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The Blob
Took a walk to church on a Sept Sunday in L.A., and found by chance the new L.A. Philharmonic building of Frank Gehry (which opened formally a month or so later). Had my new handy digital camera - photo at right can be enlarged by clicking on it.
Of course I'd read of Gehry, and this building. So it wasn't totally strange. But the sheets and hunks of apparent metal in the Sunday Sun were really dazzling. Gehry is out there! No small surprise the LA Philharmonic building is dedicated to Walt Disney.
Had a chance to dig into the topic of what this hunk and dazzle is about in a book by ADT contributing editor John K. Waters.
This copiously illustrated survey posits architect Frank Gehry in an unfolding evolution of a phenomenon described as "Blob." The book, 'Blobitecture', shows the antecedents to Gehry, and parallel movements that have spawned such notable industrial designs as the Eames chairs and the Apple iMac.
Form-follows-function was a stringent dictate on designers for many recent years. Advances in computers and computation [not to mention composite materials] have allowed Gehry to visualize designs that would not, on the face of it, seem to hold up, and come to up with the means to make these buildings - drooping, swooping, and so on - stand.
Waters notes that this style arose as something of an anti-machine impulse, yet it could not have occurred without machine technology, specifically the computer technology that could provide underpinnings for 'improbably fluid forms.'
The author uncovers some things that surprise. A Disneyland Monsanto house of the future [which could be a happy home for Zippy the Pinhead], could not be readily demolished after its stay as a futurist grotto was at an end, Waters notes. The wrecking ball bounced off the [perhaps fiberglass] Monsanto house, and good old sledge hammers had to do the dirty deed!
There have been a lot of movements, some that vaporize in the blink of an eye. Does Blob as a serious movement hold up to scrutiny? Here, Waters takes a journalist's tack, and leaves the final judgment largely to the reader and future historians.
A different approach than the movie The Blob [from whence the movement gains its name it seems], where, as the movie trailer had it, "there's no stopping the blob [a "blood-curdling threat"] as it goes from town to town."
Missing perhaps is a look at Gaudi, and Dali [especially the latter's work at the 1939 World's Fair] - two individuals that melted a building or two in their day. I guess I say this because I can recall when I first saw Gehry's now famous Gugenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain [depicted gloriously in Blobitecture], that's what I thought of. Waters does point to Eero Saarinen and his TWA Terminal as a potent precursor of Gehry, but photos he includes are of the Saarinen's St. Louis arch, to my mind less of a pointer to Frank. But the book on the main is quite generous in its illustration of things blob like.
Saarinen and TWA resonate [bing!] especially for me. Once upon a dreary red-eye flight from L.A. to Boston by way of New York, I ended up with a three-hour stay-over at Saarinen's Idlewild [now Kennedy] TWA terminal. I knew him by name somehow because his wife was the art critic on Today when I was a tike, and I feel I even recall the day that he passed. The Today crew had condolences for Mrs. S. As it's been said everything is integrated about the design of the terminal, what swoop, and it was fun to woozily view the marvel. I ike to find some redemption in the useless trip, and sometimes that means encountering striking architecture. The TWA terminal at Kennedy, the Union Station in Nashville, Wright's V. C. Morris Gift Shop in S.F.
Related
Blobitecture -Amazon
Frank Lloyd Wright - V. C.Morris Gift Shop
The Blob site
Unrelated
Collector, Clodhoppers, Little Harvey Hull
Record collector Joe Bussard has recordings that date to the 19th century. He keeps most of his treasure in a basement near Frederick, Md. It is a variation of story we've heard before but which is unique ... he heard Jimmie Rogers. "That was like a bomb --boom." - said. The walls are lined with records, all in identical, unlabeled cardboard sleeves. He doesn't have a filing system; he has them all memorized. Page links to "I Got A Woman On Sourwood Mountain" by Earl Johnson and his Dixie Clodhoppers (1927), "Original Stack O'Lee Blues" by Long Cleve Reed and Little Harvey Hull on the Black Patti label. NPR.org, Dec 24, 2003
Bussard site where you can create your own tapes custom there for reasonable price.
Song sheets ..
.. Are an early example of a mass medium and today they offer a unique perspective on the political, social, and economic life of the time, especially during the Civil War. LOC.gov
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