What do you get when you cross a century old building material, with lightweight recycled plastic, modern computer technology, and the mind of one of Time Magazine’s 100 most innovative people for the 21st century? You get Greg Lynn’s BlobWall Pavilion. The freestanding indoor/outdoor wall system that looks to redefine the common brick as a modular building system.
While the form may not be for everyone, here at Inhabitat we find the exploration not only fun, but also sustainable. Each of the modules are robotically cut and formed out of low-density, recyclable, impact-resistant polymer.
Those of you lucky enough to be in the Los Angeles area have a little over a week to view the pavilion in the gallery at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc), before it is shipped off to the 11th installation of the Venice Biennale. This year’s theme for the Biennale is titled, Out there: Architecture Beyond Building, fitting for a building experiment looking to redefine one of the century’s oldest building materials.
+ BlobWall Pavilion Blog
+ SciArc Gallery
As an ‘Art’ project.. fine. Nice work. As a practical building material… this is a joke. Quite frankly, outside the realm of ‘Art’, this is a totally ridiculous product… and really beneath the standards of inhabitat.
Oh christ. Not again. Seriously, human beings think in terms of Cartesian coordination (rectangles and prisms). Whats the point of your “module” requires abstraction to understand? My mind should be able to immediately apprehend its orientation and location in a mass plane or line. This is a kitschy masturbation of bored minds. While I can never condemn trying something new, I can condemn parading it about as something it’s not. Keep it in the children’s museum where it belongs or try to actually use it for its “intended purpose” (as a unit of construction). Build a place for DWELLING and you might have something…
a little kooky but creative. just because it is not easy to ‘immediately apprehend’ does not mean that it is without merit. it’s necessary to push the boundaries in order to move forward.
The problem with this project is that it ignores the fundamental merits – even the point – of ‘modular’ construction. If you read into the process of how the wall was created in the blog, you will find that EVERY ONE of those ‘modules’ is a unique shape, tediously custom cut to create the form of the wall in the exhibition. The project is by no means modular and certianly not sustainable. Is is an interesting exercise in how to produce the most labor intensive type of ‘modular construction’ known to man and a sophomoric attempt at novelty.
I couldn’t agree more with the previous posts. While I too was once drawn to the allure of ‘Blobitecture’, once I saw Greg Lynn speak, I lost all respect for the ‘happy accident’ that this thoughtless, unrealistic, un-important slice of architectural history if offering us. A previous Inhabitat article said it better than I could. here’s an excerpt from the full article here: http://inhabitat.com/2006/12/29/greening-the-ivory-tower
“Green Architecture vs. Blobitecture”
Green architecture is thoughtful architecture, and thoughtfulness is crucial to good architecture. Good architecture is born out of vision, passion and social conscience. It is not about producing fancy algorithms or random blobby shapes in Maya. Blobitecture is all surface and no substance, and architecture is ultimately not about surface; it’s about the experience and impact of three-dimensional space. If one’s work deals primarily in surface, aesthetics and symbolism, then one is an artist instead of an architect. Sustainable design – at its best – comes from thinking deeply and rigorously about how humans use, occupy and function in a space over time, and in turn how spaces impact urban fabric, society and culture. To approach architecture in a more superficial way is lazy and shortsighted.
Wow. I like it. The design is playful and fun. In the current atmosphere of urgency, peril and doom, from all sides of the spectrum, it is refreshing to see something so playful as this. Maybe the merits of it as a serious form of architecture are questionable but inspiration has intangible benefits that lead far into the future. Lighten up a bit my friends, enjoy the short time we have here.