why is topology groovy...

... and tectonics square. Greg Lynn in his article on blob tectonics starts answering this question by describing what a blob is, "Or should I say blobs, of all different sizes and shapes and irreducible typological essences." Here he hints on the relation of one to many, or singularity to intensity, on which he than elaborates while defining blobs. "The term BOLOB connotes a thing which is neither singular nor multiple but an intelligence that behaves as if it were singular and networked but in its form can become virtually infinitely multiplied and distributed." He invokes the emergent organizational system that both Deluze and Steven Johnson talk about in their work, the kind of singular organism that is not composed of one node but rather it is made up of intensities of many networked nodes.

Later in the article, the terms are paired up in similar fashion to how Ben van Berkel presents the opposition of modernist generic space vs. way cooler intensities of "spatial arrangements that follow the diving, swooping, zooming, slicing, folding motions" When Lynn brings up Liebniz's work the terms morph from wholes vs. intensities, to clear vs. vague, then into Cartesian "constitutive identity" vs. "changes in identities". Those, in turn, are quickly elaborated into "a series of continuous multiplicities and singularities" to finally become "an assemblage that behaves as singularity while remaining irreducible to any single simple organization." Lynn's describing his blobs as aggregate objects, or intensity objects that are "simultaneously singular in it's continuity and multiplicitous in its internal differentiation", so simply put groovy...