In the last quarter of the 20th century, renowned architects and architectural theorists such as Greg Lynn, Manuel Gausa, Juan Carlos Sancho and Sol Madridejos, as well as philosophers such as Félix Guattari and Guilles Deleuze have found multiple links between the concept of folding, its formal exploration and topological definition and architectural creation. The term fold covers a wide variety of definitions and applications in architecture, from the description and structural use of Fred Angerer and Heino Engel, and the formal exploration of Farshid Moussavi, to the more conceptual and theoretical reading of Peter Eisenman.
What architectural works have been inspired in their formal compositions by the art of origami? How and when did architecture integrate the geometric patterns of origami? What are the different messages evoked by the architectural fold?
In the books The Function of the Form and the Function of the Ornament, the architect Farshid Moussavi, highlights the sensory and significant function of the architectural form and ornament, betting on the ample significant possibilities of the architectural form. Studying the form as a transmitting element of the message and the background as an essential concept for communication, is key to know and understand the architectural experience as a whole. This work tries to explore and understand the origin of the resources and mechanisms of architectural formalization inspired in the fold. It seeks to recapitulate the knowledge acquired in the different architectural experiences to analyze and synthesize both its morphological configurations and its semantic content, highlighting the conceptual and formal relationships between origami and architecture.
J. C. Sancho and Sol Madridejos, citing Deleuze, distinguish between the inorganic fold, simple and direct, and the organic fold, compound, crossed and indirect. And they go further in their definition when they refer to the organic fold as the fold of Western culture, inherited from the artistic manifestations of Hellenic sculpture, in what has become known as the "wet clothes" technique. While the inorganic fold represents the fold of flat faceted surfaces that derive from the art of Japanese origami.
The architectonic origami was enunciated initially by the doctor architect Tomohiro Tachi in a master class offered in the year 2010 in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he exposed different systems for designing architectonic forms generated in computational origami. In that course, Tachi would show the three specific software designed by him that calculate and perform a 3D simulation of folding processes of flat surfaces.
During the first part of the 20th century, for the architects and artists of the avant-gardes, expressionists, cubists and constructivists, paperwork served for formal experimentation and the exploration and representation of new architectural spaces of great expressive value, complex and aggressive spaces, full of rhythms, twists and singularities. Where we can find the best examples of these experiences is in the compulsory preliminary courses for all the students of the Bauhaus. In the Vorkurse, professors Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Josef Albers, made paper one of their main work materials, using it as a good method to introduce students to the possibilities of exploring space and form directly with the use of material. These courses served to instill in students an unusual expressive and formal freedom.
We consider this stage the beginnings of abstract origami, the artistic current of the late twentieth century that emerges from the figurative referents of traditional origami. The abstract origami uses the basic techniques and procedures of folding or "bases" of the traditional figures generating a series of modular patterns of fold of surfaces of multiple geometric variants.
It is pertinent here to reconsider the relationship between the folded, the prismatic and the crystalline. We can consider that something is or has been folded when it comes from another superficial origin not transformed. Understanding that the prismatic faceted shapes that are generated from the extrusion of a generatrix can be made by folding thin sheets, it is evident that these polyhedral shapes, which were generally made with paper cutting and folding procedures in schools, they are much more representative of the work of the architect who thinks of spaces, in contrast to the solid and generally convex crystalline forms, free of significant internal spaces and spaces that are formed by polishing and carving procedures.
Fred Angerer distinguished between solid, lattice and laminar constructions. Emphasizing that, unlike solid constructions where there is no relationship between exterior appearance and interior space, laminar constructions express in their interior space the external order that shapes them. So this research has also considered representative all those polyhedral figures and architectural morphologies generated by non-developable faceted surfaces, but they are continuous and, therefore, feasible to be realized by means of folding techniques.
In conclusion, this doctoral thesis is a study of historical, case and experimental methodology, of the semantic, syntactic and morphological variables, derived from the use of patterns of folded surfaces in contemporary architecture, from static structures of folded surfaces to kinetic architectures and interactive parametric design.