Paleo Retiree writes:
Back here, Blowhard Esq. took note of a particularly absurd new piece of blobitecture. The fad for wibbly-wobbly, objets d’art-style design seems to be spreading; ridgey, “organic” pieces of this-‘n’-that are cropping up all over the place.
I present to you something I spotted a few days ago near Santa Barbara, CA, in — of all places — a men’s room (and not even the men’s room of a fashionable hotel or restaurant):
Though it pains me to make this concession, it isn’t the end of the world that a fashion-conscious design firm persuaded a building owner to chic up his/her property with some of-the-moment design touches. Still, and even so: what’s the point? These wavy ridges will be a pain for some maintenance person to keep relatively dust-free; they’re unlikely to age well in a material sense; and five’ll get ya ten that in a few years this men’s room will look as silly as a trendy haircut whose time has passed.
A little more interesting, it seems to me, are a handful of more general questions: Why is ridginess currently a style thing at all? Are regular people really clamoring for new buildings (and men’s rooms) to resemble pieces of glazed millefeuille pastry? And why are swoopy-doopiness and wibbly-wobbliness what all the cool kids are trying to impose on the rest of us anyway?
Blowhard, Esq.
Callowman
Sherbrooke
Eddie Pensier
Enzo Nakamura
Epaminondas
Fabrizio del Wrongo
Fenster
Brundle Guy
Glynn Marshes
Paleo Retiree
Atypical Neurotic
Question Lady
Sax von Stroheim
Sir Barken Hyena
The Mistaken
Uncouth Reflections 
At the swanky new shopping mall in Chippendale, Sydney, there’s a seat/bench with this pattern. To make it worse, it’s set up in some kind of weird ‘mobius’ design (gradually flips over so a person on the other side can sit on it). Most uncomfortable goddamned thing Iive ever sat on, and it can just barely fit two people despite having enough length for 3-4. Sure does look fancy though.
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It seems that we must all suffer for the sake of Great Design.
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Reblogged this on Will S.' Random Weirdness Blog and commented:
Ugh.
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Many thanks! And: agreed.
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Puke making, like urinating inside some sort of larva. I’ll lne up with Fenster on this one – if this is what is going to replace Modernism, give me Modernism any day, by whicj of course I mean High-Modern “Mad Men” Brasilia style modernism, not Frank Ghery (or however you spell it)
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Believe it or not this kind of thing is the modernists’ cure for modernism — if the main problem with midcentury modernism was monomaniacal rectilinearity, now the same crowd is overcompensating with an orgy of “organic” design. An option they never seem to want to explore: feeling the modernist cult and returning to the world of traditional architecture and urbanism.
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What’s up with the lines from each wall not meeting at the corner? On closer inspection, every other line meets… is *that* the cool thing? It looks sloppy and unsettling, like it’s not a single unified space. So many lines not meeting gives it a harsh slapdash look.
You may not be able to pinpoint it at first, but I’m sure most people will just feel that something is off about this thing.
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That’s a great little bit of noticing.
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And given the strong organic look, all those broken lines come off as broken bones, broken branches, broken web lines, broken cell walls, or something… nothing like trying to weird out your customers while they’re taking a wiz.
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Yeah, it’s actually disgusting, and the more you look at it, the worse it gets.
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It’s like a cross between a theme park and the movie “Alien.” Just what you want to be experiencing while relieving yourself.
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