The hottest trend, certainly in the UK, is the super-blob, the intrusion of organic forms into orthogonal structures. It is at this moment that the V & A in London has mounted Zoomorphic, an exhibition purporting to show the links between animals and architecture. From Lord Foster's "erotic gherkin" to Ushida Findlay's starfish-shaped country house design. Modernism has always had two strains, the functionalist and the organic. The former was effectively victorious, while the latter has traditionally popped up every few years like a kind of mad cousin in the attic, only to be locked safely up again by successive generations of the architectural establishment. At the fin de siècle it appeared alongside structural rationalism as art nouveau and the fantasies of Gaudí; in the 1920s it proved an expressionistic counterpoint to Germanic modernism; in the 1950s and 1960s buildings such as Eero Saarinen's TWA terminal at JFK Airport, New York, and Jorn Utzon's Sydney Opera House brought organicism into the mainstream and proved its efficacy in creating iconic structures, a lesson not lost on Frank Gehry, who took some ideas for the Bilbao Guggenheim, perhaps the most influential building of the past decade. ... read Full FT.com article