Guest Author - Sandy Hemphill
Pinching pennies may make us feel as if we are living a minimal life these days but the leaders of the architectural art movement that became known as Minimalism explored using less to have more as a form of beauty, not a means of economic ordeal. Nevertheless, a little exposure to their thought processes may inspire us to view our own financial sacrifices as a form of artistic expression and not so much woeful drudgery.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, born in Germany in 1886, not only thought less was more, he saw God in the details. As a result, the buildings he designed were stripped of fussy ornamentation, focusing instead on the “skin and bones” of the building. The lack of ornamentation gave more significance to the materials used as well as his drive to integrate elements of nature into our lives and our homes. The furniture he designed frequently relied on industrial materials to support sumptuous fabrics such as leather and silk.
Buckminster “Bucky” Fuller was driven by the question of humanity’s chance of lasting survival on planet Earth. It became important to him to explore ways the individual could improve the human condition since he had little faith big business, government, and formal organizations could accomplish that goal. Fuller became famous for his geodesic domes, structures which used triangular tiles to form circles which, when combined with precision, became a sphere-shaped structure. These domes need no internal support so all their interior space is usable. They are also aerodynamically sound, making them capable of withstanding hurricane-force winds. Fuller, born in Massachusetts in 1895, is the namesake of fullerenes, or buckyballs, spherical carbon molecules that resemble his geodesic domes.
The German industrial architect, Dieter Rams, born in 1932, described his approach to design as less but better. He attributed his success to relying on ten principles - all good design is innovative, makes an object useful, is aesthetically pleasing, provides a better understanding for use of the object, is unobtrusive, honest, durable, consistent in every detail, environmentally friendly, and requires as little design as possible. Rams was chief of design for the consumer products company, Braun, from 1961 until he retired in 1995. Jonathan Ive, lead designer of many of the most successful products created by Apple, Inc., including the iMac, iPhone, and iPod, incorporates design influences developed by Rams.
The Minimalist movement isn’t limited to architecture, furniture, and product design, though. The elegant simplicity of the movement is evident in paintings, sculpture, literature, music, and fashion from the early 20th century and the works of many artists of today exhibit Minimalist influences, too.
As we work through the current financial recession, we can’t all become economic Minimalists but maybe we can take some of the sting out of our dollar-to-dollar decisions by remembering the elegance of simplicity and adapting it into our daily living, if only for a while.
