Skin and Bones

In Leibniz's writings on folds and how they differ from the concept of skin and external membrane, I found myself questioning the deconstructive rational of blobs, skins and stretched membranes. If these forms were to be true to the architecture they are trying to represent, it would seem to me that they would not just reflect their skeletal structure, but also begin to have their own skeletal structure. The "skin" or "wrapped membrane", if indeed an animate form, would also have to react to its internal forces as well as its external forces. Once a skin if pulled taught around its generating skeleton, there would be a new concentration of external forces on the areas between that which is held taught by frame. This membrane needs to react to these forces not in their physical application but in their conceptual existence. I was intrigued by this idea of the "fold" being the space between where these internal and external tensions exist. "The Libnizan fold is in continuous movement, enveloping former folds and creating new ones on the surface of the diaphragm. Secondly, the fold, as an interior mechanism which at once reflects the outside and represents the forces of the inside, is more of a mediating device, a spatial instrument, than an object acted upon from one side or the other" I started to make some sense out of this after reading Victor Hugo's description of the interior of a monumental element built of wood and plaster from the Napoleonic era. He describes the outside as a normal form of an elephant and the inside as a huge skeleton. It was his description of the space created within the elephant based on the interior forces of framing and the external forces of the plaster coating that got me really thinking about this concept of the animate fold. "A long beam overhead, to which massive side-members were attached at regular intervals, represented the back-bone and ribs, with plaster stalactites hanging from them like entrails; and everywhere there were great spiders' webs like dusty diaphragms. Here and there in the corners were patches of black that seemed to be alive and had changed their position with sudden, startled movements. The litter fallen from the back of the elephant on to its stomach had evened out the concavity of the latter, so that one could walk on it as though on a floor." BOO YAH KA SHA........ The space between that which is and that which is not.