To me, these are amazing. They show the human creative spirit at its peak, they have warmth and life and vibrancy, and they pay tribute to nature without simply imitating it. They are complex and yet simple, every part of them is in harmony with every other part. It feels like listening to music.
“Harmony” is very important in Christopher Alexander’s books, and in his The Battle For The Life And Beauty of the Earth he describes what it means to make a place where everything is in harmony. ...
Alexander believes that good design is about the life that inhabits a place, not abstract forms, and so the cat that inhabits the bookshop, or the feeling of delight you get at coming across a hidden courtyard, or the way the light hits your book as you sit in the window seat, these should all be of as much concern to architects as producing expressive shapes.
Alexander’s rhetoric in the book is harsh—he literally believes that capitalist design process will destroy the beauty of the planet—but seeing the serene Eishin School, with its wooden footbridge and its alleyways and its majestic ceilings and its cozy alcoves, it’s difficult not to agree that he’s onto something. When I set foot in contemporary buildings, often they feel completely wrong: They don’t feel as if they have been designed with love and care, they feel as if the designer didn’t think much about the actual experiences of the people in the place. As a result, minimalism has been ruining restaurants: Stripping down to the bare essentials means making a place much louder, and a plush, cozy coffee shop is easier to have conversations in than a spare industrial one.
This image is embedded in ...
- Death To Minimalism, Sunday, February 17, 2019 - 12:00