Chapter

Allography and the Baroque Agency of the Objectile

EXCERPT

It has been over twenty-five years now since the publication of the first English translation of Gilles Deleuze’s influential book The Fold in 1993. In that time, a vast array of often hilarious architectural pastiches apparently inspired by and often claiming to represent the ideas in Deleuze’s book have been constructed around the globe, and much has been written in architectural discourse on folds, folding, points of inflection, tolerances, affordances, flows, blobs, etc. Very rarely is the question of how to resolve the endemic fissure between conception and material process in the relationship of design method and the construction of ‘designed’ things addressed, or made apparent in the manifestations of designers and architects who claim to have embedded Deleuze’s ideas into their constructions. This essay approaches several key questions about digital design processes of production, and the potential that digital electronic design and digital electronic fabrication tools have for creating ‘non-standard seriality’ or ‘mass variability’ as a viable mode of practice in design, fabrication, and manufacture that can address and theoretically overcome this fissure by considering the ‘objectile’ as a fundamental conceptual and material building format that has the flexibility and agency appropriate to the task.…