The discrete and the continuous in architecture and design

The notion of the environment as a continuous network of interacting flows of information, artefacts and subjects, as characterised by Ezio Manzini's ecological model of design and Greg Lynn's folded concept of architecture, has prompted the development of a variety of innovative techniques that can engage time, change, mobile points of view, and which can reorganise multiple economies, ecologies, information systems, and social groups. These techniques such as scenario building in design and diagramming in architecture, while attached to two distinct traditions do involve a productive overlap of concerns and concepts which can provide useful exchange and dialogue in the investigation of mutual problems of representation, practice, and the relationship of ethics and aesthetics in architecture and design. In architecture, this increasing influence of a dynamic model of complexity has characterised the displacement of deconstructivist techniques of collage and contradiction established in the 1980s with a folded logic of continuity and curvature in the 1990s. A parallel transition can be discerned in design within the transition from the external moral code of green design to the immanent ethics of sustainable design. The implications and interrelations between the emergence of folding in architecture and of ecologically sustainable design can be productively investigated through their interactive reflection with the distinction made between discrete multiplicities and continuous multiplicities as developed by the philosopher Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995). This distinction in models of complexity can be introduced as a difference between a metric space that can be reduced to an aggregate of points, and a non-metric continuum that can only be qualitatively differentiated in time.