on Blobs

Greg Lynn's essays were a dense and invigorating read. The ideas that Lynn proposes when discussing blobs and how they can be used to address contextually are particularly refreshing. In design studio we as students are constantly being challenged to offer contextual responses with every design proposal. However, too often contextual responses become limited by borrowing the very material, color, or form palette found in the site. Lynn claims that blobs, free of any connotation and referentiality are in a way inherently contextual in themselves. So blobs encapsulate an interior and define an exterior with one continuous surface which is molding and shaping to exist within it's surroundings. So I understand Lynn to be saying that paradoxically, blobs, which take odd volumes, are as contextual as it gets when possibly studied in the realm of architecture. 

I like this idea that "the blob is all surface." It is not the blob aesthetic that entices me as much as the principles that drive Lynn's fascination with blobs. Conceptually, this idea that "a blob ...[has] no depth per se; its interior and exterior are continuous" is powerful. We are surrounded by architecture that too often does not take the opportunity to engage its inhabitants in simultaneous perceptions of the inside and the outside. I can tell from Lynn's writing that studying blobs perhaps could be helpful in exploring these notions. I find it a paradox that architecture which as Lynn says is derived from human proportions and modeled after the human body (abstracted) is often so static and even unresponsive when you consider that the human body is neither of those. Perhaps blobs, even in their "alien" and "detached" forms can lend themselves to a more human architecture. This is what I am getting from Lynn and even though I don't love blobs as much as he does, I appreciate the thoughts they provoke.