My Building Project group set out to design a “simple” house, and we completely failed. We got the opposite. We had a helpful but somewhat disastrous mid-review, and over the last few days I’ve been thinking about why. More importantly, I’ve been thinking about what the hell it actually means for architecture to be simple.
There’s formal simplicity, where the building looks simple. This is what Minimalism is. I’d argue that it’s a more shallow form of simplicity because it’s largely aesthetic—Minimalism doesn’t necessarily have a programmatic payoff. There’s little programmatic genius in a Minimalist building: its simplicity comes from ignoring architectural variables, from ignoring certain aspects of functionality, what reduction to a building’s “necessary elements” really means. In other words, Minimalism comes from making an architectural problem easier by simplifying the problem. John Pawson’s work is a good example of this.
Then there’s architecture that comes from an efficiency of “moves”—i.e., design decisions. To me that defines a class of really great design: buildings that address multiple issues with the fewest moves possible, as opposed to a building that’s the sum of individual moves addressing individual issues. The former reveals a sort of diligent genius; the latter’s sloppy, lazy, and unnecessarily complex. David Adjaye’s work is a pretty good example of this.
I think I want the latter.
The Building Project is unbelievably, outstandingly educational in a very frustrating and almost painful, completely unpredictable sort of way. I feel like I’ve learned more about architecture in the last few weeks, working with my groupmates, trying to get together a house, then I’ve learned in the last eight studios combined. It really is the right reason to come to Yale.
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