Labored Form: Domestic Fold

Abstract

Las Vegas is a city of duplicates; it appears at first only complicated. Buildings on The Strip duplicate neighboring buildings, implicate antecedent versions of themselves, and replicate other cities. The multiplication of duplicate forms can be explicated (unfolded) to reveal apparently similar but separately applied interests. This thesis posits the plication (the fold) as a device capable of uniting near duplicates such as the new high speed rail and existing low speed rail, the city of Las Vegas proper and unincorporated Clark County (the Strip), the service worker and the tourist, modes of transportation for the tourist and those for the resident, and high density housing with a civic building.

The history of plication can be traced as both a product of domestic labor and a subject of intellectual inquiry. The lineage of the fold includes its appearance in Jacques Ozanam’s Récréations mathématiques et physiques (1694) employed as a teaching device, as a method of decorating tables with folded napkins in early contemporary cookbooks such as Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management (1861), as a topic of study disseminated through the history of home economics, and as a theoretical framework in Deleuze’s The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (1988).

The Las Vegas Transportation Center is a multi-plied form which employs the continuous nature of the fold to bring together the tourist and the work force, and the train station with housing, and speculates on the possibility of the discontinuous fold to choreograph their division.