yes, i think some of it consists of autonomous objects which are nothing but a bunch of literal folds, especially some early greg lynn stuff. i do still respect these guys, but yeah....the whole folding thing's pretty much over with anyway.

isn't there a degree to which a person might suspend her disbelief in the power of analogies? It is the same when we hail Suger for peeling open the Saint-Dennis to let God in in all her polychromatic razmattaz.
.Beatrice.'the Love that sets the sun and other stars in motion'.

Maybe some are trying to build cathedrals inside the pleats of office complexes and hotels....why is that pretentious? its touching..sweet..and perhaps slightly pathetic for being vunerable...in an age where analogy is only decent in schoolchildren exercise books.
compare Eisenman's and Sancho&Madridejos' folds. The former springs forth with pseudoobjectivist self justification, in a landscape that has to justify everything within a language of necessity and utility. Perversely, Eisenman turns the esoteric into a utilitarian necessity. A gesture in a metaphysical unified project..a desire to blend science, philosophy and architecture in one great fold self repeating within itself. It is a place where people grow old to quickly.

The latter's is a toy, a small poetic conjecture...a fold as a treasured play of quirkiness...a fold that shares the clichés of the mediterranean carefee-ness. cute. almost accidental.

Yup, it's a superficial, over-intellectualized rambling.

Be careful who you lump together, though. A lot of the 'trends' are put together by authors, and not by the architects. Decon was a great example, everyone with an angle was decon, but that was simply wrong. It made for good book sales, though.

Gehry and Hadid, for example, have been part of every movement for the last 15 or more years (according to my piles of books), but their ideas and motivations rarely coincide with whatever nonsense is being tossed around. Just an example.

It's trendy to be part of a trend, and if you know the right people, that can get you in a book, too, regardless of your abilities.

wasn't it frank gehry who said with regard to eisenman's work that what he thought was really important was the insane spaces that he generated and that the philosophy and all that was just bs as far as he was concerned?

it was, it was...
i agree with what mbr said about the labels, but it was the only quick way of making people understand what i was refering to.and its curious to see how hadid in her latest work is actually steering (although only aesthetically ) toward the same curves and radia of gehry, although i am sure patrik schumacher would have averyprofound and marxist explenation as to the rerason why her architecture is turning into a kind of plastic coated high tech.

isn't it funny how people like koolhaas still feel the need for a philosphical backing to their design decision, when i believe that the programmatic innovations they have introduced in architecture are more than sufficien to justify their work.its looks like, although he is incredibly more succesfull than someone like eisenmann, he still feels the need to answer the master, or to have an answer to give to the intelligentsia.
Idont despise eisenmann, i think his work in indispensible, more to architects than humanity at large, i think the autopoeisis of our field imposes that we filter his findings, because i also believe that an eisenmann building is pretty useless to the average joe.

ThunderArm vs SnakeHead

yeah, but even if the pragmmatics are enough to justify their work, i don't see anything wrong with an additional philisophical layer. the introduction of philosophy and literary theory definitely requires a greater stretch of the imagination or critical thinking than what those advocates of the experiential or "affective" would prefer. i remember the first time i saw some of lebbeus woods drawings i was blown away by them, but after i picked up radical reconstructions and read the book, i actually found the writing to be much better in some way. the guy is incredible, but the drawings almost seemed like too much, as objects unto themselves which really don't require the philosophy in some way. the work of samuel mockbee seems more in tune in some way with what woods writes about. what i was taking from the drawings initially all but disappeared. i'm all for theory, but architecture can become so overwhelming at times that the theory becomes irrelevent (or vice versa). i supposed that from a theoretical standpoint that's why i don't think frank gehry is as full of it as a lot of people say.

bossman:

i do agree with you when you say that " don't see anything wrong with an additional philisophical layer". its just that sometimes this addition is made in a very un-carefull, superficial way, thus making the whole thing sound as an excuse. and it is not so much worrying when the additional layer of meaning is applied by one of many critics, but i find it scary when the architect himself finds the need to postrationalize his work...

uneDITed, are you a professional, an academic or both? may I ask you what king of practice you work in? you seem very knowledgeable, although i find your way of writing very hard to read (mind you, i'm a foreigner)

yeah, i definitely agree with you there....if it was an intellectual work to begin with, then there is no need to intellectualize it

I find it interesting that all the great classic ages of architecture had definite philosophical (usually theological actually - which is different - but thats another discussion)underpinnings to them. but when a curent architect claims some philosophical underpinning to their work it's called bs.
I'm not weighing in on the fold discussion - just commenting in general. To me architecture is the nexus of art science and philosophy - and to deny any of the three is to lessen the potential of work that is "more than sufficient" without it.

norm:

i am not saying that having a layer of theoretical discussion in a bulding is wrong. i believe that every design should have a theory behind it, and that theory is the basis to which designers refer in order to make those choices they face and that cannot always be answered by common sense or practical needs. what i was saying is that, if someone designs the educatium, which is one of the greatest buildings of the last 20 years (my humble opinion, obviously), and then feels the need to come and tell us that the fold represents the fold in thought that deleuze talked about, well, that sounds to me like a postrationalization, and a useless one, like he was trying to justify a piece of work which is already justified, or that he is trying to be contrived for contrivedness' sake (ups, a neologism there). i believe in philosophy as an integral part of architecure, i try to my best to make every single design decision following what i want my building to mean and do. at the same time i do not discard architecture because there is no hidden meaning behind it (aka gehry). i used postrationalization before (how the hell do you get through architectural education otherwise?) but it just puzzled me because i saw some of the people i admire the most using it and in such a blatant way, that i wondered wether i had missed some of the logical passages behind it. thus the thread.

Here is a nice crystal fold:

In drifts of sleep I came upon you
Buried to your wasit in snow.
You reached your arms out:I came to
Like water in a dream of thaw.

The Rescue. Seamus Heaney

god, i'm in love with the girl that just walked in. and its al your fault uneDITed

first..beg..as promised

I watch you from the beach of dreams
Moonlit on felspar crags where
Quiet breezes keep your bronze tresses
Lapping your neck like a midnight tide

Stygian Shore. C.L.Tutton