Greg Lynn Probable Geometries and Blobs

The idea of human order, architectural order and the relationship of the human body to architectural space is one in which every architectural student is aware.  Architecture typical has a clear connection to proportion, pure form, and geometry, Greg Lynn's Probable Geometries: The Architecture of Writing in Bodies states the rejection of Bataille and Hollier to static proportion of the complete pure forms of exact geometries in architecture "in favor of a transgressive practice of writing against form."  

 

According to Bataille and Hollier architecture is eidetic: reducible, static, exact, fixed, proportional, and identically reproducible.  In accordance to their definition of writing, architecture and writing are quite opposite.  If writing "does not arrest matter in fixed proportions; it respects and maintains incompleteness, undecidability, amorphousness and other vague characteristics" then it is indeed anti-architecture by definition.

 

It was about this point in the article that I found myself lost, trying to define “writing” and more clearly understand why exactly it is not architectural.  But after reading the article in its several times, I think I may have begun to understand exactly what Lynn was arguing. Writing is something that we use to explain concepts and ideas, but concepts, ideas, words, and meaning are ever changing.  They are not concrete, words can be vague; two people can say the exact same thing yet the context can result in completely separate meanings.  Architecture, when referring to a physical building is concrete, static, its there, built and physically cannot change on its own, by the definition given by Bataille and Hollier.  So by default using writing to explain and define architecture one is actually creating a contraction, using something that is ever changing and vague, to explain something that is static and defined. 

 

I also found the discussion of exact, inexact, and anexact quite compelling, although initially difficult to grasp because I have never encountered the concept of anexact, the idea is quite clear, and it actually makes sense for the three to exist.  The concept of anexact, something that is rigorous and precise that still lacks unity and completion allows for flexibility in concepts and a greater range of thinking about form. 

 

Blob Tectonics, or why tectonics is square and topology is groovy seems to directly tie into these concepts.  The concept that a form can exist in exact definition but be capable of change because of its surroundings and the environment in which it is placed.  It is an anexact form in theory.  It also allows an understanding of the blob, an once thought of goo like substance the is nothing more then that which is depicted in horror movies, is actually a complex form.