The Blur comes to the Built Environment

Much esoteric philosophizing and intellectual building goes on in the architectural world, for material suppliers questions of the validity of some of the ideas and how they will manifest is always in the forefront of their product planning. As a consultant, I regularly wrestle with how culture, technology and design ideas will combine into new forms. I realize that the influences and outcomes are never linear, but rather more organic, often even spiral. On my return from Art Basel Miami, I have been obsessing over how THE BLUR will affect the built environment. Of course, it already has - Diller + Scofidio created a building for the Swiss Expo 2002 called the BLUR Building that was essentially a scaffold with mist created by 31,500 high-pressure nozzles. Their description states: "Upon entering the fog mass, visual and acoustic references are erased, leaving only an optical "white-out" and the "white-noise" of pulsing nozzles. Blur is an anti-spectacle. Contrary to immersive environments that strive for high-definition visual fidelity with ever-greater technical virtuosity, Blur is decidedly low-definition: there is nothing to see but our dependence on vision itself." Ah! but this rarefied thinking doesn't translate to my clients, nor do my clients make water.

So I am no wiser, I keep searching and realize that one of my previous presentations held the answer - the ribbon building I was showing as a new new trend in a 2005 presentation at Coverings showed what blur would look like in the built environment. Surfaces will no longer be distinct, floors will meld into walls and flow into ceiling and technology makes it all possible. Now that is something my clients will understand - a new way of seeing their material with more square footage to cover!

Always looking for confirmation, I found it on a most spectacular architectural website: Iconography: In a post called "The Endgame of Minimalism," Michiel van Raaij states, "For the first time in architectural history the floor, wall, and ceiling not only had the same color, but became part of the same surface." He also sees "the end of paint, stucco, or foil" putting all but concrete, metal and glass manufacturers out of business. If I follow his reasoning, I guess that I'd better put less emphasis on color and more on texture, it 's all seems rather blurry to me.