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As if harking back to the 1950s horror flick, the Blob has reinvaded our culture. Now, though, instead of screaming hordes fleeing in terror, there are hordes of people rushing out to buy the G-shock watches, the iMAC computers, and the other symbols of the way in which our society has rejected the idea of form. The Blob is everywhere; you can't miss it. At Target a few weeks ago, I wandered into an aisle of strangely shaped kitchen utensils designed by pop-culture architect Michael Graves. I brought home a spatula to show my family: the end of the handle had a blobular shape on it, and it wasn't just of ergonomic concern. It's hip. Paging through a design magazine, one sees faucets, sofas, and light fixtures that exhibit the Blob Aesthetic. Brueton Studios produces an Advil-shaped stool called "UFO Seating"; on the streets of New York you'll see the twentysomething crowd sporting Blob backpacks made of foam. And in the computer lab at school there are four of those horrifyingly ugly computers, with their violent neon colors and mini-Blob mouses.
This rejection of traditional forms—of corners, planes, and straight lines—has spilled over into the discipline of architecture. Last year at the Museum of Modern Art, I heard Japanese architect Toyo Ito speak about his Mediatheque; its internal structure of curving tubes was inspired, he said, by bulbous, floating seaweed. New York, always the leader in world design trends, has its own amorphous monuments; surprisingly, perhaps the city's most striking example of the new aesthetic is a building nearing completion in Queens: New York Presbyterian Church, with a congregation composed largely of Korean immigrants and their children.
The architect primarily responsible for this astonishing structure is Columbia University's wunderkind, Greg Lynn, a graduate-level professor at the School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation at the age of 33. By his own admission, Lynn never carries a pencil; he doesn't even sketch without the aid of a computer. Already, he has formed his own theories about spatial relationships; he's fascinated by what he calls "anexact" relationships, neither exact nor inexact. Recently, Lynn combined with Garofalo Architects and Michael McInturf Architects to build the first actual structure he's been commissioned for: New York Presbyterian Church in Long Island City, Queens.
The first time I visited the site, the sky was gray and the clouds leaked out a light, spattering drizzle, playing an accompaniment to the industrial area all around. On one side are the railyards for the Long Island Railroad, and trains traveling east through Queens get a view of the church's north facade. On the opposite side is a large retail shopping center with bright colors, trying desperately to bring life to an area that looks like an inhabited ghost town. All around are factories and warehouses in drab, colorless, ashen shades.
The church was not built from the ground up but rather was integrated into an existing building (the Knickerbocker Laundry, dating to the 1930s and the heyday of modernism). Lynn's design for the sanctuary was based on what he called an aggregational model, rather than a congregational one. Members of a congregation remain subordinate to the concept of the congregation itself, using a "theocentric body" for structure. On the other hand, members of an aggregation retain their autonomy within the body, fusing together to form a "multiple, mutable, and mobile" body that remains ever-changing and dynamic.
The building is nothing if not aggregational: a conglomerate of shapes, structures, and ideas. I know of many architects who would cringe at the idea of naming parts of their structures, but Lynn and his associates don't shy away from it. The sacred void inside the sanctuary was referred to as the "blob," and the sanctuary itself as the "shed," names that project architect Gregg Pasquarelli threw at me without a trace of a smirk. Conceived on WaveFront software, a Lynn design, the blob is fed by two flowing "tubes," one from either side, that facilitate entering and exiting for a large number of people. The undulating roof of the sanctuary is composed of sharply cutting polygons that, if collapsed, would nest inside each other, prompting the nickname Nestor. So, the tubes are connected to the blob, the blob supports Nestor, and Nestor covers the shed.
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