Minimalism
by James Steele
Mies van der Rohe's famous dictum 'less is more' is for modernists a defining
statement. For minimalists, however, it has become a kind of mantra to be repeated
daily as they pursue their quest to strip away unwanted detail. For the true
minimalist the object of all design is to define the true essence of any given piece,
whether it be a piece of cutlery, a gallery space or a house in the landscape.
As a reinforcement of Modernism in architecture, as well as its manifestation in all
of the arts, Minimalism may be traced back to the beginning of the Arts and Crafts
Movement and the move away from the Victorian clutter. It is rooted in the efforts
toward simplicity made by William Morris, among others, who established the
groundwork for the modernist principles of honesty of materials and structure,
and the 'total work of art'. Minimalism, as evident today, most obviously stems
from the philosophy and architecture of Mies van der Rohe and the reductivist
tendency that finds its ultimate expression in his work. By taking this desire
for simplicity to the extreme in buildings such as the Barcelona Pavilion,
constructed 1928-9, and the Farnsworth House, 1945-51, Mies intended to maximize
the feeling of a free flow of space between zones in the interior, and between
architecture and nature. Glass, however, arguably the most important material for
the early Modernists, always intervenes between the two, keeping unpredictable,
dangerous forces at bay. Glass provides a visual, but not actual, connection with
the external world, abstracting it from experience and presenting it as a pattern
on a transparent wall. Mies's development of this abstraction in the three decades
that separates the Barcelona Pavilion and the Farnsworth House is obvious: the
former has a direct relationship with the brick country villas that Mies had
designed previously, with long tentacle walls extending out into the countryside,
while the latter, in the contrast, is completely detached from its site, a glass
box riding high above the ground on steel columns. In his Glass House in New
Canaan, Connecticut, 1949-50, Philip Johnson, Mies' chief disciple, echoed this
detachment. Johnson was able to make all the walls from the glass, relying on
the protection of his extensive wooded estate for privacy. Like the Farnsworth
House, nature is treated as a remote backdrop, a changing panorama to be observed
from an immutable, crystalline capsule.
The change that has recently taken place in this reductivist sensibility lies in
the way it has been adapted by various architects throughout the world to answer
to particularized agendas and to develop a new awareness of a revised attitude to
nature in general. Tadao Ando, Antoine Predock, John Pawson, Alberto Campo Baeza,
Donald Judd and Ricardo Legoretta, who follows in the footsteps of the late Luis
Barragan, are just a few of those now seeking to achieve a balance between
architecture and nature through simplicity of form, surface and detail.
Chief amongst this group, Tadao Ando disproves the notion that architectural
Minimalism is the built equivalent of artistic abstraction and the
anti-representational reductivism that stemmed from it. Closer inspection also
reveals that these architects, while superficially seeming to fall into the same
category, must each be taken on their own terms. While Ando freely admits to an
ongoing reverence for the work of Le Corbusier (the first book he bought in his
remarkable struggle to teach himself architecture were Le Corbusier's Oeuvre
complete), he cannot be dismissed simply as an inspired disciple, taking the
'Five Points of a New Architecture' to their extreme. Instead, he has taken an
entirely different direction specifically related to his own background.
Consistent with the intention of Minimalism in art in its initial phase in
the mid-1960s, Ando's aim has been to force a conflict between the person in a
space and its surroundings. Whereas minimalist art can be seen as a reaction
against commercial vulgarity, the commodification of culture and the overabundance
of riches provided by industry, as well as testing the limits of non-representation,
Ando's architecture presents a wider three-dimensional vision. Like minimalist
artists, he seeks a reaction and sets up the spatial conditions to get it, but
rather than calling the value of representation into question, he focuses on
nature itself as the historical focus of Japanese architecture. The relationship
with nature, Ando admits, 'is very troubled today', and he seeks to draw attention
to the extent of this threat: 'by dynamically integrating the opposition between
abstraction and representation. Abstraction is an aesthetic based on clarity of
logic and transparency of concept, and representation is concerned with all
historical, cultural, climatic, topographical, urban and living conditions. I
want to integrate these two in a fundamental way. What appears on the surface
may be geometrical abstraction. However, inside there must be much that is
representational. Architecture exists in conflict between abstraction and
representation. Into this relationship another element, nature, is introduced,
which occupies a different plane.'
Steele, James, ARCHITECTURE TODAY, Phaidon, London, 2001.
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