Rem Koolhaas's Casa da Musica

Famed Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas has designed the new concert hall in the Portuguese city of Oporto. My opinion of it is based solely on Nicolai Ouroussoff's article and slide show in the New York Times (link - registration required).

Here's an excerpt from the article:

The main hall seems hyperrational by comparison. Since conventional wisdom holds that acoustically, the world's best concert halls - Symphony Hall in Boston, say - are built in the shape of a shoebox, Mr. Koolhaas gives us a shoebox. Similarly, the seats are arranged with the precision of an assembly line, in simple repetitive rows.

Judging by the photos in the slide show, Mr. Ouroussoff is right - this building is hyperrational, with all of the terrible modernist geometry that implies. The only nod to organic form (and even then, not human-scale) that I can make out is the interior wall decoration of the hall itself, which depicts freakishly blown-up wood grain. The rest - interior, exterior - looks like it was built by a little boy who had taken a chainsaw to his Lego set: an odd jumble of lines, triangles, diamonds, trapezoids and rectangles. Even worse - the Lego set was colored gray, white and black. Bilbao must be laughing...

Blobalicious!

The San Jose Museum of Art is holding an exhibition of organic design, the products of which are sometimes called blobjects.

Here's a link to the Museum site.

There's a concise summary of the exhibition, accompanied by excellent photos, in Metropolis magazine, and interviews with exhibition curators Steven and Mara Holt Skov.

Link.

Design has always aimed to strike an emotional chord in its users, but perhaps no style does this better than the amorphous blobject. At once organic, tactile, and ergonomic, the blobject is inspired by the curvy shapes in nature--the human breast, a weathered stone, tear drops--but forged via cutting-edge technology.

“Blobs can too easily be seen as superficial, but in reality they are the answer to marrying ecological concerns, emotion, cultural expression, and state-of-the-art technology” said Holt.

I couldn't have put it better myoself.

Organic blobby Flash animations

Electrolyte, by Jonathan Caplin. An experiment in organic design which is somehow facscinating and difficult to stop watching.

Link