BTM...
"Even the idea of evolution itself is neither perfect, nor complete."--DC Wilson
Let me distill that further: even evolution is evolving. Tautology? Close, but not quite.
I know I sounded pedantic and reductive as hell in my post above, but sometimes it is useful to distill and repeat a bit.
Design is a heady game, despite the feel and art of it. It is full of ideas and techniques, and efforts to fit solutions to problems in complex contexts, whether it is drapes, or a space station.
All persons involved in thought intensive work need occassionally to be drawn back to basics from the epistemic jungle gyms they erect and then attempt to scale. To wit, sometimes they need to be brought back to something like this...
"I need a hammer, Mr. Designer, because I have a nail and something that needs fastening. Make me one, so I can drive it more effectively. Or figure out some way to fasten it without the nail. I don't care. I need help. I want it to feel good in my hand. I want it to look good, if it can. Can you do it? It doesn't matter to me, if it is minimalist, maximalist, medianist in form language. Make it gothic if it works better. I just want to drive the fucking nail and be done and satisfied with my work. I would make it myself, but I am not very swift that way and I am a fan of division of labor." 🙂
I am over analytic and often redundant, as you have sagely noticed, BTM. 🙂
But as a result, I am highly empathetic and sympathetic to the awkward, overwhelmed gropings in the philosophical wilderness of design by the person who started this thread. I am just like that person frequently, though I have learned over the years to force myself back to working on a very basic problem, when I begin to feel this way.
I was just trying to nudge that person in that direction without being too "on the nose" as they say in Hollywood.
Working on basic problems allows one to return to the ethers later--refreshed, and decide whether the ether-issue was necessary to work on, or just an act of displacement to avoid working on the real problem. It can be either--sometimes even both!
pt 2
I thought perhaps confronting this person with the global-ness of evolution (the envelope of all design, so to speak) AND the arcane, but interesting narrowness of minimalism might be enough of an antipodal stretch to unfreeze this thoughtful person's mind and allow them to get on with it, as the English say so well.
Good things can come from contemplating things like minimalism. Lord knows, I do it. But I think the good tends to emerge as one bounces back and forth between the wonderful desert picture the person posted and a picture like the one below I am posting.
The problem with the picture of the desert is that its very magnificient symbolizing of minimalist aesthetics (i.e., essentially elegant inactivity) masks the teeming complexity of the ecosystem of a desert (plus the much longer term geologic dynamism involved). Put another way, minimalism does not reduce complexity, it hides it. Everything is complex, even the things we try to simplify elegantly. There's no escaping it. Minimalism offers a band-aide of symbolic relief from complexity. Good minimalism also kind of helps straighten us up a little, though it usually has to constrain our behavior somewhat as a dominatrix relieves one from life's complexities (or so I have heard).
On the other hand, the problem with the picture of the hammer and the nail I have posted is that in symbolizing the wonderful concreteness, elegance and useful practicality of a hammer and a nail it too obscures the complexity of how the hammer and the nail came to be, and the frustrating dynamics associated with using them.
Neither picture escapes complexity. Both obscure it, but at different levels of scale.
Thought IS a labyrinth, as Borges noted, but the labyrinth can be a little illuminating when one iterates between the macro and the micro. Doing so often sensitizes one to what is being left out, as well as to what is being left in. What is left out of a design (i.e., that which a design is not specified to solve, or deal with) often determines as much about the effectiveness of the design, as does the elegance with which it solves the specified problem. Or as my old professor used to say: framing a question properly is the first step to getting a useful answer.
Minimalism is a tool. Use it when it solves something. Put it back, or combine it with another tool, in the tool box when it doesn't.
DC I am slightly more confused but I think I get your point
and yes even evolution is constantly evolving, its state of being is its' very definition. Apropos of nothing, save for the photo in particular and perhaps a bit of levity. When every problem is a nail, a hammer is often the only solution.
I agree with whitespike but must minimalism always be lived in an architecturally significant house. We by no means live in one but aspire to minimalism, perhaps what we are really aspiring to live in (the wife and I) is within a Declutteralism environment. Edit and more edits of stuff we neither use nor have touched upon in years. Our one exception to that, is of course books.
A thread on minimalism is utterly delicious as it presents anything but a minimalist plate of options and ruminations. At it's essence, I guess, is that it comes down to how we relate within and to our primary living environments.
Just an introduction...
Not all ism's are mannerisms but most of them are. Minimalism is in many ways a mannerism. It is predictable and the characteristics of the style always seem to overrule the needs of those who are using these spaces. Mannerisms are bad design because design is a process by which you reach a solution. If the solution is given where is the design process?
True enough --
and spoken like a true designer ?
Like many good insights, it leads to further thoughts. What about the world that belongs to non-design -- the great majority of our world, some would say, and certainly the world of nature. One definition of "minimal" might be "only that which is necessary." This could apply both to the hovel of a pauper, and to the leaf of a tree.
On a parallel track: design proposes answers to stated problems. What of the problem posed by the connoisseur, who says "I want my house to look like X." Without naming any particular precedent, this person just wants a clean and uncluttered interior. Is the resulting solution a mannerist artifact ?
It seems the discussion is...
It seems the discussion is going toward distinct definitions, the way isms sometimes do, one being more toward an aesthetic championing of the uncluttered environment and the other being more toward what I think of when the term minimalism is used, the school definition, which for me seems to fall - in Koen's terms - primarily to mannerism, the stripping down of something essentially for the sake of stripping it down, which doesn't, in my opinion, always achieve clarity.
A friend told me a while back that he tried the cap M minimalism a la Pawson for a year or so and didn't care for it. It made him feel edgy, and he started hearing voices. Well, not actually voices, he said, but a couple words over and over, scalpel, forceps.
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