Blom trained first as a carpenter and building draughtsman and only then took a degree at Amsterdam's Academie van Bouwkunst, graduating in 1959 as a pupil of Aldo van Eyck. He spent his career on one idea, which he called living as a general urban roof: lift the dwellings onto columns and let shops, parking, workshops and gardens run continuously underneath. The students' building at Twente, the Kasbah at Hengelo, the burnt Speelhuis theatre at Helmond, the Rotterdam cube houses and the Closed City at Amersfoort are all versions of it. Because he would not compromise the principle, commissions thinned in the 1980s. He is grouped with Van Eyck and Hertzberger as one of the three architects who carried Dutch Structuralism abroad.
