Less is more.
Congratulations, you have officially alienated 75% of the population. Now if you can make Less cost more? You’ll knock out another 23%. The remaining 2% are married to an Architect. Clearly, your practice is off to a good start.
Reducing everything down to the purest, most elegant form is difficult, and only a truely gifted Architect can achieve that level of perfection, and that gifted Architect probably designed a glass house for a crazy lady in a robe, but she died, and now the house is a museum, and, yes, I just called Philip Johnson a crazy lady in a robe, and I think the facts will back me up on that.
Removing all the clutter, and the contradictions, and the character, and the color, and the messiness, and the struggle, and the inconsistency, and the uncertainty, and the imbalance, just to reveal an underlying structure, and an order, and a harmony, and a calm, centered peace…, is a disservice to our humanity.
Like replacing a beating heart with a thick block of glass.
But, Architects continue to strive for that perfection, and we continue to enlarge the divide between what we want and what is wanted, and I think we may have missed the point of what we were trying to do in the first place.
Yes, simplicity is a difficult goal, and clean lines are next to godliness, and purity photographs well. And, nobody cares. Because:
Life is complicated and Life is messy and Life is hard and Life is endlessly fascinating…
So, stop it.
Less is not more.
More is more.
J
.
photos are from hooverine’s photostream on flickr and were used under creative commons license, and I used one more than I needed.
