Blobism: Aesthetics of Orbed Forms as a New Ontology of Human Environment

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The paper analyzes a wide range of architectural innovations brought to reality in the middle of the XXth century as a continuation and development of Frank Lloyd Wright's philosophical ideas about creating „organic constructions“ which would be „in harmony with humanity and its environment“, with particular attention to materials (Wright 2003; Patterson 1994; Satler 1999; Materiality 2015). Comparing several trends in two main types of contemporary „futuristic“ architecture – organic and digital ones (David 1992; Pawlyn 2011; Rosa 2003; Saint-Pierre 2015; Marchand 2013) – we investigate the profound aesthetic foundations which are supposed to have motivated the emergence of so called waveform architecture, or blobitecture. The results of our studies show that, since 1960-1970s, the ecological concern, facilitated by technological progress, gave birth to the new paradigm in design and architecture, which could be summarily designed as BLOBISM (Blobjects & Beyond 2005). In our paper we propose archetypal, cultural and psychological interpretation of orbed forms symbolism as being related to the revival of indigenous building traditions (Adam, Dauch, Soum 2010), to cosmic allusions, to solar mythology latent cultural representations, to the discovery of Oriental philosophy practices (such as Feng Shui), to the technological revolution in materials and digital engineering which made possible privileging dynamic structures and rounded forms. The significance of such generalization consists in suggesting a classificatory global scope of all the above mentioned branches of organicist naturalizing and digital modeling approaches.