Greg Lynn, 2003

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Among artists, designers, and architects there is an emerging sensibility of intricacy. Partially heralded by the digital and genetic engineering revolutions, the term intricacy connotes a new model of connectionism composed of extremely small scale and incredibly diverse elements. Intricacy is the fusion of disparate elements into continuity, the becoming whole of components that retain their status as pieces in a larger composition. Unlike simple hierarchy, subdivision, compartmentalization or modularity, intricacy involves a variation of the parts that is not reducible to the structure of the whole.

During the last twenty years architecture has been particularly attentive to developments in the visual arts, primarily sculpture. Since the 1980s sculptors such as Donald Judd and Vito Acconci have proposed and realized building designs. There has always been a close relationship of exchange between architects and artists, and not only because they are forced to collaborate in close spatial proximity. The tumultuous and productive relationship between Richard Serra and Frank Gehry is but one example of mutual influence. More often than not, it is the sculptors who host the conversation, as is the case with artists like Judd, James Turrell and Daniel Buren. The architects, for their part, have translated their techniques in architecture while refining generic forms and fetishizing their detailing. The focus on celebration and isolation of detailed connections has dominated the conversation between architecture and sculpture for a group of architects as diverse as David Chipperfield, John Pawson, Tadao Ando, Peter Zumthor, Diener and Diener and Richard Meier. Apart from these minimalists, who remain spatially and formally close to the simplicity of minimal sculpture, there are architects of greater spatial and formal complexity whose work is equally invested in material detail: Steven Holl, Williams and Tsien, Machado Silvetti, Will Bruder, Stanley Saitowitz and Rafael Moneo to name just a few.

The term intricacy is intended to move away from this understanding of the architectural detail as an isolated fetishized instance within an otherwise minimal framework. Detail need not be the reduction or concentration of architectural design into a discrete moment. In an intricate network, there are no details per se. Detail is everywhere, ubiquitously distributed and continuously variegated in collaboration with formal and spatial effects. Instead of punctuating volumetric minimalism with discrete details, intricacy implies all over complexity without recourse to compositional contrast. Intricacy occurs where macro- and micro-scales of components are interwoven and intertwined.

Since Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown’s Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (1966), it has been important for architecture to define compositional complexity. This exhibition attempts to move beyond Venturi’s pictorial collage aesthetics, as well as the formal and spatial collage aesthetics that constituted the vanguard of complexity in architecture, as epitomized by Johnson and Wigley’s “Deconstructivist Architecture” exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art in 1988. In this way the exhibition is a return to many of the conceptual issues raised in the book Folding in Architecture (1993) that I edited ten years ago. Having had no experience as a curator, I approached the show from my experience as an editor. The show is intended to function within a didactic dimension that epitomizes the formal, structural and material connection between objects placed in conversation. A less explicit connection to the Folding in Architecture book is that the term intricacy is a derivative of “pli,” much like the other terms—complex, complicated, pliant—all of which imply compositional practices of weaving, folding and joining.

Most of the objects in “Intricacy” employ digital or photographic manufacturing and design techniques. The exhibition relies on contemporary machine processes that allow for both a monolithic materiality and form while maintaining an incredible fineness of detail and connection. Because of this machinic focus, the show has some kinship with the “Machine Art” exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art in 1934, curated by Philip Johnson. However, instead of proposing a machine aesthetic for our age, one that would certainly be digital, these works outline a compositional, organizational, visual and material sensibility that is facilitated by, but not simply reducible to, digital design, visualization or manufacturing tools. This exhibition includes only those designs that have achieved a rigorous mastery of digital design technique. Rather than using the computer for its expedience and potential to realize forms and spaces that would be otherwise too complicated, messy or convoluted to produce otherwise, these works make a claim towards elegance, rigor, expertise and, dare say, beauty. Therefore, with one exception, none of these objects rely on process as a validation or explanation of their genesis. The exception is Karl Chu, whose reliance on fractal-like Lindenmayer geometries gives his procedurally derived forms a coherence lacking in other process-based indexical architectural projects. Much interesting work by architects was not included in the exhibition because of this criteria.

Happy accidents and automatic processes are certainly the precursors to fine grain, detailed, continuous compositions. The latter demands a fusion that is not possible without a theory of synthesis and unity that maintains detail as a discrete moment that participates intensively in the construction of a new kind of whole. In this way, a theory of intricate form is drawn from Leibniz’s logic of monadology and Deleuze’s subsequent theories of “le pli,” or the fold. The works in the exhibition mark a multi-faceted approach towards detail, structure and form relying on slippages between complex interconnectedness and singularity, between homogeneity at a distance and near formal incoherence in detail, between disparate interacting systems and monolithic wholes, and finally between mechanical components and voluptuous organic surfaces.

The works exhibited here display an almost myopic rigor within their own disciplines while maintaining an attention to technical innovation outside their respective fields. The installation’s logic draws on similarities in form, material and process and treats disciplinary limits with great degree of expansiveness. Indeed, “Intricacy” aspires to disassociate a number of common formal and structural techniques from the milieu of any particular field. A common thread in the show is an advanced notion of drafting and dimension, whether constructed, drawn, photographed, or modeled. In this way, it is quite important that the exhibition be hosted by architecture, where qualities of drafting, assembly, and volume are so germane.

Intricacy’s visual sensibility emerges from technique rather than figuration or content. The most obvious connections between the works are formal. Material similarity is also prevalent: almost all of the works are realized in plastic, for example. The drift from monolithic objects to infinitesimally scaled components explains the technical similarity where many of the projects use CNC controlled robotic technologies for their construction. Despite these affinities, this exhibition should not be seen as yet another digital architecture exhibition that attempts to define a new style based on simplistic formal and material commonalities germane to the use of computer aided design tools. Unlike the International Style, which was defined by rectilinear masses rendered in glass and steel, intricacy does not rely on material or formal categories for its a priori definition.

Because of the ubiquity and availability of the computer, intricacy can no longer gain its force due to the management of incredible complication and labor intensiveness. Manually assembled work more and more is an aesthetic decision and therefore labor value in art must be understood as a choice. Folk or labor intensive work was discouraged for this reason, as it makes computer designed objects appear exotic while reinforcing the laborious value of the artistic struggle. The robotic ease with which Roxy Paine’s Skumak (2001) forms were mass produced makes the labor value associated with gluing together a cloud of packing peanuts less relevant than the geometry, density, structure and properties of the object itself. No object is more forceful in its statement of modular intricacy than Tom Freidman’s sculpture Untitled (2002). The value of these works becomes a value of construction concept rather than simply complication and labor.

Intricacy evokes a particular kind of cohesion, continuity, holism and even organicity. Intricate structures are continuously connected and intertwined through fine grain local linkages such that a totality or whole is operative. Neither top down, nor bottom up, the method of organization is irrelevant for intricacy. Rube Goldberg contraptions, for instance, are not intricate, they are merely complicated: collages of fragments that operate in mechanically independent motions. They are compartmentalized. Intricate compositions are organic in the sense that each and every part and piece is interacting and communicating simultaneously, so that every instance is effected by every other instance. Contraptions of the Rube Goldberg variety may be fine grain, disparate, complex and interdependent, yet each part is a closed system that could be modularly cut and replaced. Rote machines and gizmos without the ability to incorporate feedback are not intricate. Intricacy can use the techniques of collage but makes no appeals to disjunction.

Many of the artworks in the exhibition, those by James Rosenquist, Fabian Marcaccio and David Reed especially, show how collage techniques can yield continuous field paintings where figures fuse and merge on a single surface rather than invoking a pictorial space of discrete elements. In Rosenquist’s Hours Flowers (1984), the collaged shards are indistinguishable from the fields they overlay as the color, texture and figuration of the flowers and the women’s faces blur and fuse in a single pictorial plane. Similarly, Reed’s #292 (1989-91) works multiple overlaid strokes across and along delineated gridded fields so that locally disparate strokes align on seams while also transparently overlaying one another. In a more detailed and figurative manner, Marcaccio’s Paint Management Drawings (1988-present) connects the weaving of the canvas, the strokes themselves and larger figures along their edges into a whole. These various forms of cohesion counter collage techniques and make the work complexly connected rather than merely complicated. Issues of hierarchy and synthesis become more important than fragmentation and juxtaposition. The familiar disjunction of collage is jettisoned in favor of a monolithic smoothing together of forms and figures such that individuation and difference are maintained with hierarchy and coherence.

The fusion of disparate systems into a continuous rhythm is best explained by the concept of entrainment. In 1665, Christian Huygens, the inventor of the pendulum clock, formulated the Law of Entrainment after observing the behavior of clocks placed adjacent to one another in the same room. Despite their individual movements, over a relatively short time the clocks’ pendulums began to swing in a single synchronous rhythm. Through subtle cancellations, adaptations and modulations the pattern of these disparate mechanisms entrains into a stable, rhythmic, singularity. It was not the clocks themselves, in their finely constructed mechanism and movements, where intricacy dwelled; it was in the ability for their minute motions to subtly modify and adjust to other adjacent patterns. There are two preconditions for entrainment. First, the objects must be nearly modulating, or nearly modular, and second, the objects must be in the same field.

Intricacy is the logic of fused ecologies. In biology there is an untenable but nonetheless fascinating concept of the organism as symbiotic colony of previously free living organisms that adapt to reproduce together. It is one of the most provocative concepts to combat the idea of the simplistic contraption or collage. In the book Microcosmos: Four Billion Years of Evolution from Our Microbial Ancestors (1997), Lynn Margulis argues that higher life forms are colonies that fuse together and evolve to reproduce as a single higher level organism. For instance, the shell of a calcium-depositing organism becomes a skeleton, an ammonia processing organism becomes a kidney, and other symbiotically linked organisms in an ecosystem become organs in a larger organism. Atrophy and hypertrophy of individuated elements in synchronicity with the emergence of the whole organism leads to a new body composed of mutually adapted irreducible parts. This becoming-whole is vastly different from legislated organicity defined by symmetry, proportion, modularity, hierarchy, or other forms of global organization. It also differs from infinite organicity defined by extension, addition, subtrac­tion or multiplication of segmented modular components.

AGGREGATES AND ASSEMBLAGES

There are two types of connected parts that are intricate: aggregations and assemblages. Assemblages are non-modular constructions where each and every part is unique in shape and dimension. Variations are not random but are derived from the overall composition of a whole. Aggregations are instances where modular components are complexly connected to produce a mass or form that is not simply reducible to a single modular logic of assembly. Examples of aggregation are the masonry patterns of Office dA’s Tongxian Model (2002) and Friedman’s assembled packing peanuts. Assemblages are non-modular and include Paine’s Skumaks and Blob Studies as well as the structural trusses of designs by Reiser + Umemoto and Foreign Office Architects.

The Skumak is an assemblage machine and follows an artistic logic of self-criticality. In physics, a critical point is a point where a system radically changes its behavior or structure, for instance, from solid to liquid. In standard critical phenomena, there is a control parameter which an experimenter can vary to obtain this radical change in behavior. In the case of melting, the control parameter is temperature. The Skumak objects freeze the transition from liquid to solid at variable rates thus achieving variations in form. The critical state of the Skumak forms is determined by the intrinsic dynamics of the paint in its surface tension, drying rate and slumping, as well as by the feed rate of the paint that is drawn by Paine in the dispensing CNC (computer numerically controlled) machine. Like the archetype of self-organized critical systems, the sand pile, the Skumaks form results from miniscule changes in feed rate that translate into catastrophic variations in overall form, as well as an internal similarity and coherence that lets them be understood as of the same artistic species, family or typology.

VOLUPTUOUS SURFACES AND UNDULATING LATTICES

Disavowing the disjunction of collage, intricacy privileges fusion by either superimposition or surgical connections along edges. In different ways, the Rosenquist, Marcaccio and Reed paintings all achieve continuities where figures fuse and merge on a single pictorial surface while maintaining multiple discrete figurative vocabularies. The fusion of strokes in Reed through complex transparency and fusion across sliced grid fields, the mingling of facial features with flower petals through collaged shards by Rosenquist, and the local braiding and convolutions of brush strokes by Marcaccio, are all examples of fused cohesiveness in painting. By working complex connections rather than complication the figures in these paintings fluctuate between being discrete elements and smooth pictorial flows. In architecture a similar composition is effected by voluptuous undulating surfaces composed of individuated parts of coplanar structural lattices, space frames or load bearing trusses. Works by COOP HIMMELB(L)AU, Peter Eisenman, Foreign Office Architects, and Karl Chu achieve a fusion of elements on a surface very similar to the photographs of Adam Fuss. The flickering between monolithic surface and a collection of structural components raises issues of hierarchy and synthesis rather than fragmentation and juxtaposition.

Though not included in the exhibition, the fiberglass dress made by fashion designer Hussein Chalayan is an example of form simplified into a single smooth unarticulated surface. The seams, connections, features, colors, pattern and general articulation of a typical dress are smoothed into a single plastic form. This continuous surface is then incised and cut into panels with a freedom of shape, edge and scale that would not have been apparent had the dress been thought in conventional flat surfaces seamed together. At the cut areas, hardware is used to bind and connect the panels. This combination of smooth surfaces and mechanical methods of connection is further extended in Chalayan’s Remote Control Dress, where mechanisms open and close the panels of the dress. These topological surface studies of the form of a dress as pure surface, along with the new patterns that emerge through their incising and reconnection, become the template for cutting and tailoring of a collection.

Since the mid-1980s, Peter Eisenman has drawn formal inspiration from the apparent and latent figures of a site and its history. In his design for the Wexner Center for the Arts, on the campus of Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio (1989), forms from the archaeology of the site, such as an armory, are collaged with the city and campus grids, the landscape, and existing buildings to form a recombinatorial matrix of references and signs. Eisenman’s earlier work, the now canonical series of numbered houses for instance, was characterized by a rigorous exploration of geometric operations and transformations, primarily of L-shaped grids. This spatial and structural research into the complexities of grid structures has been gradually fused with the more figura­tive and symbolic references of projects like the Wexner Center, where archeological shapes from the ground are vertically extruded or literally reconstructed. Much like Chalayan, Eisenman in his competition entry for the Quai Branley Museum in the center of Paris, makes a leap from both vertical extrusion and reconstruction into a smoothing of multiple contextual responses to the existing historic site, primarily in section, with a folding and bending surface. The familiar context is resurfaced topologically to connect the intervention into the site, from building to landscape, from historical city to street, all with a single smooth surface. Like a pastry chef, smoothing frosting with a knife, Eisenman modulates surface into monolith. In order to open the roof to light, entry and view, this voluptuous surface is shredded and split along a lengthwise bias. Eisenman draws a representational connection to the adjacent Eiffel Tower by filling the voids between these shreds with a space frame that follows the undulations of the surface. Where the monolithic connective surface is pulled apart, what was a vertical iconic structural sign in the Eiffel Tower becomes a dense network of structural components woven into a space frame. Instead of a hierarchical relationship between a primary structure and building panels, here the structure and surface are woven together into a continuous variegated system. Both the surface of the building’s mass and the internalized structure affiliate themselves with the Eiffel Tower and the eight story building fabric of Paris without becoming simply iconic or symbolic. Their alignments are subtler and transform along the length of the building. What was a connection to a vertical building and street becomes an alignment to a horizontal plaza. What was an alignment to the vertical structure of the Eiffel Tower becomes an alignment to an entry.

These works are predominantly about surfaces and their articulation through subdivision, modulation, panelization, structure and massing. There are similar issues of connection and fusion of multiple profiles occurring not in the three-dimensional space of an undulating surface but in the pictorial space of layers of paint. The multiple layers of Reed’s painting #292 intricately connect in two ways; along seams and through superposition. The gridded field, a consistent trait in Reed’s paintings, is seemingly the division of the color fields and the foil across which strokes float. In fact, what appear to be continuous strokes are disparate gestures that sever along the gridded field and align at a razor’s edge. Reed’s paintings blush at the moments where strokes at multiple depths commingle on a single surface.

VITAL MECHANISMS

Intricacy of movement is one of the characteristics of a regime of machines that began to express a new kind of mechanical complexity in the 16th century and continues to do so today. The robot is, and has been, the ultimate expression of a machine capable of detailed organic movements. The maquette built by Chris Cunningham for the Bjork video “All is Full of Love” uses two car assembly robots to move and control two humanoid robots made of smooth white surfaces connected by mechanical joints and armatures. The robots fuse monolithic surfaces, often associated with sculpture, and assemblies of mechanical structural members, often associated with architecture. The surfaces of the robots are scored to suggest detachable panels, while the apertures of the surfaces suggest openings to an interior. The parts are connected with mechanical joints and armatures that allow degrees of freedom and motion similar to biological joints. The most exhilarating image is when a digital composite of a face is combined with the head of these robots and the alabaster white plastic like skin seems to have the musculature and elasticity of a human face capable of emoting and expressing feelings. This literally expressive robot is joined by more abstractly expressive works in the exhibition, like the robots that manufacture Paine’s Skumaks, the surfaces of Eisenman ‘s roof forms, the gradiated density of Friedman’s sculpture and the digital technologies of manufacture and drawing used by the architects to build the micro scale models. All the work in this exhibition is in one way or another robotic.

FUSED FORMS

There are intricate lattice networks of two types, modular and non-modular: the first creates intricate series of components, the second creates intricate masses or overall shapes from identical elements. The non-modular components construct surfaces or frames, and the modular networks construct more amorphous clouds. There is a third kind of mass that is more of an intricate monster, a combination of parts that are inextricably smoothed together and fused as a surface. This more sculptural intricacy is apparent in the objects of Bonnie Collura, Marcaccio, Cunningham and Preston Scott Cohen. From Collura’s nine headed Skywalker (2002) dozens of facial features emerge anamorphically as one moves around the piece. In fact, each head is a multiplicity of faces fused into a single surface. Unlike a Boccioni sculpture, that attempts to freeze motion in an instant, and more like the anamorphic paintings of Holbein, which conceal information in a one point perspective and reveal images only to oblique view, the Skywalker figures can only be seen in an anamorphic motion without any single privileged point of view. They instigate continuous oblique roving visual motion. Anamorphic projection is also a critical feature of Preston Scott Cohen’s Eyebeam Competition entry (2002), where tubular volumes branch and multiply volumetrically like a bifurcating tangential shrub. Neither one nor many, these intricately monstrous objects contain a plentitude of figures smoothed together as a single surface.

It is with the combination of these works by Collura, Paine, Cunningham and Rosenquist that the mechanical violence and biological erotics of intricacy are manifestly combined. Although the content and form of Collura’s women’s faces in their agonizing expression come from classical sources, their multiplication, mutation and fusion constitutes an altogether new form of sculptural cohesion one precedent of which are the paintings of Francis Bacon. This cohesion brings them close to the Paine’s Skumaks while their content unlocks tl1e violent sensuality latent in the abstraction of a new kind of form created with vital machines. Much has been made of mechanical reproduction in art and architecture. Like the modern vision of identical glossy modules, intricate reproduction is still dependent on a model of the machine. But instead of a mechanism of simple repetition, an intricate reproduction machine is a wet machine charged with free energy, variation, and subtlety. Where the mechanical is characterized by rote, encoded, repetitive operations on a sequence of identical modular units, a different form of reproduction characterizes the biological. In a word, an intricate machine is a vital rather than mechanical construct. Intricacy evokes an eroticism for the machine and a desire to make it reproduce organically, both in the variation of subtly variegated brothers and sisters as well as a differentiated complex of discrete organs that nonetheless coheres into a beautifully synthesized whole.