#blobism

[skitzomoondog]

[sagesarvie]

Blobism

[richardholman]

Selfridge’s & Co. building, Birmingham, UK.

I've never been too keen on photographing this building and never been very satisfied with the few attempts I've made, but I'm quite pleased with this one from today's enjoyable sojourn in Birmingham.

[sugarpastewetscreen]

iMac in Flower Power, 2001

[rutbelrueda]

. . . . . #architecture #brutalist #artdeco #streamlinemoderne #parametric #contemporary #blobism #minimalist #expressionist #artnouveau #deconstructivist https://www.instagram.com/p/CEMmSwggnTu/?igshid=zu9to30yuazn

[emilyrapunzel]

Reading Reflection- Week 9

Summary: This week we had a lot of content and it’s going to be hard to condense it all in one post. We read a chapter in Emerge about how our innate talents need a catalyst if we want our creative selves to emerge. There were also two articles about common myths that society places around artists. The articles were about how Artists make their living and myths about scientists and creatives having different types of minds. Along with the articles we watched a video about how artists explore their identity. I found that the video was not what I expected. It focused on three artists accepting who they were and making art about it, and while it was interesting, I don't feel like it explained how artists explore their identity, like the title says. 

Reflection: My favorite art of the reading was Emerge. In the few pages we read it was able to cover several important details people need to know about life, not just art. The first thing that stood out to me was the idea of Reductionism or Blobism. Blobism is where you look at people and immediately clump them all together as a group without getting to know the individual. When you place people you are missing out in their story. You are taking away their ability to be an individual for a specific purpose when you place them in a blob. This reminds me of something I learned about in High School from a Ted Talk by a woman named Adichie. She talked about the dangers of a single story. The danger of only taking the one story you have of someone or something (usually formed by a stereotype) and making that one story someone's identity. This is wrong! This idea of stereotypes also connects with the articles we read about stereotypes of creative minds vs. scientific minds. People want to understand people. They want to assign value to them so they try to understand them and one way to do that is to say if someone is a creative thinker then they must be a feeler, an emotional person. Or, if someone likes science or is in the scientific fields then they must be logical and analytical. The article pushed against this and explained that people can be both. It doesn’t have to be one or the other. In fact many of the best scientists also consider themselves artists and vise versa. People need to stop placing people into boxes by their stereotypes. Instead we should listen to them and learn from them. In doing this, we discover who they are. 

Oil Painting by Gregory Thinker “Complete Stop”

[joellehameister]

Reading Response #9

Emerge

The first couple pages of Emerge were the most intriguing to me. The descriptions of reductionism and blobism were very sad. I feel like that is what is happening in today’s age. People don’t want to have identities anymore. With the current movement of culture people are wanting to strip away all pieces that make us God’s children. 

How Artists Explore Identity” video from MoMA 

I really liked the description of Frida Kahlo. I have heard lots about Frida Kahlo, but never knew why she had become famous. It was very interesting to know about her leaving her husband and painting herself without any of the things he liked about her. The Runaways by Glenn Ligon was also a very interesting art piece. 

Exploding the Myth of the Scientific vs Creative Mind

The terms divergent and convergent thinkers were a new topic for me. I did not know that convergent thinkers were thought of as good at science and divergent thinkers were  thought of as better in arts and humanities. 

“The Myth of the Starving Artist and Other Misconceptions about Creativity” 

I really liked this quote from the article, “But at the same time, what writer, designer, or musician wants to be irrelevant or ignored?” There is definitely a stereotype that artists need to go through this struggle, that they must struggle to become famous.  

Another interesting point was the point made about marketing. I am a marketing major, so hearing that people think marketing is evil was not a great thought. As I continued reading I saw the reasoning with the Nazi propaganda. I think that marketing can be bad, but can also be really good. 

[jewelthomasson]

Art Reading Response:

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⭐️Summary of Emerge (Emerge & Determination) pages 36-55:

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The chapter of emerge starts off with the writer telling us basically the definition of what emerge means (35). They gave the example of when “putting harmful ingredients together you get some thing called a Twinkie” (35). This example was basically to show us that when putting things together you get emergence. Then the writer went on to talk about how the human body is identified (36). To a reductionist view human beings are nothing but cells or as the writer described it as “blobisms” (36). Perini’s main goal was to shed light on the fact that human beings are not just blobs, they are image bearers of God, and have been given gifts and talents that establish who we are (37). The writer wants us to use our talents and combined them with our creative habits so that something greater will emerge (38).

In the second chapter of a emerge titled determination, the main idea described is the fact that we ourselves can be our biggest distraction (50). He talks about how being creative is a choice and is a way of life (50). He then shed light on how determination is pretty much the only tool to overcome the distraction of our self (50). In order to build determination one needs to set a reminder that will help keep your mindset set on your goal (51). Then you need to have goals, which can be short or long term but something that will keep your eyes ahead in achieving success (51). We also in this process need to know ourselves and overall know that God has given us talents for us to develop and use for a greater good (51). And then The writer went on to say how a mission statement is very critical in this process (52). A mission statement will help you in accomplishing your goals. But the key is to have a mission statement that is inspiring to you so that when you are in a difficult spot you can look to that statement to move forward (52). And then overall having mentors to help you accomplish your goals will really help and push you through the very end. Having the opportunity to not go through something alone can help you achieve more in life because other people are right alongside you (52).

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🤔What I thought about Emerge (Emerge & Determination) pages 36-55:

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I thought the two chapters of emerge were very interesting. Before reading this I had never heard the term reductionist. I find it so weird that someone can believe that we are just nothing but cells. God has made us in our own uniqueness and he has instilled in us gifts and talents different from everyone. How can someone think that we are all just blobs and no different from the natural world. I just don’t get it. I like how the author said “creative habits by themselves accomplish nothing either, but when you combine creative habits with your talents, or creative habits with your endeavors, something will emerge.” I like this quote because it shows that if we use our talents and our habits that God has given us then something greater emerge. I want to be a part of something greater and by combining my talents with my creative habits that will happen. Which is exciting! I also found the second section really interesting as far as determination goes. I could definitely relate with this chapter because I find myself being my biggest distraction. And I really liked how the author gave us like a roadmap/ step to step guide on how to overcome distraction. I definitely think that I can apply this to my life and it will help me in my current situations.

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⭐️ Summary of Exodus 35:30-35:

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In these verses it talks about how God has given people different talents and gifts. As God has filled people with the spirit He gives us wisdom, understanding, and knowledge with all kinds of different skills.

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🤔My thoughts on Exodus 35:30-35:

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I think these verses are very interesting because it is showing us the first people that got gifts from God. And I really like how as we read God fills those people with the spirit, we know that as believers we are filled with the spirit. Having Jesus live inside you is so cool and comforting to think of because we know we are not alone. I also find it interesting how God shows in the Scriptures that he gives us all different kinds of talents and skills. It really shows how much He cares for us because He gives everyone their own personal gifts and talents. God is so good 🥰!

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⭐️Summary of video “How artists explore identity | Modern Art & Ideas:”

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The overall concept of this video explores how we view ourselves and how others view us. One of the examples was of Frida Kahalo. She was originally famous because her husband, but she then wanted to convey to others who she really is and not under the standard of her husband. She did this by creating artwork that was extremely personal to her and showed her true self. Then they gave an example of someone named Glenn Ligon, where he had people write down how they view him and how they would describe him. Most often the comments was only related to superficial qualities which don’t define who Glenn actually is.

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🤔My thoughts on video “How artists explore identity | Modern Art & Ideas:”

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The way that people often perceive us is most likely not who we truly are. Often people only focus on the superficial appearance qualities that don’t always truly make up who we are. We need to not automatically judge others and create who they are because we don’t truly know who they are. We can only truly know who someone is by taking the time to get to know them. As people often create judgments/ideas on who people are we often miss who the true person is. Which is not good! This video proved that what people think is most often incorrect. So why do we make judgments about people without getting to know them first?

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⭐️Summary of video “What Art Tells us about Gender:”

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In this video the topic of Gender was discussed. And how the idea of gender gave different meanings especially to different time periods in history. The example of Hermaphroditism was often a common concept in ancient Greeks art. These art pieces showed a human with both genders to convey a different meaning that was relevant in history at that time. The topic of masculine and feminine was brought up as well. Those ideas gave different art pieces meaning because very different techniques were used to portray those concepts. These topics gave the artist an outlet to express how they felt. Overall history has been shaped by these new ideas and concepts that people have cultivated over time.

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🤔My thoughts on video “What Art Tells us about Gender:”

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It is interesting to see how artists from in the past to now use the concept of gender to convey certain things to the viewers. But most the time, what the viewers think the artist is trying to convey is not always accurate. We as viewers often create judgments and answers to whatever we see, and in turn that could not be at all what is trying to be conveyed. For me it’s hard because coming from a Christian background the topic of gender wasn’t really discussed. I mean of course God created male and female, but that was it. The way society views gender is something that I feel like Christians don’t necessarily enjoy talking about. Because it’s a touchy subject. How do we even approach starting to talk about this subject of gender? I don’t think I’ve ever had a conversation about it about how others view it. I have just always had my own opinion and my parents opinion to shape what I believe. But I really would want to talk about different perspectives on how people view gender especially in art.

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📸Image above:

[floating-through-the-void]

I made a new religion

It’s called Blobism

Be a Blobist today

May the blob be with you.

[skitzomoondog]

Ballet

[terefah]

today’s topics: car jacks, le cobusier, junk spaces, blobism & postmodernist bookshelf design

[architectureworksonline-blog]

Blobitecture - Architecture Blob

Blobitecture – Architecture Blob

La blobitecture, également appelée "architecture blob" ou "blobisme", fait référence à des bâtiments modernes de forme amorphe. "Blobitecture" est un terme inventé par l'écrivain du New York Times Magazine, William Safire, qui l'a utilisé pour décrire avec sardonie la montée soudaine d'immeubles de type amibe. Contrairement à son intention, les architectes ont heureusement adopté "blobitecture"…

[jcurtisid]

Karim’s China #STUDIO designed by #karimrashid in 2016 #office #design #industrialdesign #digipop #interiordesign #interiordesign interiordesign #china #lobby #reception #blobism #waves… https://t.co/yA8rM8Ay4O

— karim rashid (@karim_design) March 14, 2019

March 14, 2019 at 09:09PM

[timothyivison]

B(L.A.)DErunner, 1980-2020

Expanded to Immersive City

Joe Day

Tim Ivison

SCI-Arc, spring 2018 seminar

TUESDAYS

10am-1pm

ROOM 226

ABSTRACT:

In the last two decades of the 20th century and the first two of the 21st, space has taken some unlikely turns. The millennial window of 1980-2020 saw a profusion of spatial paradigms, realized in new architecture, art, film, literature and theory. Many of these were first tested in Los Angeles, a city that had long been a template for US auto-driven urban expansion, but now often stands in for everywhere. We will clarify, question and debate LA’s role as urban role model, and document the new spatial regimes pioneered here between 1980-2020, since Fredric Jameson’s nodal celebration of the Bonaventure Hotel.

In retrospect, the preceding forty years, 1940-1980, appear a relatively coherent late-Modern whole: as WWII concluded, the Korean War kept the southland’s military industrial complex humming and the Cold War guaranteed its continuation into the foreseeable future. The 1950s launched both the Space Race and the era of mass suburbanization, with the valleys of Los Angeles coming to represent its sprawling apotheosis. In the early 1960s, Rand Corp. pursued “game theory” in Santa Monica, Warhol inaugurated Pop Art at Ferus in West Hollywood, and Capitol Records inaugurated Beattlemania at Hollywood and Vine. Meanwhile, the Watts Uprising brought the civil rights movement to the LAPD’s doorstep. By the end of the decade, the psychedelic bliss of the Summer of Love was followed by the bad trip of Altamont …followed by Nixon’s War on Drugs. To all of these advances and upheavals, the 1970s were both the after-party and its hangover.

The 1980s by contrast are an ironic “Morning in America,” one of extreme and less commensurable polarities: Ronald Reagan and Black Flag, the Crystal Cathedral and the AIDS crisis. After almost a half century, the Cold War “ends” in less than two weeks with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Financial globalization and the dot-com bubble of the 1990s promised to usher in Fukuyama’s “End of History”, strangely echoed in the prayers of evangelical Christians, eager to hasten the apocalypse. The turn of the Millennium promised this and more, but the truly epochal shift came in the following year on 9/11 – the late arrival of the 21st century. The Great Recession of 2008 and the slow ascent of the Obama years set the stage for the backlash of Trump, with all his echoes of Reagan. For architecture, this has been a forty-year period of compound “isms,” as Postmodernism splintered into Historicism and “Deconstructivism,” only to be supplanted by a proliferation of neo-Minimalisms and Blobisms. Many finally opted for the generic “Contemporary” — a loaded term in its own right. This seminar will explore and document the new spatial formations engendered in this millennial period, especially as they were imagined from and for Los Angeles: a map and a territory marked up with concrete islands, concrete pools, gang graffiti, area codes, gated communities, fragmented horizontal grids, and stacked hierarchies of satellite, cell towers, and fiber optic cables. The original Blade Runner, released in 1982 and set in an imaginary 2019, will serve as a bracketing device for our studies. Readings will include foundational essays on Los Angeles and the millennial turn. Authors will include Reyner Banham, Joan Didion, Mike Davis, Bret Easton Ellis, Ed Soja, Steve Erickson, James Ellroy, and others.

REQUIREMENTS:

Regular attendance and participation in discussion are paramount. Each student will be responsible for one discussion

presentation related to a reading. In addition, there will be two analytical exercises:

1. The first of these - two annual entries for the cultural production matrix on the next page - will be due at mid-term. Each student

will identify and document 5 major cultural events/formations in two years, one between 1980 and 2000, the other 2000-2020.

2. The second, final project will be a spatial extropolation that bridges - geographically, thematically, in some way spatially -

between the two years’ findings at the midterm. This will include a 1000-2000 word synopsis, a 2-3 minute clip and two difinitive

images, and will be due the final week.

[hisourart-blog]

[:en]Blobitecture[:]

[:en]Blobitecture (from blob architecture), blobism and blobismus are terms for a movement in architecture in which buildings have an organic, amoeba-shaped, building 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…

[juliandmouton30]

"Chicago Biennial shows us how we might find building blocks for a new architecture"

This year's Chicago Biennial doesn't provide a blueprint for the future of architecture, but it does offer clues for how to create one, says Aaron Betsky.

The fear of what the future might hold looms heavily over the second edition of the Chicago Architecture Biennial, Make New History, which opened in that city on 15 September 2017. The exhibition's name evokes the looming of the past, whose orders and achievements seem to overshadow our current attempts to make things new as we face a future in which not much good seems in the offing.

If the exhibition, which has moments of great beauty framed by a blessedly low level of "discourse", succeeds in freeing itself from its name, it is probably because history means something different to us today. The exhibition unfolds in a moment in which history has became a data bank, not an order, narrative, or order to either inform or constrain us.

Traditionally the past has been the weapon of conservatives and even reactionaries. It is so even today, but only in the alt-right world of hard-bitten, uncompromising neo-classicism as espoused by those battling the Eisenhower Memorial, and the implied racism and Reaganite dreams of the nostalgia-laden New Urbanists.

To others, the past has been a story that teaches us how to act today, but few believe in such unquestionable morals. The past has also been a monument, a fixed presence from which we cannot escape, but these days we prefer to tear down such edifices.

Here is good work, curators Johnston and Lee seem to be saying

What Make New History espouses is an altogether more neutral story, one that is dedicated to two aspects of America's architecture culture that have distinguished its forms since the beginning of the 19th century: the omnipresence of the grid, and the desire to make our culture "real", with a material presence and its own history. This latter impulse dates back to the Colonial Revival that unfolded in the decades after the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition.

The Chicago Biennial is certainly a show of grids. Not only are quite a few of them on display, such as in the work of Design With Company, which looks at the combinatory possibilities of steel frame construction, but the display methods also establish grids, frames, and ordered pedestals that give subject what the architects have done to the ordering principles the curators, Sharon Johnston and Mark Lee, have devised.

Moreover, the presence of the magician of grids, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, looms over the proceedings. That in itself should remind us that the American grid, as opposed to, say, the German one that became an office building cliché in the 1970s, is in its essence open and democratic, inviting free action and expression within a framework that once supplied utilities and safety as well as an aesthetic order.

The revivalist realism of the biennial is equally devoid of the terror of the already known. It takes the form of a strong archaeological bent. While the last Biennial, curated by Sarah Herda and others, found historical precedents in avant-garde practices of the 1960s and 1970s, Johnston and Lee look towards materials and forms that are more part of the real, as opposed to the white-bread colonial, vernacular.

What the show risks giving up is the act of titillation, discovery, and even awe

Their exhibitors give us many well-worn walls and ceilings, perhaps as a way to show that it is not abstract dreams or elitist form-making that should inspire us today, but the real stuff out of which our lives are made. There are no messages here, only remnants, fragments and snaps we can collect and manipulate.

What the show risks giving up is the act of titillation, discovery, and even awe that we have come to expect from such large-scale gatherings of cultural gatherings since at least the first Venice Biennale in 1893.

Here is good work, Johnston and Lee seem to be saying, that stands against the self-conscious weirdness and muscle-flexing, the rampant appropriation and the soaring skyscrapers cladding themselves in ever thinner skins; this is work that calls us back perhaps not to order, but to the to what Aldo Rossi (another ghost wafting through the exhibition halls) once called "certainly small things".

Certainly it is not architecture either of the sublime or of experimentation, but instead of documentation and slight, at times critical, deformations. That does seem to be an accurate reflection of our current practice – and I do not mean the mindless reproduction of banality that constitutes nine-tenths of what we see going up around us.

In the city that is supposed to make no small plans, this biennial offers us no plans

Following the grid through to scales and cantilevers previously impossible to construct is the go-to vernacular of big building, with a few fashionables folding and flowing those grids to turn it into blobism as a skin disease.

In academia, the days of researching the most outre form are over as we dive further and further into the ways in which we actually make buildings, from life and safety codes to stud-wall construction, to find expressive possibilities in those building blocks of banality.

It is perhaps telling that the only one of the super-tall residential buildings in New York to show any kind of integrity is Rafael Viñoly's unadorned pencil of grids soaring above all its competitors not only in height, but also in simplicity. This is where we have ended up: clarity and simplicity in instead of overt repression and revolt.

So has Make New History captured the zeitgeist? It is too small and limited to be able to make that claim for it, but it certainly offers a salutary alternative to the purely reactionary statements such as David Chipperfield's misanthropic 2012 Venice Biennale exhibition. In the city that is supposed to make no small plans, this biennial offers us no plans, only a documentation of well-organised possibilities in maps, models, and photographs.

Perhaps the next biennial will erect the scaffolding for such future-forming forms

My favourite display was Jürgen Mayer H's Cosmic Latte Manifesto: a collection of buildings that are all beige, off-brown, or latte-coloured. This refusal at the idealism of white, this practicality of incorporating dirt into the building's facade, this desire not to offend or stand out, is what we see all around us.

Mayer, who's best early building, a small city hall in the suburbs of Stuttgart coloured in stripes of brown that recalled both the 1970s and the clothes and accessories then being produced by Prada, but who has now turned towards tortured triangles and tree-like forms, proposes that we should make this vernacular our own and, well, do something with it. What, however, he does not say.

That, for me, is the next step. This biennial calls us to order and turns us to the past, but it does not allow us to answer to the terror and the banality that threatens to drown us with false forms. Instead, it shows us what is all around us and how we might go digging through its detritus to find building blocks for a new architecture. Perhaps the next biennial will erect the scaffolding for such future-forming forms.

Aaron Betsky is president of the School of Architecture at Taliesin. A critic of art, architecture, and design, Betsky is the author of over a dozen books on those subjects, including a forthcoming survey of modernism in architecture and design. He writes a twice-weekly blog for architectmagazine.com, Beyond Buildings. Trained as an architect and in the humanities at Yale University, Betsky was previously director of the Cincinnati Art Museum (2006-2014) and the Netherlands Architecture Institute (2001-2006), and Curator of Architecture and Design at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1995-2001). In 2008, he also directed the 11th Venice International Biennale of Architecture.

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"Architecture as intellectual inquiry needs to take more risks"

The post "Chicago Biennial shows us how we might find building blocks for a new architecture" appeared first on Dezeen.

from ifttt-furniture https://www.dezeen.com/2017/10/03/opinion-aaron-betsky-chicago-architecture-biennial-future-building-blocks/