Nueva York Museum of Technology Culture, New York, 1999

The menacing blob in the science fiction of the fifties returned half a century later under the auspices of the computer revolution and, just like the economic mutations brought about by the dot.com, its formal expression was delivered in two versions, rosy and dark: both features can be found in the restaurant by Jakob & MacFarlane at the Centre Pompidou, a friendly warped metal shell that appears to turn into a somber virus when placed under the trusses of this happy machine. This also applies to the biomorphic and sculptural architecture of the sixties, which had the bulbs or rhizomes of Frederick Kiesler and André Bloc as main characters, revived decades later with the help of the computer, which manages to draw – and sometimes build – oneiric spaces where the represented and the real are hard to distinguish. The same happens in the images of the pavilion of NOX and the museum of Asymptote, bulky or fluid forms that go from the organic smoothness of manual modelling to the liquid dissolution of the digital screen: between the skulls of Frank Gehry, shaped as the clay heads of Barceló, and the embryological and grooved bubbles of Greg Lynn or Kas Oosterhuis, always on the verge of informal fading...[+]