WBlobitecture, blobism and blobismus are terms for a movement in architecture in which buildings have an organic, amoeba-shaped, building form. Though the term blob architecture was in vogue already in the mid-1990s, the word blobitecture first appeared in print in 2002, in William Safire's "On Language" column in the New York Times Magazine in an article entitled "Defenestration". Though intended in the article to have a derogatory meaning, the word stuck and is often used to describe buildings with curved and rounded shapes.
WDeconstructivism is a movement of postmodern architecture which appeared in the 1980s. It gives the impression of the fragmentation of the constructed building, commonly characterised by an absence of obvious harmony, continuity, or symmetry. Its name is a portmanteau of Constructivism and "Deconstruction", a form of semiotic analysis developed by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida. Architects whose work is often described as deconstructivist include Zaha Hadid, Peter Eisenman, Frank Gehry, Rem Koolhaas, Daniel Libeskind, Bernard Tschumi, and Coop Himmelb(l)au.
WAlfred Lerner Hall is the student center or students' union of Columbia University. It is named for Al Lerner, who financed part of its construction. Situated on the university's historic Morningside Heights campus in New York City, the building, designed by deconstructivist architect Bernard Tschumi, then dean of Columbia's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, opened in 1999, replacing the previous student center, Ferris Booth Hall, which stood from 1960-1996. The cafeteria in Lerner Hall still bears the name of Ferris Booth, and unlike the other large cafeteria on campus in John Jay, Ferris Booth utilizes only plastic silverware and paper plates. The building attempts to both conform to its context of neoclassical McKim, Mead, and White buildings as well as break out of their mold. In so doing, Lerner Hall features redbrick cladding and proportions that hold the street wall of university buildings along Broadway, but reveals a vast glass wall to the campus fabricated by Eiffel Constructions Metalliques, descendant of the firm that built the Eiffel Tower. Behind the wall are a series of escalating ramps that give the building a unified sense of space and are meant to act as a social meeting place much like the steps of Low Memorial Library.
WThe Caltrans District 7 Headquarters building at 100 South Main Street in Downtown Los Angeles, California serves the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) and the Los Angeles Department of Transportation. Built on a $165 million budget, it opened on September 24, 2004. Its futuristic and environmentally friendly design won its designer, Thom Mayne, the 2005 Pritzker Prize. The design and construction of the building was documented across four episodes on the History Channel series Modern Marvels, to demonstrate the unique challenges presented in the design and construction of large buildings over the past two centuries.
WThe Campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is located on a 168-acre (68 ha) tract in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. The campus spans approximately one mile (1.6 km) of the north side of the Charles River basin directly opposite the Back Bay neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts.
WThe CCTV Headquarters serves as the headquarters for China Central Television (CCTV) that was formerly at the old China Central Television Building located at 11 Fuxin Road some 15 km (9.3 mi) to the west. The tower is a 234-metre (768 ft), 51-story skyscraper on East Third Ring Road, Guanghua Road in the Beijing Central Business District (CBD). Groundbreaking took place on 1 June 2004 and the building's facade was completed in January 2008. After the construction was delayed by a fire that engulfed the adjacent Television Cultural Center in February 2009, the headquarters was completed in May 2012 and was officially inaugurated in June 2013. The CCTV Headquarters won the 2013 Best Tall Building Worldwide from the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat.
WThe China Media Group Headquarters is a 112 m (367 ft), 27-story-tall office tower and television complex at 11 Fuxin Road in Haidian District, Beijing, China. Construction began in 1983 and was completed in 1986 with the official opening in 1987. It was named CCTV Headquarters or CCTV Building at the time was official inaugurated on 1988. The tower served as the headquarters for China Media Group since 2018, and it formerly served as the headquarters for China Central Television until 2013 when the new headquarters was officially inaugurated on East Third Ring Road, Guanghua Road, some 15 km (9.3 mi) to the east.
WThe Contemporary Arts Center (CAC) is a contemporary art museum in Cincinnati, Ohio and one of the first contemporary art institutions in the United States. The CAC is a non-collecting museum that focuses on new developments in painting, sculpture, photography, architecture, performance art and new media. Focusing on programming that reflects "the art of the last five minutes," the CAC has displayed the works of many now-famous artists early in their careers, including Andy Warhol. In 2003, the CAC moved to a new building designed by the late Zaha Hadid.
WThe Contemporary Jewish Museum (CJM) is a non-collecting museum at 736 Mission Street at Yerba Buena Lane in the South of Market (SoMa) neighborhood of San Francisco, California. The museum, which was founded in 1984, is located in the historic Jessie Street Substation, which was gutted and its interior redesigned by Daniel Libeskind, along with a new addition; the new museum opened in 2008. The museum's mission is to make the diversity of the Jewish experience relevant for a twenty-first century audience through exhibitions and educational programs.
WThe Dancing House, or Fred and Ginger, is the nickname given to the Nationale-Nederlanden building on the Rašínovo nábřeží in Prague, Czech Republic. It was designed by the Croatian-Czech architect Vlado Milunić in cooperation with Canadian-American architect Frank Gehry on a vacant riverfront plot. The building was designed in 1992. The construction, carried out by BESIX, was completed four years later in 1996.
WThe de Young Museum, formally the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum, is a fine arts museum located in San Francisco, California. Located in Golden Gate Park, it is a component of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, along with the Legion of Honor. The de Young is named for early San Francisco newspaperman M. H. de Young.
WDiamond Ranch High School is a high school that serves students from Diamond Bar and Phillips Ranch, California, United States, and is operated by the Pomona Unified School District (PUSD) in Pomona, California. Diamond Ranch's athletic teams compete in the Hacienda League of the CIF Southern Section.
WThe Dongdaemun Design Plaza, abbreviated as DDP, is a major urban development landmark in Seoul, South Korea designed by Zaha Hadid and Samoo, with a distinctively neofuturistic design characterized by the "powerful, curving forms of elongated structures". The landmark is the centerpiece of South Korea's fashion hub and popular tourist destination, Dongdaemun, featuring a walkable park on its roofs, large global exhibition spaces, futuristic retail stores and restored parts of the Seoul fortress.
WPeter Eisenman is an American architect. Considered one of the New York Five, Eisenman is known for his writing and speaking about architecture as well as his designs, which have been called high modernist or deconstructive.
WThe Elbphilharmonie, popularly nicknamed Elphi, is a concert hall in the HafenCity quarter of Hamburg, Germany, on the Grasbrook peninsula of the Elbe River. It is among the largest in the world.
WThe Denver Art Museum (DAM) is an art museum located in the Civic Center of Denver, Colorado. With encyclopedic collections of more than 70,000 diverse works from across the centuries and world, the DAM is one of the largest art museums between the West Coast and Chicago. It is known for its collection of American Indian art, as well as The Petrie Institute of Western American Art, which oversees the Museum’s Western art collection. and its other collections of more than 70,000 diverse works from across the centuries and world. The Museum’s iconic Martin Building was designed by famed Italian architect Gio Ponti in 1971.
WThe Gehry Residence is architect Frank Gehry's home. It was originally an extension, designed by Gehry and built around an existing Dutch colonial style house. It makes use of unconventional materials, such as chain-link fences and corrugated steel. It is sometimes considered one of the earliest deconstructivist buildings, although Gehry denies this.
WFrank Owen Gehry,, FAIA is a Canadian-born American architect and designer, residing in Los Angeles. A number of his buildings, including his private residence, have become world-renowned attractions. His works are cited as being among the most important works of contemporary architecture in the 2010 World Architecture Survey, which led Vanity Fair to label him as "the most important architect of our age".
WThe Gran Teatro Nacional del Perú is a multi-purpose theatre and concert hall in Lima, Peru. It is part of the Cultural Tridium, flanked by the National Library of Peru and the Museo de la Nación.
WThe Greater Columbus Convention Center is a convention center located in Downtown Columbus, Ohio, United States, along the east side of North High Street.
WThe Groninger Museum is an art museum in the city of Groningen in the Netherlands. The museum exhibits modern and contemporary art of local, national, and international artists.
WHouse VI, or the Frank Residence, is a significant building in Cornwall, Connecticut, designed by Peter Eisenman, completed in 1975. His second built work, the getaway house, located on Great Hollow Road near Bird's Eye Brook in Cornwall, Connecticut, has become famous for both its revolutionary definition of a house as much as for the physical problems of design and difficulty of use. At the time of construction, the architect was known almost exclusively as a theorist and "paper architect," promulgating a highly formalist approach to architecture he calls "postfunctionalism." Rather than form following function or an aesthetic design, the design emerged from a conceptual process, and remains pinned to that conceptual framework.
WImperial War Museum North is a museum in the Metropolitan Borough of Trafford in Greater Manchester, England. One of five branches of the Imperial War Museum, it explores the impact of modern conflicts on people and society. It is the first branch of the Imperial War Museum to be located in the north of England. The museum occupies a site overlooking the Manchester Ship Canal on Trafford Wharf Road, Trafford Park, an area which during the Second World War was a key industrial centre and consequently heavily bombed during the Manchester Blitz in 1940. Just across the Trafford Wharf Road from the Museum is the bulk of the Rank Hovis Flour Mill, a survivor from a former industrial age and now rather out of keeping with the surrounding architecture. The area is now home to the Lowry cultural centre and the MediaCityUK development, which stand opposite the museum at Salford Quays.
WThe International Museum of the Baroque is a museum of Baroque art designed by Japanese architect Toyo Itō located in Puebla, Mexico. It opened on February 4, 2016.
WJeffrey Kipnis is an American architectural critic, theorist, designer, film-maker, curator, and educator.
WRemment Lucas Koolhaas is a Dutch architect, architectural theorist, urbanist and Professor in Practice of Architecture and Urban Design at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University. He is often cited as a representative of Deconstructivism and is the author of Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan.
WDaniel Libeskind is a Polish-American architect, artist, professor and set designer. Libeskind founded Studio Daniel Libeskind in 1989 with his wife, Nina, and is its principal design architect.
WThe Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health (LRCBH), officially the Cleveland Clinic Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health, opened on May 21, 2010, in Las Vegas, Nevada. It is operated by the Cleveland Clinic and was designed by Frank Gehry.
WThe Matcal Tower is a 17-floor high-rise building at Camp Rabin military base in the HaKirya quarter of Tel Aviv, Israel. It houses the headquarters of the Israel Ministry of Defense and offices of the IDF General Staff. It was built in 2003, and is located close to another IDF building, the Marganit Tower, and across the road from the civilian Azrieli Center.
WGordon Matta-Clark was an American artist best known for his site-specific artworks he made in the 1970s.
WThe McCormick Tribune Campus Center (MTCC) is a building on the main campus of the Illinois Institute of Technology, in the Bronzeville neighborhood on the south side of Chicago. The McCormick Tribune Campus Center opened September 30, 2003. A single-story 110,000-square-foot (10,000 m2) building, it was the first building designed by architect Rem Koolhaas within the United States.
WThe Musée des Confluences is a science centre and anthropology museum which opened on 20 December 2014 in the 2nd arrondissement of Lyon, (Rhône), France. It is located at the southern tip of the Presqu'île at the confluence of the Rhône and the Saône, adjacent to Autoroute A7, and comprises part of a larger redevelopment project of the Confluence quarter of Lyon. The deconstructivist architectural design, said to resemble a floating crystal cloud of stainless steel and glass, was created by the Austrian firm Coop Himmelb(l)au.
WThe Museum of Pop Culture or MoPOP is a nonprofit museum in Seattle, Washington, dedicated to contemporary popular culture. It was founded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen in 2000 as the Experience Music Project. Since then MoPOP has organized dozens of exhibits, 17 of which have toured across the U.S. and internationally.
WThe Parc de la Villette is the third-largest park in Paris, 55.5 hectares in area, located at the northeastern edge of the city in the 19th arrondissement. The park houses one of the largest concentration of cultural venues in Paris, including the Cité des Sciences et de l'Industrie, three major concert venues, and the prestigious Conservatoire de Paris.
WThe Ramón C. Cortines School of Visual and Performing Arts, known unofficially as Grand Arts High School, is a performing arts public high school in the Los Angeles Unified School District in the United States. It is located on the site of the old Fort Moore at the corner of Grand Avenue and Cesar E. Chavez Avenue in Downtown Los Angeles, adjacent to Chinatown. Grand Arts anchors the north end of Los Angeles' "Grand Avenue Cultural Corridor". The school's distinctive architecture has made the facility noteworthy beyond the Los Angeles area.
WReflections at Keppel Bay in Singapore is luxury waterfront residential complex on approx 84,000 m² of land with 750m of shoreline. It was completed in 2011, offering 1129 units with a 99-year leasehold. The six distinctive curved glass towers afford panorama views of Mount Faber and Sentosa.
WThe Falkestrasse rooftop remodeling located in Vienna, Austria, is a Coop Himmelb(l)au architectural project. The remodelling is an edition to a pre-existing traditional Viennese building. The law firm clients, Schuppich, Sporn, Winischhofer required more space in which Coop Himmelblau went up and out. The remodelling design commenced in 1983, with the final construction concluding in late 1988.
WThe San Francisco Federal Building is an 18-story, 234 ft-tall (71.3 m) building at 90 7th Street on the corner of Mission and 7th streets in the South of Market neighborhood of San Francisco, California. The federal building was designed by the Morphosis architectural firm, as a supplement to the Phillip Burton Federal Building several blocks away. Thom Mayne of Morphosis designed the building using a juxtaposition of gray concrete walls, perforated metal panels, and custom, faceted wood ceilings. The building was expected to be completed in 2005, but construction issues and delays pushed the project completion to 2007.
WThe Scottish Parliament Building is the home of the Scottish Parliament at Holyrood, within the UNESCO World Heritage Site in central Edinburgh. Construction of the building commenced in June 1999 and the Members of the Scottish Parliament (MSPs) held their first debate in the new building on 7 September 2004. The formal opening by Queen Elizabeth II took place on 9 October 2004. Enric Miralles, the Spanish architect who designed the building, died before its completion.
WThe Seattle Central Library is the flagship library of the Seattle Public Library system. The 11-story glass and steel building in downtown Seattle, Washington was opened to the public on May 23, 2004. Rem Koolhaas and Joshua Prince-Ramus of OMA/LMN were the principal architects, and Magnusson Klemencic Associates was the structural engineer with Arup. Arup also provided mechanical, electrical, and plumbing engineering, as well as fire/life safety, security, IT and communications, and audio visual consulting. Hoffman Construction Company of Portland, Oregon, was the general contractor.
WThe Ray and Maria Stata Center or Building 32 is a 720,000-square-foot (67,000 m2) academic complex designed by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Frank Gehry for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The building opened for initial occupancy on March 16, 2004. It sits on the site of MIT's former Building 20, which had housed the historic Radiation Laboratory, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The building's address is 32 Vassar Street.
WBernard Tschumi is an architect, writer, and educator, commonly associated with deconstructivism. Son of the well-known Swiss architect Jean Tschumi and a French mother, Tschumi is a dual French-Swiss national who works and lives in New York City and Paris. He studied in Paris and at ETH in Zurich, where he received his degree in architecture in 1969.
WThe Walt Disney Concert Hall at 111 South Grand Avenue in downtown Los Angeles, California, is the fourth hall of the Los Angeles Music Center and was designed by Frank Gehry. It opened on October 24, 2003. Bounded by Hope Street, Grand Avenue, and 1st and 2nd Streets, it seats 2,265 people and serves, among other purposes, as the home of the Los Angeles Philharmonic orchestra and the Los Angeles Master Chorale. The hall is a compromise between a vinyard-style seating configuration, like the Berliner Philharmonie by Hans Scharoun, and a classical shoebox design like the Vienna Musikverein or the Boston Symphony Hall.
WThe Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum is an art museum located at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The museum was founded in 1934 and is named in honor of art collector Frederick R. Weisman. Originally based in Northrop Auditorium, it moved into its current building in 1993. Widely known as a "modern art museum," the 25,000+ image collection has large collections of Marsden Hartley, Alfred Maurer, Charles Biederman, Native American Mimbres pottery, and traditional Korean furniture.
WThe Wexner Center for the Arts is the Ohio State University's "multidisciplinary, international laboratory for the exploration and advancement of contemporary art". The Wexner Center opened in November 1989, named in honor of the father of Limited Brands founder Leslie Wexner, who was a major donor to the center.