of design in the field of architecture when it comes to the use of computer-aided design.  The projects, publications, teachings and writings associated with the office have been influential in the acceptance and use of advanced technology for design and fabrication.

Greg Lynn FORM was established in 1994 in NJ and relocated to Venice, California in 1998 to take advantage of the knowledge and technology resources in both the manufacturing and entertainment industries of Southern California. 

The office is a team that combines a creative ease and expertise with cutting edge design, manufacturing and construction techniques germane to the aeronautic, automobile and film industries.  As well as local projects, Greg Lynn FORM is experienced in working on international projects ranging from a large to a small scale: he has recently designed for Alessi the “Supple” coffee cup and is designing Sociopolis, a complex with apartments units and a centre for art and music in Valencia, Spain; he has designed private houses as the Slavin house and the Bloom house in California an he is involved in the renovation of Kleiburg Block, a 500 units housing block built in the early 1970’s in Amsterdam.

Greg Lynn, In addition to leading his design practice, has taught and lectured around the world: at the ETH (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology) in Zurich, at the Columbia University, at the "angewandte" in Vienna, Austria, at UCLA in Los Angeles and at Yale University.  His architectural designs have received numerous awards and have been exhibited in both architecture and art museums including the 2000 Venice Biennale of Architecture. He writes and lectures widely on architectural design and theory. He is the author of Intricacy (ICA, Philadelphia), Architectural Laboratories (NAI, Rotterdam), Folds, Bodies and Blobs: Collected Essays (La Lettre Volée, Brussels), Animate Form (Princeton Architectural Press, New York) and the forthcoming Predator (Wexner Center, Columbus, OH) and Embryological House (also by Princeton Architectural Press).

 

 If you want to partecipate please contact the Osservatorio sull'Architettura (osservatorioarchitettura@targetti.it) or phone to +39 055 3791285 within the 19th of June.