L'Arca International N° 115

November / December 2013

Click here for contents

 

Minimism

 

Over the last few months I have made a number of comments about the way in architectural design has developed over the last thirty years to achieving increasingly bold, not to say bizarre, formal and aesthetic results.

 

I decided to call this new interpretation of increasingly startling-looking buildings "strangism". Indeed, it seems strange to build sloping towers or to challenge the force of gravity by means of increasingly unlikely overhangs. Or treating material as a sculptural, elastic element for attaining what look more like macro-sculptures than inhabitable buildings.

 

Of course this is not all bad when the aesthetic results fit into the urban fabric, at times even in contrast with tradition, while successfully embodying enough creativity to positively transform and influence the setting in which these buildings are located. Unfortunately, these are always individual constructions and never entire neighbourhoods of the city, which would mark the (this time not strange) start of the famous "Smart City", so often talked about but never actually created.

 

All this has been opposed for years now by a small group of so-called "minimalist" architectural designers, who, from the East to the West, have been creating what appear to be simple stylistic and structural projects, abandoning the idea of spectacularity at all costs in order to focus their ideas on the most intangible parts of construction: such as non-colour, light reflections, and a total lack of and arrogance of construction technology.

 

The result is unobtrusive, pleasant to inhabit and never in contrast with their surroundings. This kind of architecture certainly does not flex its muscles and is hard to popularise due to its hidden poetics. But, as always, we need to beware of a new school of thought that we might call "minimist", which designs projects that really are minimal in terms of ideas, drawing on a minimum of construction technology and which, loaded with terms like "sustainability", is attempting to contrast technological progress, preaching about the uselessness of aesthetics and modernity.

 

Needless to say this indigestible meal is being served up in universities with lashings of cultural side dishes. It is clear that we are living at a turning-point period in history, when everything is becoming hybrid and everything already appears to have been experimented with; it is a time for young architects and those among them whom we already know can interpret our age properly and the enormous potential scientific research and knowledge are placing at our disposal.

 

Cesare Maria Casati