Blob Tectonics, or why Tectonics is Square and Topology is Groovy.

In an excerpt titled Blob Tectonics, or why Tectonics is Square and Topology is Groovy, from the book Folds, Bodies, & Blobs author Greg Lynn attempts to define the new emerging technology of blob tectonics. Historically speaking, when attempting to define tectonics of any sort one faces the perplexing dilemma of combining the particular with the general. This combination focuses on melding the traditional structural and special techniques with the overriding idea and parti of the project. Where the study of tectonics becomes slightly muddled is in respect to the blob. The blog is a formal complexity that has yet to be fully experienced. Blobs endeavor to provide “alternative strategies of structural organization and constriction that provide intricate and complex new ways of relating the homogeneous to the heterogeneous or particular.”(169)
There are many examples of artists and architects attempting to use this new and exciting formal strategy to help define art and the possibly a new movement in the architectural world.
One of the first examples of blobs is found not in architecture but in the artistic realm of the film industry. Simply titled “The Blob”, a 1958 original movie, which was later remade in 1988, introduces us to the very basic form and idea of a blob. In these movies a giant alien creature takes on the form of a blob and oozes its way around the city enveloping and digesting all in its path. While these movies present blobs as organisms that “slither, creep, and squirm [while] instigating disgust and queasiness” they also provide a very basic groundwork for the idea of blobs. That is they present an amorphous shape that is able to mold and conform to its surroundings based on a seemingly random set of values. This “complexity involves the fusion of multiple and different systems into an assemblage that behaves as a singularity irreducible to any single simple organization.”(173)
This idea and blobby shape has surpassed late 80’s horror films and entered into the world of architecture through the work of Alejando Zaera-Polo, Farshid Moussavi, Jesse Reiser, Nanako Umemoto to name a few. This exploration into the world of blog is most noticed in these architects’ proposals for the Yokohama Port Terminal. These proposals reveal “both the limitations and the potential of blob forms as built forms.” Unfortunately blob theory is far more advanced than actual blob construction. There still remains a large disconnect from what you can design using modern computer software and what can actually be built. In respect to the Port Terminal proposals the blog technology is limited in its construction aspects. The architects only use the blob tectonics only in respect to their roof plans. Until a more homogenous and applicable construction method of blob technology is developed we will be forced to see material blobs only in roof structures covering orthogonal and symmetrical plans.
There still exists a large gap between blog tectonics, the theory and design, with the actual construction techniques needed for blobby architecture. This gap is slowly closing but until more architects take chances on blob technology and form there will still be an awkward disconnect from construction and theory in terms of blob tectonics.