Blobitecture
May 27, 2009 by blogtopia
Filed under Architectural style
Blobitecture from blob architecture, blobism or blobismus are terms for a movement in architecture in which buildings have an organic, amoeba-shaped, bulging form. Though the term ‘blob architecture’ was in vogue already in the mid-1990s, the word blobitecture first appeared in print in 2002, in William Safire’s "On Language" column in the New York Times Magazine in an article entitled Defenestration. Though intended in the article to have a derogatory meaning, the word stuck and is often used to describe buildings with curved and rounded shapes.
The term ‘blob architecture’ was coined by architect Greg Lynn in 1995 in his experiments in digital design with metaball graphical software. Soon a range of architects and furniture designers began to experiment with this "blobby" software to create new and unusual forms. Despite its seeming organicism, blob architecture is unthinkable without this and other similar computer-aided design programs.
Architects derive the forms by manipulating the algorithms of the computer modeling platform. Some other computer aided design functions involved in developing this are the nonuniform rational B-spline or NURB, freeform surfaces, and the digitizing of sculpted forms by means akin to computed tomography.
Despite the narrow interpretation of Blob architecture (i.e. that coming from the computer), the word, especially in popular parlance, has come to be associated quite widely with a range of curved or odd-looking buildings including Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum Bilbao (1997) and the Experience Music Project (2000), though these, in the narrower sense are not blob buildings, even though they were designed by advanced computer-aided design tools, CATIA in particular.
The reason for this is that they were designed from physical models rather than from computer manipulations. The first full blob building, however, was built in the Netherlands by Lars Spuybroek (NOX) and Kas Oosterhuis. Called the Water Pavilion (1993-1997), it has a fully computer-based shape manufactured with computer-aided tools and an electronic interactive interior where sound and light can be transformed by the visitor.
A building that also can be considered an example of a blob is Peter Cook and Colin Fournier’s Kunsthaus (2003) in Graz, Austria. Other instances are Roy Mason’s Xanadu House (1979), and a rare excursion into the field by Herzog & de Meuron in their Allianz Arena (2005). By 2005, Norman Foster had involved himself in blobitecture to some extent as well with his brain-shaped design for the Philological Library at the Free University of Berlin and the Sage Gateshead opened in 2004.