03.01.2008

After bringing together the factors of City Architecture concerning our PerfectCity Charter "The City of The Future" we were asking ourselves which actually is the most modern architectural style.

So we tracked the timeline of architectural styles from 1750 until the present day and found out that a current movement in architecture is Blobitecture. Blobitecture from blob architecture, blobism or blobismus is curvy architecture, fluid protoplasmic shapes that completely redefine what a building ought to look like. That means buildings have an organic, amoeba-shaped, bulging form.
The term ‘blob architecture’ already was in vogue in the mid-1990s but the word blobitecture first appeared in print in 2002 in the New York Times.

When it comes to the origins of the term "blob architecture" it was American architect Greg Lynn who created it in 1995 during his experiments in digital design with metaball graphical software. He based it on binary large object, or BLOB, a technical term for a computer representation of an object; that blob is also a good word for the amoeboid buildings.

There are a lot of examples in many cities, because adventurous architects are using computer-aided design systems to create structures that would otherwise be impossible to realise.
Examples are Norman Foster’s Swiss Re building in London called the Gherkin, Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles and Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao.

Do you know other examples for blobitecture? What do you think about this architectural style? Do you like it?

We look forward to your comments!

Update: Thanks to our reader Jan who gave us another example for Blobitecture: the Selfridges Department Store, Birmingham. You can have a look at this building here.

 
* * * * ½ 22 votes
1
rechts

what about future systems’ bloby birmingham bldg? is that one also an example of this style?

links
         unten-blase nix
           14. 01. 2008
  jan
2
rechts

Hello Jan,
you are right!
The Selfridges Department Store, Birmingham is a perfect example for Blobitecture!

links
         unten-blase nix
           16. 01. 2008
  Christina Anna Tramburg

Trackback URI | Comments RSS

add comments