03-26-2021, 11:21 AM
(03-23-2021, 07:19 PM)dtkvictim Wrote: Perhaps you would disagree that "less, but more" translates to minimalism and a scorn for form that has nothing to do with function, but if a line exists between the two, then to me it's a blurry one. This is where I disagree with the principles laid out, because I don't think I've ever found something "minimalist" (very broadly speaking) to be beautiful. Functional, attractive, cool: yes. Something I would buy and appreciate for most products: yes. But not beautiful. When you apply this to architecture, I think it misses the mark, because in an urban environment one of the only potential sources of beauty comes from architecture. And an environment without beauty is psychological torment to me. Of course beauty is subjective, which becomes a real nightmare to deal with in architecture, because urban buildings are imposed upon the population. People don't have a choice.
As I type this, I think modern material choices that lack the natural beauty of, well, natural materials may be part of my issue. And that those materials are used in tandem with design principles favouring simplicity may just be a coincidence.
You raise a good point here. It also illustrates why having differences is a good thing. Beauty or aesthetic experiences are always going to be subjective. We thankfully have a very large range of architects, designers, artists etc who all believe in their own thing and that lets us have so many different buildings to live and work in. Where one might find minimalist modernism to be beautiful, other people find it to be cold and would rather have something colourful and postmodernist and there are others who would rather have our buildings look like Venetian Renaissance architecture.
It can indeed become a nightmare as you put it, though, I'd rather have a huge range of buildings all built beside each other to show off all of these differences. For example, I think Michael Graves designed some truly awful work, but would I prefer to not have it at all? Definitely not. His Portland Tower might be ugly to me, but I love that it exists and that he made it. It's colourful and unique and that gives it something. Even the most intentionally deconstructive architecture has a certain beauty to it (for some people anyway). I suppose it can come down to intent, however. And capitalism certainly makes buildings seem like a commodity...and in a way, they are these days. It's hard to say a building like Luxe (another SRM building) in Waterloo has any form of beauty as it seems to exist purely as a functional building: to pack students in like sardines for as cheap as possible and I don't think a whole lot of effort went into making that thing look nice.