Greg Lynn FORM, Ark of the World, Tarcoles River, Costa Rica, 2003 top: Ark of the World

was conceived as a tourist destination in the rainforest of the Tarcoles River, having a mixed programme of natural history museum, ecology centre and contemporary art museum.

Greg Lynn FORM, Embryological House, 1999 bottom: Sterolith model. The Embryological House project speculated on a housing system developable from a malleable primitive geometry into a potentially unlimited series of blob iterations. These were conceived as being constructed as a monocoque aluminium shell with secondary frame and additional steel members. Lynns recent work with composites examines ways in which the tectonic logic of these early propositions could now be reconceptualised, as the Room Vehicle Prototype begins to suggest.

On a Fine
Architectural innovators often work on the cusp of what is feasible, acceptable and convincing. Practising futuristically can also mean risking going down a blind alley. Over the last two decades, Greg Lynn has been one of the leading figures in innovative practice, demonstrating an instinct for the meaningfully inventive. One of his major contributions has been cross-fertilisation of technologies, introducing the likes of animation and robotics from other disciplines into architecture. Having interviewed Lynn in April 2012, GuestEditor Pia Ednie-Brown reflects on the specific characteristics of his work and mode of operation.

To do this kind of work its a very fine line between sounding like youre a lunatic, and sounding like youre on the cutting edge of architecture. Its a fine line.1 This is advice Greg Lynn offered to his students during a review of a studio work exploring the potential for robotic architectures. Proposals for robotically activated, moving buildings, described through animations and physically modelled using digital fabrication technologies, has been a pursuit of Lynns design studios for the last five years or so. The architectural propositions are looking towards the future, aiming for the merging of buildings and robots in ways and to degrees that are yet to be realised. While the territory of robotic fabrication is becoming more familiar, presenting us with new relationships between designing and making,2 the becomingrobot of buildings is still out there. Presumably, Lynns advice is that the students strive to present their propositions in ways that come across as canny and cleverly knowing and as such, cutting edge rather than insane. Doing this successfully, however, requires remaining aware that these kinds of explorations are inevitably located on, or almost over, the edge of acceptability, viability and believability a bit off the beaten track, or just a bit off, and needing a good sniff to see if its too far over the edge or not. This edgy condition can also be where ugliness sits, poised and waiting on the edge of aesthetic insanity or offness.

Line
44

Pia Ednie-Brown

Greg Lynn FORM with Christian Moeller, ROOC (Robotic Operated Olympic Canopy), Olympic Park visitor attraction, London, 2009 This composite-shell canopy is supported by a series of robotic armatures, in a proposal that extends the British landscape pavilion to include interactive motion. In a state of rest, the only detectable motion of the canopy is a subtle breathing quality. However, its embedded artificial life system is capable of triggering dramatic movement in response to environmental stimulus, following the sound of a passing siren or the movement of a large crowd of people as detected by its camera and microphone inputs.

GreG Lynn and the VOice OF innOVatiOn

Peter Eisenman seems to have felt that edge sharply, having told Lynn that his Embryological Houses were really ugly and horrible. A year after making that remark, however, Lynn showed the Ark of the World museum and visitor centre project, and Eisenman found it disgusting, asking him: Why isnt it like those beautiful embryological houses?3 Sylvia Lavin, after having had a similar response to the visitor centre, was quoted as calling it the ugliest thing I ever saw.4 In her essay Freshness, she carefully attends to this issue, convincingly recasting the diagnosis of ugliness in terms of novelty: which begins as a feeling indexically expressed convulsively and automatically in the speed of verbal utterances like it s ugly.5 Rather than being the opposite of beautiful, Lynns architecture becomes something else, something other, something new.6 His projects, as articulated in Lavins analysis, revive an appreciation of the aesthetic affects of novelty: maybe at first appearing mad or ugly, but in the end, as Lavin suggests, fresh. Lynns practice has a history of innovating through cross-field technological adoption. Having famously explored the potential of animation technologies for rethinking architectural form and design technique in the 1990s, he then tweaked his trajectory towards the use of digital and other advanced fabrication technologies across many neighbouring industries, recalibrating the tropes of architectural construction, materiality and formal languages. He is now drawing on both of these trajectories in developing projects such as ROOC (Robotic Operated Olympic Canopy), the RV (Room Vehicle) Prototype, and the Smart Mark sailing buoy, all of which quite literally and robotically move. Across these three interlinked lines of investigation, one can discern a common, intertwined attention to movement, tectonics and digitally driven machines. The way in which this attention has been directed has changed as the practice has evolved, often redefining architectural conventions along the way shifting, for example, the logics of tectonics, construction and materials with projects like Blobwall (2005), and relations between form and structure in his use of composite materials in projects such as the more recent RV Prototype. But what is this kind of work Lynn refers to in his advice? Certainly one could give it many names like innovative, fresh or ugly but what are the qualities of action that mobilise it? How might we characterise the inherent approaches that make it the kind that it is? If Lynns work is innovative, which seems as widely accepted a prognosis as its ugliness, then what diagram of practice underscores this perpetual novelty machine? We could start by pointing to Lynns wide range of attention: I spend a lot of energy staying connected with people in other fields who are using a similar medium I think of the new as being located and somehow shared between these different

45

46

Greg Lynn FORM with Kreysler & Associates, Smart Mark, 2012 A number of sensors, cameras and monitors extend the capabilities and role of the sailing buoy. Smart Mark can flip its orientation, creating an improved hull profile for towing or self-propulsion.

47

Greg Lynn FORM, Blobwall, Los Angeles, 2005 Brightly coloured, hollow plastic rotationmoulded blobs are used in a modular system that reinvents the idea of the brick wall.

fields. You find the place where people are moving in a direction which you wouldnt see if you just only talked to all the other architects.7 Across Lynns history, his practice has engaged with a diversity of collaborations and clients8 that reflect his practice location in the Hollywood-infused West Coast of the US, plugged into entertainment and software communities. Collaborations range from Brad Pitt and motion graphics company Imaginary Forces, to major cultural institutions such as the Guggenheim Museum, jewellery company Atelier Swarovski, and composite materials manufacturer Kreysler & Associates with sailmaker North Sails. The polyphony of conversations this indicates involves more than just attention to talking with other people, which generally involves a relatively straightforward use of language. More generally, inhabiting transdisciplinary territory getting inside alternative techniques and frameworks in order to produce the fresh requires tapping into some kind of abstraction in order to generate connections beneath, across and between the differences. Lynn has discussed such an abstract connector in terms of machine language: Everyone in my studio knows how to talk to machines. We spend a great deal of time speaking their language, and their language is translated much more easily than ours The spread of machine language and programming is in some ways more significant than the worldwide spread of

English.9 One might imagine that a bunch of architects uttering machine language, talking to robots in code, could appear like a conglomerate of lunatics speaking in idiomorphic dialects.10 But programming is only one aspect of talking to machines, also requiring an understanding of their tendencies and capacities that builds up through a history of engagement where they fail, their limits, their capacities. Like learning to play a musical instrument and writing music for it, learning to speak with ones instrument is not just about the musical score; it involves gradually finessing ones engagement with it until you can work imaginatively with the potential it offers. As such, while virtuosos might be found muttering madly in incomprehensible tongues, they are also cleverly making cunning moves inside their engagement with instruments, like Barbarella folding the traits of the excessive machine back into itself (see The Ethics of the Imperative on pp 1921 of this issue). The virtuoso points to the idea that ones approach to engagement and negotiation within the actions of practice shapes the nature of that practice. Having engaged with many different systems, tools and techniques across an array of collaborations, there has been no lack of dance partners with which to explore and adapt different steps and movement routines. This is no small point, for as Mark Rakatansky once pointed out: Diagrammatics will only be recognisable by

I spend a lot of energy staying connected with people in other fields who are using a similar medium I think of the new as being located and somehow shared between these different fields.
Greg Lynn FORM with Kreysler & Associates, Smart Mark, 2012 Blurring distinctions between robots and objects, Smart Mark incorporates a number of new technologies to the design of a sailing buoy. These include the ability to set and adjust courses during a race, and hold position in rough seas and high currents without anchors.

48

The joints and connections of the blobs are cut with precision by a robot. This enables the modular wall to avoid mortar or glue, the units being welded together with a tool used to repair car bumpers.

Having engaged with many different systems, tools and techniques across an array of collaborations, there has been no lack of dance partners with which to explore and adapt different steps and movement routines.

virtue of how they are drawn forth in the act of responding to internal and external forces.11 An emphasis on Lynns generosity of engagement is discussed in the essay that follows, which is an excerpt from a text written by philosopher Brian Massumi in 2000. Through closely examining the internal tendencies of the generative design techniques Lynn brought to table in the 1990s, Massumi explores the intricacies of Lynns early work in proposing it as directly an ethics as a design endeavour: an ethics of engagement. This ethics constitutionally accepting of what lies outside its control, tending from the very beginning towards productive engagement is at the core of the virtuosity that defines what kind of work Lynns practice stands for. Perhaps the ways that Lynns future robotic buildings move and engage with the world will act out a movement-diagram of an implicit ethics that can be traced from the blobs, and unfolded across the subsequent production of families of buildings and objects. Might this tell us something more tangible, even if abstractly, about what kind of work this is? Probably, but any such diagram of practice will be found balanced on a very fine line, not just between lunacy and the cutting edge, but between multiple polarities. If the future more explicitly unfolds the ethics that Massumi refers to, it will pertain to virtuosity rather than the virtuous, always teetering on the edge, on a fine line.12 2

Notes 1. From the video Giant Robot, Studio Lynn, University of Applied Arts Vienna, 2008: www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_ embedded&v=XSdXnmq37x0. 2. See Iain Maxwell and Dave Pigram, In the Cause of Architecture: Traversing Design and Making, Log 25, Summer 2012, pp 3140. 3. Quotes from Greg Lynn interview with Pia Ednie-Brown, April 2012. 4. Sylvia Lavin, Freshness, in Greg Lynn, Greg Lynn Form, Rizzoli (New York), 2008, p 14. 5. Ibid, p 21. 6. Ibid, p 19. 7. From Greg Lynn interview with Pia Ednie-Brown, April 2012. 8. See mapping of clients and collaborators up until 2008: Greg Lynn Form, op cit, pp 16970. 9. Greg Lynn, Machine Language, Log 10, Summer/Fall 2007, pp 5563. 10. See Ezio Blasetti, pars (orationis), Log 25, Summer 2012, pp 717. 11. Mark Rakatansky, Motivations of Animation, Any 23: Diagram Work, 1998, p 55. 12. See also Pia Ednie-Brown, Architecture on Wire: Resilience Through Vitality, Log 25, Summer 2012, pp 1522.

Greg Lynn FORM, RV (Room Vehicle) Prototype, 2012 Within the footprint of a small building is a huge quantity of liveable surface. The RV Prototype rotates in both the vertical and horizontal axes, tumbling the inhabitant in something of a cross between a theme park ride, exercise machine and natural landscape. This opens up more useable surfaces: living spaces on one side, bathing on another, with sleeping above. Text 2013 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images Greg Lynn

49