Blobitecture: Waveform Architecture and Digital Design

Rating:
Summary: Blob landscape survey
Review: This copiously illustrated survey posits architect Frank Gehry in an unfolding evolution of a phenomenon described as "Blob." The book, 'Blobitecture', shows the antecedents to Gehry, and parallel movements that have spawned such notable industrial designs as the Eames chairs and the Apple iMac.

Form-follows-function was a stringent dictate on designers for many recent years. Advances in computers and computation [not to mention composite materials] have allowed Gehry to visualize designs that would not, on the face of it, seem to hold up, and come to up with the means to make these buildings - drooping, swooping, and so on - stand.

Waters notes that this style arose as something of an anti-machine impulse, yet it could not have occurred without machine technology, specifically the computer technology that could provide underpinnings for 'improbably fluid forms.'

The author uncovers some things that surprise. A Disneyland Monsanto house of the future [which could be a happy home for Zippy the Pinhead], could not be readily demolished after its stay as a futurist grotto was at an end, Waters notes. The wrecking ball bounced off the [perhaps fiberglass] Monsanto house, and good old sledge hammers had to do the dirty deed!

There have been a lot of movements, some that vaporize in the blink of an eye. Does Blob as a serious movement hold up to scrutiny? Here, Waters takes a journalist's tack, and leaves the final judgment largely to the reader and future historians.

A different approach than the movie The Blob [from whence the movement gains its name it seems], where, as the movie trailer had it, "there's no stopping the blob [a "blood-curdling threat"] as it goes from town to town."

Missing perhaps is a look at Gaudi, and Dali [especially the latter's work at the 1939 World's Fair] - two individuals that melted a building or two in their day. I guess I say this because I can recall when I first saw Gehry's now famous Gugenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain [depicted gloriously in Blobitecture], that's what I thought of. Waters does point to Eero Saarinen and his TWA Terminal as a potent precursor of Gehry, but photos he includes are of the Saarinen's St. Louis arch, to my mind less of a pointer to Frank. But the book on the main is quite generous in its illustration of things blob like.