How have other disciplines started to address these questions of topology, and where on the timeline have other arenas approached a complication of inside and outside?

As an idea, I follow the conversation architecture seems to be having, and fully appreciate a sensibility of categorizing things in a paradigmatically different way. I do wonder, though, if in terms of architecture, we’ve been selectively ignoring scale as a part of the dialogue.

Does the scale of the body versus the scale of a building mean that fashion has been dealing with topology much much before the late 1990s? Or, at the scale of a product, are the blurring of lines more productive—the Klein bottle, unlike the D+S Eyebeam project, doesn’t have to address where to place the thermal break.

Are we being cavalier to want the wall-to-floor-to-façade condition for our design proposals? Is our desire to complicate things flippant—a greedy hope we can claim a vocabulary because we like the way it sounds, the way it makes us sound (how evolved of us to think of a square as so much more than Cartesian)—or is it actually a catalyst of creativity, a way of giving ourselves permission to question even those fundamentals which we thought to be givens?