Minimalism then is the erection of false history, a zombie culture, a hollow laugh at the failure of architecture. A kind of anti-architecture, replaying Modernism’s tropes to opposite ends. Not utopia, not social progress, not a better world, but an ultimate and mesmerizing nihilism.
I doesn't seem suprising to read a partner of FAT calling for an end to minimalism....
I particularly enjoyed his comment about Pawson designed bathrooms and baths.
Also, was intrigued by his ending. Which is where we started: an obituary for something that isn’t dead, but was never alive, yet is everywhere, all the time. Maybe we should write obituaries where once we wrote manifestos.
Perhaps the new manifesto is the obit? Instead of framing a coming movement more about defining the ending of one...
like the intellectual version of "ugh, that is sooo 2005?" seems almost snobbish.
the entire blog is great. I love the "Terror and Romance of SketchUp" post:
Even when there’s nothing there, there’s the green flat land and the simple graduated fill sky. A landscape whose utter, terrifying banality we ignore so easily in our eagerness to get on with whatever task we have at hand. What if we just looked into this landscape. What would we see? What would we learn? This after all, is a model of the world. Maybe it’s the truest way of seeing the world as conceived by Google? Or perhaps it’s the real view of landscape after the Internet, or the surface of the planet as viewed by the military-industrial complex?
I disagree that it is dead. I think minimalism in its various forms is something that many people hope to be. There's something about owning almost nothing that is very alluring to many people.
The style we know as minimalism might be zombified. But there's a still a growing population of people who want their living rooms to be nothing but a single sofa, a single table and a single tv.
Someitmes, I think that having almost nothing is a luxury in and of itself.
I've tried explaining to many people that buying a big car to haul those once a year gigantic loads (like lumber or sheetrock) is so much more expensive than buying an expensive, compact sports car.
If we look at a style as how that looks, we could say a style is a visual language. Minimalism and de-constructionism are different languages just like French and English are different language, neither of those are 'blamable'.
Minimalism could be boring in outlook, but I see more witty realistic ideas in "minimalism" architectures. De-constructionism architectures look intriguing but it is also true that most of them are mindless and boring in its ideas.
@syp, i wonder if minimalism can only be considered as a stylistic, visual design aesthetic. Or maybe further a theoretical approach. Or do the two go hand?
@namhenderson, you are right.
Unlike what the author says, I don't think contemporary minimalism architectures are "ascetic idealism".
They look simple and minimal but individual project's concepts are unique and various. So, unlike the author, again, I wouldn't generalize those various architecture as "Minimalism".
Take contemporary japanese architecture for an example, they look simple and minimal but if looking at close enough, we can find their creativities. Even if they could be called minimalism, they are definitely not boring.
The only reason the author can generalize those architecture as "Minimalism" is their simple outlook, but I don't think outlook is everything deciding architectural value.
Can someone for the love of god write something I find the vaguest interest in? Its been fucking 5 years. I know its a recession but sweet fucking jesus come on.
jacob's just being intentionally provocative, obviously. of all people he knows that - in the current cultural landscape - minimalism is just one of many choices that can be mixed and matched.
minimalism is appreciated for its ability to highlight rich materials and fetishized-but-invisible details.
it's sexy/seductive in a way that towers with flags and pink housey-shapes will never be.
it's the quiet that balances out the noise that FAT makes at places like heerlijkheid.
it's no more dead than disney.
and it's just as much a post-modern outgrowth of legacy modernism as jacob's own work.
i don't know, but i expect that he likes pawson as much as i do - despite that liking being inconvenient.
It's a good storytelling device, the whole "Obituary for the Undead" scenario. It remains clear enough to be understood, but gauzy enough to be poetic. "Hook"-ie enough to make you read.
The key issue with minimalism isn't it's aesthetic, it's the soulless automatons who deploy that aesthetic blindly into the world in service of "Keeping the Lights on" or "Flexibility of Program" or some other reason that says, "I abandoned Architecture, I'm an architect... see? Says so right there on my business card".
It's when "Minimalism" is deployed as a Sales device, or for Efficiency of Production, or some other root cause whose soul (intended) purpose is to save some businessman X-thousands of dollars so he can go back to his Mc"Home" and stuff his jowls with more and more Butter and Shiny and Electronics. Wal-Mart was having a sale.
It takes three times as long to design something and consolidate all the variables you can. To make something elegant and get it truly down to only the stuff that NEEDS to be there. And to do so without losing the spirit of a place (did you remember to engineer a spirit into the place?) is the issue to be found at the center of the shrubbery maze.
Then of course, the Client comes in having spent a life in and around buildings, yet with no understanding of Architecture. But don't try to explain that to them. "What if it was like this...?"
They don't realize that you've carefully tuned all of the nothingness so that there's actually something there. Then their Value-ists come in with their tabulations and engineer the Architecture into the big green bin out back. You won't be needing that. Unspirited. Dischordant. Minimalism.
If you experience the generative "Minimalist" places created by the Modernists (Corbusier, Mies, FLW etc) you'll find they're spare without losing their visceral sumptuousness. There's more life in the spartan glazing details at La Tourette, than in all of the goop that is $chlocked into and onto most of the crap that's built in the world.
But the proliferation of "Minimalism" is understandable (though not excusable). Just because they were good students in Mid & Late Century architecture schools, didn't make them a generation of poets.
The thing about Jacob's mantra is that the ideas are readily accessible, and seem intelligent and engaging. However the products of those ideas are ineffectual, uninspired, lazy, and unintelligible.
I believe, if you're going to pontificate in architecture, you should put your money where your mouth is.
"But there's a still a growing population of people who want their living rooms to be nothing but a single sofa, a single table and a single tv."
Is this really minimalism? Aside from the thousand channels spewing shit from that tv---that's got to be a minimalism killer right there---there's the cable box, the remote, a player of some kind, cords, discs, a complete chaotic mess. You can't be a minimalist and have a TV. Sorry.
Minimalism is the reduction of a concept to its fundamental features.
In that sense, the modern living room is generally a place for sitting, snacking, drinking and watching television-- which only requires 3 key features (seating, a surface and some variety of display device [TV, laptop or combination]).
All of the other things can be cleverly hidden. Wires can be run through walls or furniture itself, electronics can be integrated into cabinetry and there's always a few pockets of space for miscellaneous storage.
The bigger picture I was alluding to was that simplification and reduction can be used interchangeably-- many people's lives often become cluttered and filled up with things they don't really need, want or necessarily enjoy but maintain directly or indirectly because they might be thought of as a requirement or a necessity.
These objects often represent a mixture of feelings and emotions. Sometimes, we hold onto things because they have an emotional value. Other times we hold onto things because we perceive them to be expensive or of utilitarian use.
However, those objects often disrupt the life of day-to-day. Having an object might evoke one singular good memory but few consider that object negatively effecting their life as a whole.
Many also don't realize that these objects, aside from their initial cost, also have residual expenses.
Say you had the most perfect vacation in Venice. While you were in Venice, you on this rush of feel goodness bought a vase that particularly struck you as something you must have. You spent $400 on that vase.
You bring it home and want to display it. You buy a small table for it ($200) and that table takes up approximately 1.5 square feet.
Well, now you've spent $600 on this memory. And say you have a 2,000 square foot house that you pay $1,300 a month for. That vase now also consumes about $11.70 a year over the life of your mortgage. That's another $300 for that singular object. Throw in another $50 for all the borax, windex and paper towels you'll use cleaning it.
And you can't display a vase without good flowers! So, for $5 a week for basically ever, you buy a cheap bouquet to put in it. That's another $7800 for the next 30 years.
Add it all up, that memory is effectively costing you ~$290 a year.
I will say that most objects have a residual cost of say $20-$50 a year with some larger objects (sofas, curtains, beds) can cost upwards of $100 to $300 a year.
Multiply these numbers by a dozen or two... and having these objects can really add onto what you're spending your money on versus what you want to spend your money on.
Architecture today is pure consumption - the question is, at what point does an assemblage of standard manufactured building products and systems become architecture? Or is that even possible?
minimalism, dead at 38
link
I doesn't seem suprising to read a partner of FAT calling for an end to minimalism....
I particularly enjoyed his comment about Pawson designed bathrooms and baths.
Also, was intrigued by his ending. Which is where we started: an obituary for something that isn’t dead, but was never alive, yet is everywhere, all the time. Maybe we should write obituaries where once we wrote manifestos.
Perhaps the new manifesto is the obit? Instead of framing a coming movement more about defining the ending of one...
like the intellectual version of "ugh, that is sooo 2005?" seems almost snobbish.
the entire blog is great. I love the "Terror and Romance of SketchUp" post:
Even when there’s nothing there, there’s the green flat land and the simple graduated fill sky. A landscape whose utter, terrifying banality we ignore so easily in our eagerness to get on with whatever task we have at hand. What if we just looked into this landscape. What would we see? What would we learn? This after all, is a model of the world. Maybe it’s the truest way of seeing the world as conceived by Google? Or perhaps it’s the real view of landscape after the Internet, or the surface of the planet as viewed by the military-industrial complex?
I love this thread.
I also love minimalism.
I disagree that it is dead. I think minimalism in its various forms is something that many people hope to be. There's something about owning almost nothing that is very alluring to many people.
The style we know as minimalism might be zombified. But there's a still a growing population of people who want their living rooms to be nothing but a single sofa, a single table and a single tv.
Someitmes, I think that having almost nothing is a luxury in and of itself.
I've tried explaining to many people that buying a big car to haul those once a year gigantic loads (like lumber or sheetrock) is so much more expensive than buying an expensive, compact sports car.
hate minimalism.
definitely not dead.
less is more profit and less work.
minimalism is not dead yet. comes in cycles it seems. where there is hygienic ideals, minimal structures will follow.
pretty awesome article though. i too like the idea of obits over manifestos. interesting.
Ironically, this "obituary" is more nihilistic than the thing it's criticizing.
Minimalism, if you understand it correctly, is NOT nihilism.
If we look at a style as how that looks, we could say a style is a visual language. Minimalism and de-constructionism are different languages just like French and English are different language, neither of those are 'blamable'.
Minimalism could be boring in outlook, but I see more witty realistic ideas in "minimalism" architectures. De-constructionism architectures look intriguing but it is also true that most of them are mindless and boring in its ideas.
Minimalism is Truth.
Minimalism is forgetting
@syp, i wonder if minimalism can only be considered as a stylistic, visual design aesthetic. Or maybe further a theoretical approach. Or do the two go hand?
@namhenderson, you are right.
Unlike what the author says, I don't think contemporary minimalism architectures are "ascetic idealism".
They look simple and minimal but individual project's concepts are unique and various. So, unlike the author, again, I wouldn't generalize those various architecture as "Minimalism".
Take contemporary japanese architecture for an example, they look simple and minimal but if looking at close enough, we can find their creativities. Even if they could be called minimalism, they are definitely not boring.
The only reason the author can generalize those architecture as "Minimalism" is their simple outlook, but I don't think outlook is everything deciding architectural value.
Can someone for the love of god write something I find the vaguest interest in? Its been fucking 5 years. I know its a recession but sweet fucking jesus come on.
Also. "Strange Harvest"? ouch.
jacob's just being intentionally provocative, obviously. of all people he knows that - in the current cultural landscape - minimalism is just one of many choices that can be mixed and matched.
minimalism is appreciated for its ability to highlight rich materials and fetishized-but-invisible details.
it's sexy/seductive in a way that towers with flags and pink housey-shapes will never be.
it's the quiet that balances out the noise that FAT makes at places like heerlijkheid.
it's no more dead than disney.
and it's just as much a post-modern outgrowth of legacy modernism as jacob's own work.
i don't know, but i expect that he likes pawson as much as i do - despite that liking being inconvenient.
It's a good storytelling device, the whole "Obituary for the Undead" scenario. It remains clear enough to be understood, but gauzy enough to be poetic. "Hook"-ie enough to make you read.
The key issue with minimalism isn't it's aesthetic, it's the soulless automatons who deploy that aesthetic blindly into the world in service of "Keeping the Lights on" or "Flexibility of Program" or some other reason that says, "I abandoned Architecture, I'm an architect... see? Says so right there on my business card".
It's when "Minimalism" is deployed as a Sales device, or for Efficiency of Production, or some other root cause whose soul (intended) purpose is to save some businessman X-thousands of dollars so he can go back to his Mc"Home" and stuff his jowls with more and more Butter and Shiny and Electronics. Wal-Mart was having a sale.
It takes three times as long to design something and consolidate all the variables you can. To make something elegant and get it truly down to only the stuff that NEEDS to be there. And to do so without losing the spirit of a place (did you remember to engineer a spirit into the place?) is the issue to be found at the center of the shrubbery maze.
Then of course, the Client comes in having spent a life in and around buildings, yet with no understanding of Architecture. But don't try to explain that to them. "What if it was like this...?"
They don't realize that you've carefully tuned all of the nothingness so that there's actually something there. Then their Value-ists come in with their tabulations and engineer the Architecture into the big green bin out back. You won't be needing that. Unspirited. Dischordant. Minimalism.
If you experience the generative "Minimalist" places created by the Modernists (Corbusier, Mies, FLW etc) you'll find they're spare without losing their visceral sumptuousness. There's more life in the spartan glazing details at La Tourette, than in all of the goop that is $chlocked into and onto most of the crap that's built in the world.
But the proliferation of "Minimalism" is understandable (though not excusable). Just because they were good students in Mid & Late Century architecture schools, didn't make them a generation of poets.
Also, It's hard to work in the dark.
architectural minimalism fails when reduced to material count.
FAT architects.. oh yeah the children of Venturi, we heard that one before (less is a bore) and whaddayaknow, theyre teaching at Yale.
like repeating a bad joke IMO
i don't like minimalism when it shaves off the rough edges... it seems anti-grit. Especially if using 'grit' as ornamentation.
what about pixel count, Orhan?
The thing about Jacob's mantra is that the ideas are readily accessible, and seem intelligent and engaging. However the products of those ideas are ineffectual, uninspired, lazy, and unintelligible.
I believe, if you're going to pontificate in architecture, you should put your money where your mouth is.
To me, of these two images, the one below seems a zombie.
"But there's a still a growing population of people who want their living rooms to be nothing but a single sofa, a single table and a single tv."
Is this really minimalism? Aside from the thousand channels spewing shit from that tv---that's got to be a minimalism killer right there---there's the cable box, the remote, a player of some kind, cords, discs, a complete chaotic mess. You can't be a minimalist and have a TV. Sorry.
Minimalism is the reduction of a concept to its fundamental features.
In that sense, the modern living room is generally a place for sitting, snacking, drinking and watching television-- which only requires 3 key features (seating, a surface and some variety of display device [TV, laptop or combination]).
All of the other things can be cleverly hidden. Wires can be run through walls or furniture itself, electronics can be integrated into cabinetry and there's always a few pockets of space for miscellaneous storage.
The bigger picture I was alluding to was that simplification and reduction can be used interchangeably-- many people's lives often become cluttered and filled up with things they don't really need, want or necessarily enjoy but maintain directly or indirectly because they might be thought of as a requirement or a necessity.
These objects often represent a mixture of feelings and emotions. Sometimes, we hold onto things because they have an emotional value. Other times we hold onto things because we perceive them to be expensive or of utilitarian use.
However, those objects often disrupt the life of day-to-day. Having an object might evoke one singular good memory but few consider that object negatively effecting their life as a whole.
Many also don't realize that these objects, aside from their initial cost, also have residual expenses.
Say you had the most perfect vacation in Venice. While you were in Venice, you on this rush of feel goodness bought a vase that particularly struck you as something you must have. You spent $400 on that vase.
You bring it home and want to display it. You buy a small table for it ($200) and that table takes up approximately 1.5 square feet.
Well, now you've spent $600 on this memory. And say you have a 2,000 square foot house that you pay $1,300 a month for. That vase now also consumes about $11.70 a year over the life of your mortgage. That's another $300 for that singular object. Throw in another $50 for all the borax, windex and paper towels you'll use cleaning it.
And you can't display a vase without good flowers! So, for $5 a week for basically ever, you buy a cheap bouquet to put in it. That's another $7800 for the next 30 years.
Add it all up, that memory is effectively costing you ~$290 a year.
But, that point is a bit of an extreme example.
I will say that most objects have a residual cost of say $20-$50 a year with some larger objects (sofas, curtains, beds) can cost upwards of $100 to $300 a year.
Multiply these numbers by a dozen or two... and having these objects can really add onto what you're spending your money on versus what you want to spend your money on.
Architecture today is pure consumption - the question is, at what point does an assemblage of standard manufactured building products and systems become architecture? Or is that even possible?
A point which I think is echoed by the line of your thinking in respect to the Venetian vase...
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