Crease

Definition

The crease, in Winka Dubbeldam's essay, is the boundary re-conceived as a live, malleable in-between: "boundaries are no longer barriers but are interactive; they are creases – a hard-soft space allowing for local conditions" (editors' headnote, p. 96). Located "in between at the incidence and co-incidence of modern life," the crease is "malleable, soft, adaptable and multidimensional. Not unlike cartilage between spinal cord fragments, it allows for flexibility and precise adjustment" (p. 99). Its operation is dissemination across a material gradient: "Disseminating the soft in the hard and the hard in the soft, and produced in collaboration with the complex exigencies of contemporary urbanism, the hard-soft space of the crease works between and conflates the requirements of the urban and the individual, demanding minimum space and providing maximum comfort and efficiency. It conflates mathematical behaviour with industrial precision into a set of smart layers, hybrid structures" (pp. 99–100).

The crease is the boundary condition of Dubbeldam's thing-shape system: where boundaries "are negotiated and distinctions are blurred" by "the politics of layering, creasing and wrapping" (p. 98), the crease is what appears when a continuous surface — the wrapper — folds under "internal and external pressures": "Inhabit the slip between former dichotomies. Ride this slip until its surface creases from internal and external pressures, producing a space that is at once grotesquely beautiful, intimately public, urbanely private and tactilely cerebral" (p. 100). The crease is where dichotomy becomes gradient: instead of a wall dividing private from public, hard from soft, urban from individual, a folded surface carries both terms across its thickness, and occupation happens at the fold.

Key Thinkers

• Winka Dubbeldam — the concept's author: the crease as interactive boundary, cartilage-like in-between, and the operative figure of the smart wall; built in the Aida Hair Salon (2000), where "creases allow for local insertions of cutting stations, desks and seating elements."
• Gilles Deleuze (via Dubbeldam's Bergsonism citations) — the philosophical background of the generative surface: "the statement and creation of problems," "genuine differences in kind," "the apprehension of real time" (p. 97); the fold's lineage in Deleuze's Le Pli is adjacent (see log). Not separately paged for the fold.
• Edmund Husserl — the surfaces "more or less 'smooth,' more or less perfect" whose variation generates thing-shapes: the crease as the fold in such a surface, where gradual perfection is locally negotiated.

Related Concepts

• Thing-Shapes — the system the crease belongs to: layered smooth surfaces, bodies included, "generating and regenerating space"; the crease is the fold where the layers negotiate.
• Boundaries — the concept the crease transforms: Ardener's rule-system, Borden's thick edge, Taylor's actuated wall — the crease as the boundary made continuous, soft-hard disseminated rather than crossed.
• Thick Edge — Borden's five-metre in-between zone: the crease's closest sibling in the wiki, but infrastructural and socio-political where the crease is material and bodily.
• Inside/Outside Dialectic — the dichotomy the crease inhabits rather than resolves: "intimately public, urbanely private."
• Interactive Architecture — the crease as the responsive surface's geometric signature: the fold that adjusts "locally," the wall that adapts rather than divides.
• Smooth and Striated Space — Dubbeldam's "labyrinthine smooth surface" is a material smoothness (the unbroken wrapper), not Deleuze & Guattari's spatial distinction — but the "slip" ridden "until its surface creases" performs a smooth-to-striated transition at the scale of a surface.
• Flexible Interior — the crease's built lineage: where the movable screen subdivides rooms by moving, the crease subdivides by folding in place — reconfiguration without displacement.
• Liminality — the crease as liminal space transgressed and inhabited: "the liminal space between the private and the public" (p. 100).

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Thing-Shapes (Dubbeldam 2002/2006) — the source that names the concept: "boundaries are no longer barriers but are interactive; they are creases" (p. 96); the cartilage simile and the incidence/co-incidence of modern life (p. 99); the dissemination formula — "Disseminating the soft in the hard and the hard in the soft" (pp. 99–100); the Aida Hair Salon's smart wall, "a smooth wrapper enveloping all functional requirements and leaving the space free of clutter," whose "creases create a sculpted void to be occupied by the clientele" (p. 100).
• Thick Edge (Borden 1996/2006) — the crease's socio-spatial sibling: the in-between as a zone of negotiation ("a five metre deep in-between zone in which social relations are challenged and controlled through architectural materiality"); where Borden's edge is an urban depth policed by bodies, Dubbeldam's crease is a surface fold that carries both sides.
• Shape shifting (Taylor 2018) — the paradigm continuation: the responsive surface (Aegis Hyposurface) as a boundary whose solidity itself is "spatially disturbing, while questioning the seeming solidity" — the crease's actuated descendant.

Open Questions

• Is the crease a boundary concept or an anti-boundary concept? It is named as what boundaries become when they stop being barriers — but "allowing for local conditions" and "precise adjustment" suggest the crease still regulates (a softer gate-keeping?). Can a crease exclude, or only negotiate?
• The crease's hard-soft dissemination ("the soft in the hard and the hard in the soft") is stated for materials and for territories (urban/individual). Do the two disseminations scale to each other — is the urban/hard ↔ individual/soft mapping stable, or does it stereotype the city as hard and the person as soft?
• Can a crease be drawn? The concept lives between the fold (a line in the plan) and the gradient (a field in section) — architectural representation, built on line-work, may systematically miss it. What would a crease survey look like?
• Does the crease anticipate the parametric surface (continuous, locally differentiated) or critique it? Dubbeldam's crease adjusts to pressure (internal and external), while the parametric surface adjusts to parameters set elsewhere — whose pressure counts?