Outside the lines

Both interdependent and autonomous, lineaments and matter have a long, complicated, and multiplicitous history. Since the fifteenth century, architects (and architectural representations) have largely carried forward Leon Battista Alberti’s assertion that lineaments have nothing to do with inchoate matter, but instead “project whole forms in the mind without any recourse to … material.” ¹ Ideologically holistic and unifying, lineaments prescribe the placement, number, scale, and order of parts toward their cohesion into an irreducible, uncomplicated whole; lineaments, as historian Dalibor Vesely writes, “anticipate the visible unity of the result as a closed system, to which nothing can be added and from which nothing can be taken away.” ² That a similarly flattening, idealizing, and closed representational system—orthographic projection—would come to accompany attendant translations of unformed matter is unsurprising. And architects have taken up such representational ideals in ever-quickening succession: Alberti’s own “precise and correct outline”; the innumerable measurements of “Grand” tourists; ³ J. N. L. Durand’s grids; Le Corbusier’s tracés régulateurs, Modulor, and “orthogonal state of mind” … even the splines turned structure of digital formalism; and, most recently (and perhaps significantly), the tautologies of (capital P) Parametricism. However multiple and diffuse their technologies, geometries, and processes, these closed and hegemonic systems of representation come with closed and hegemonic systems of evaluation. Idealized systems of proportion beget idealized geometries, beget idealized compositions, beget idealized representations, and so on. … Such idealization is “the burden of linearity.” ⁴ Ever complicated by the “messy physicality” of matter, ⁵ architectural form is instead codified and represented through lineaments. And so ideality and reality have remained incommensurate and irresolvable. Today, however, such dialectical characterizations no longer seem wholly accurate. With Parametricism, lineaments and their ideological consistency have dissolved into a more complicated closed system hosting near-infinite possibilities. At the same time, the supposed formlessness of matter has become increasingly deterministic through the adoption of more scientific and quantified metrics for evaluation such as material performance, economies of fabrication or assembly, and energy. ⁶ It is this vague space between entrenched historical positions and their contemporary reversals—a space neither entirely lineament nor entirely matter—that our work and software experiments occupy.