Customer Reviews

Animate Form

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The text contained in Animate Form, assembled from previously published articles, continues Lynn's rhetoric announcing the emergence of a new dynamic paradigm for architectural design [animation software]. It reads like skimming a stone across the liquid surface of current [digital] architectural discourse. Each bounce touches a relative key point maintaining enough speed to progress to the next without requiring any perceived depth of substance. This presents the reader with a wide scoping text offering potential to rethink architecture as a non-static art, but does little to critically place this mode of production within practice.

The major difficulty I have with this book [animate form] is that the projects chosen have become already dated. Although monograph culture can be blamed for the presentation of more recent work, for a book's whose content is all about a newness of direction and dynamic qualities of change, the material seems incredibly inert. Even the CDRom is a very traditional piece of homepage publishing. It simply catalogues the animations for the projects and does not provide another level of understanding through hyperlink connections.

The book competently collates the work of Greg Lynn up to 1996 and is still required reading for those involved with producing new modes of architectural design through technological advancement. I guess I was expecting a More innovative approach to the publishing of Greg Lynn's material.

Again we should be amazed at these wonderful algorithmic creatures that have continued to sprawl for the last half a century or more. The innovation about this type of experimentation if at all it is anymore should lie on the reality and materiality of the projects. We cannot let technology invent architecture but to at least keep up if not produce it. Lynns dialogues will only be convincing if the show doesn't end up or formulate by gyp board.