A Living Blob By Austin Bunn Photographs by Lars Tunbjork he tour of Beatrix Ost and Lud wig Kuttner’s 1,600-square-foot Upper West Side pied -ai-terre be- gins, appropriately, in the bath- room. From the outside, it isa frosted-glass cube. One side faces the living room so that, from the couch, you could watch a ghostly silhouette Water Pik and floss. Heading into the master bedroom, you angle around an enormous, brushed alumi- num teardrop — which is also a sink and a closet, but we'll get 0 that later — and it becomes clear that Ost and Kuttner are still very rmuch in love. They have to be. A floor-to-ceiling glass pane, albeit with two modest milky areas, stands between the bed and the toilet and the shower, making modesty definitely not the point. Where most of us tend co prefer the privacy of walls, Ost and Kuttner have a window. “It’s nice,” Kutiner says about the partition. “Instead of being lonely and remote from each other, we «can be close. For the same reason, we only have one bathroom sink —so we're always together.” When Task Ost if it’s strange to wake up with her head against the glass where her husband's shower water is splattering, she looks at me quizzically. “No, it’s not strange,” she says, in a slightly re proving German accent. “It just is.” ‘What is strange in the Ost/Kuttner apartment is just about everything else. When they purchased the apartment in the mid~ Marriage of bee ane bath: Kutine et) ard Ostin ther “bio” apartment490's, Ost and Kuttner, the 57-year ‘old president of the apparel com: pany Hampshire Group, were dead-set aginst the stark his minimalism of 20th-century Mod- cenism, They wanted somethin more contemporary and playful What they got looks likea continu ous puddle of plastic, stretching from the shampoo rack to the bed: room slippers Tha single sweep of burnt-oF the wall of the shower flows into the lipo the tub and chen spills onto the floor, ranning out of the bsehroom, where it shapes platform for the mattress. You really could say the tub is abo the bed. Taken together, the two rooms have the feel of bow doir subcontracted to Nickelodeon, Ost, an elegant, 60-yearold artist and write, says, "We call this place ‘Cleopatra's submarine Spend any time in the (Ost/Kuttner apartment, and you have to get over your sense that shapes need edges or have a re sponsibility ro end. “We wanted t0 explorean apartment that wouldn't ig0 back to walls and doors and Standard room sequences,” says Sulan Kolatan, che architect who, ‘wich her husband and partner, W c Donald, designed the fe wanted continuities So the bathroom sink into a wall and fattens into a stor- age cabinet. The second shower in the apartment — also orange (“L wanted honey, but they couldn’e auite get there,” Ost says) and bul: ous as a wee unk — spreads from the stall across the kitchen as the base melts in waves, Kolatan and Mac Donald wil tell you that the design of O/K apart= ‘ment — critically acclaimed and still featured regularly in design ‘magazines — is not random, nor ‘organic, and most definitely notin spired by natural metaphors, an idea Kolatan calls both “sentimen- tal” and “horsifying”” What the apartment is, more. precisely is bobby. If traditional architecture has been the practice of clean lines inside the rectilinear box, blob ar chitccture is messy, roiling and deeply, shamelessly plastic. Ie is a result of the confluence of software ‘enbloed from the 3-D animation in Anstn Bunn last wrote forthe mag azine about diabetes, With blobs ike thse, who needs walls? Ashower lurks behing tne orange Bio t he right of Ost (stancing), dustry, new materials like carbon fi bers and composite resins and ar chieects gone curve-happy Kolatan and Mae Donald have ready finished the designs for a blobby, 1,800-square-foot addition to a farmhouse in Connecticut — cone of the first large-scale, doms ¢ blob experiments — that looks, oughly like a barn blowing a but bie Instead of wood, the extension will be made of a fiber-reinforced composite. “The exterior will have the consistency of a 1970's Nauga- hhyde couch,” Mac Donald says “The owners will be able to sun- bathe on ther roof.” Tobitecture is as loose and idiosyncratic as the blobby forms it yields. For the O/K apartment, Kolatan and Mac Donald scanned in spoons, pillows and couch uphol- stery and then permutated them in 3-D software beyond recognition ‘The computer does_precooking for us," Kolaan says. The lability, then, is what's called “the stopping probiem,” which is to say: what keeps architects from permutating and extruding forever in undulating waves of fiberglass? Is no blob ever finished, only abandoned? The closest analogy, says a New York based architect and blob- perimenter, Eric Liftn, is psycho- analysis. “Te’s not atypical achitec- tural task of “Here's a problem and here's how I will solve it)” Liftin says, “buta series of continual ass0- cations that get at something use ful.” Working from “little mo- ‘ments of inspiration —like spoons — means that the work is more jazzy than mose architects are com- fortable admitting, “No architect is ever going to say that their work is ‘atbitaryy” Liftin says. “Tes sup posed to be rigorous. Butalor of the data is essentially arbitrary Beatrix Ost and Ludwig Kattner spend most of their time in the counterpoint of blobitecture — a 200-yearold Jeffersonian villa on 500 acres in Virginia designed by a craftsman who worked on Mont: cello. The house is symmetrical fevery room has a twin, Ost and Kuctner grew up in postwar Ger- ‘many, and they spent years as no- ‘ads in Manhattan, bouncing from ‘TeBeCa lofts to che West Side to Philippe Starck’s Paramount Ho- tel. In the mid-9's, they pur- chased two adjacent” apartments near Central Park and decided to fase them into one — the O/K apartment. Ost and Kuttner didn't tnced much persuading trom Kole tan and Mac Donald to experiment with plastics. The couple's son Oliver designs and drives race cars ‘made of the same composites But engineers, and the general public, may take more convinc ‘One of the most surprising aspects ‘o.cunvlineay, blobby designs is how strong they are. “Everybody looks at a straight, So-degreeangle wood ‘wall and thinks, Thats the norma- tie condition thar must be the strongest,” Mac Donald says. “But it isn't necessarily so." Kolatan points ro the advent of ew materi= als that have flipped the physics of serength. “There isa history in 20th ‘century construction to believe in heavy-strong materials,” she says. But now we're entering into 3 ‘whole other phase of composite ma- terials — like titanium, or the car= bon fiber thatthe stealth bomber is made of — that are ‘light-strong: Recents; Kolatan and Mse Do submitted one of thie curved com posite shells to.a “bend test” a the Columbia engineering school. The shell withttood 3 load of realy 12,000 pounds. “I: had a great resi fence," Mac Donald says. “One of the guys there ssid we should have tricked 1 bottle of Champagne against the prow For Ost and Kuttnes, the lived experience of blobitecture escapes the severity of Modernism without indulging in cartoon. I's expansive and accepting, in the way that a loose curve is more human than a line. “People ask, Do we ever get tired of the design,” Kurener sa. “Bur if something is beautiful to day, why would you get tired of it tomorrow? People want t0 move conto the next when they are tired of themselves.” Ost setles at her kiechen table covered in junk mail, Postits and a bouquet of lilacs shedding on the floor. “I have a friend in Munich who says: “Please never bring me red roses. [can't put them anywhere, she ells me. "In hher mind, she isso stuck with hee design. But our apartment is the kind of place where there's no such thing asthe wrong flowers." = id