Connections are interfaces between discretized materials, assemblies, spaces, and structures. They are performative in as much as they actively facilitate transference of information, activity, and most often, energy amongst localities of a system. Despite such virtuosity, they are often conceived as static problem-solving tools derived blindly from an architectonic problem with which they have no inherent relation; or they are considered the site of a sort of poetic first principle out of which structure, form, material, and space, all unfold in a supposed harmonious resolution.
The fundamental problem with such conceptions is that they place the connection within a hierarchy; the connection is always subject of or subject to some other element or system of elements, be it formal, structural, or even logical. Contemporary architecture requires a consideration of the connection that’s independent of such an impositional hierarchy.
Local Manifold considers the connection in terms of its identity as a self-referential system, a hive of localities which neither serve nor are served by another entity. As an architectural project, it manifests connectivity as a condition that permeates a spatial field and is irreducible to formal heuristics or tectonic poetics. In this way the role of the connection is to metastasize a plurality of field-defining elements into an architecture of utter autonomic poesy.
