Minimalism vs. maximalism – “minimum is maximum in drag.”

It would be hard to count the number of times I’ve seen a photo of a beautiful minimalist interior in a blog and then scrolled down to the comments to discover that many people find it cold, sterile, clinical, unfit for kids, even morally reprehensible. Oddly, it’s the same thing with maximalist interiors – I see one I like, and then find people saying it’s too bohemian, it’s a hippie train wreck, degenerate, or the clutter gives them a headache. Recently The Guardian asked the Scottish band Franz Ferdinand to guest-edit the paper’s style section, and interestingly they brought up the question of this exact aesthetic divide by inviting architect John Pawson, a minimalist, and the artist Lucy Orta, whose home is maximalist, to talk about their different aesthetics. As it turned out, their ideas weren’t that far apart, just as the Rem Koolhaas quote in this post’s title suggests. What is Franz Ferdinand’s own aesthetic? “Minimalists and maximalists: as a band, we tend to write from the perspective of the former, but live from the perspective of the latter.”

Photos: Top—Rooms by minimalist architect John Pawson. Middle: The loft of Donald Judd, one of the founders of minimalism in art. Bottom, room from The Selby, photographer Todd Selby’s addictive blog. We couldn’t find any photos of Lucy Orta’s art studio/living space, but The Selby contains dozens of real-life, unstyled, unfluffed maximalist interiors of artists and musicians. UPDATE: read new comments by Todd about maximalism. See also this fascinating NYT article on creativity and mess –  Saying Yes to Mess.

To be minimalist … or maximalist?

John Pawson writes…
I am always perplexed when people look at my house and say that it is very beautiful – but how can I live like that? To me the thinking is the wrong way round. The whole point is that this is how I live, so this is what my house needs to be like. The architecture is the physical expression of a way of being: the form does not follow a particular fashion, it follows a particular life. The life my sort of architecture follows is not one that feels right for everybody. I am passionate about my work, but I am not out to make converts.

The only universal measure is whether the space feels comfortable and right to the people who use it. Minimalism – or, as the sculptor Donald Judd preferred to put it, the simple expression of complex thought – is only one valid response of an aesthetically diverse society, answering the needs of particular individuals and provoking debate in society at large about how we choose to live and how we expect architecture to support these choices.

I believe we have to get away from the idea of minimalism as a style and instead understand it as a way of thinking about space: its proportions, its surfaces, and the fall of light. The vision is comprehensive and seamless, a quality of space rather than forms; places, not things. This is why, in its fullest and most satisfying expression, it is not something that you can readily acquire a piece of. A perfect hemispherical basin carved out of a solid block of Carrara marble may be an exquisite object, but in isolation it is no more than that: a beautiful basin. It is the totality of the environment of which it is a part that signifies.

“Minimum is maximum in drag,” wrote the architect Rem Koolhaas: a consciously inflammatory comment, but all too true, I think, where simplicity is crudely translated into a decorative effect. Drag implies spectacle. There is of course a place for theatre, but for architecture of this type, theatre is not the principle on which everything else is hung.

I think it is important, too, to understand that minimalism is not a manifesto for spartan living. This is a recurrent misunderstanding that springs in part from its association with movements where renunciation of one sort or another is a central theme – it is unusual for a discussion of architectural simplicity not to include some reference to Zen Buddhism, the Cistercian monks or the Shakers. One may respond to the aesthetic expressions and indeed share many of the needs that these movements have sought to address without adopting particular codes of behaviour: one can want a place where it is possible to be still without necessarily wanting to pray in it.

Minimalism is not an architecture of self-denial, deprivation or absence: it is defined not by what is not there, but by the rightness of what is there and by the richness with which this is experienced. I have been accused of practising a kind of inverted luxury – but what could be more sensuous or more tactile than an expanse of honey-coloured limestone?

This is definitively not about creating the architectural equivalent of the hair shirt, but about making the best possible contexts for the things that matter in life, on paring back the accretions of surface and behaviour to what is essential: the glory lies not in the act of removal, but in the experience of what is left. Profound – and pleasurable – experience is located in ordinary experience: in the taking of a shower or the preparation of food.

People tend to home in on the idea of removal, believing that it is all somehow a case of throwing out the furniture and painting the walls white. The serious thought that underlies the endeavour is missed. Real comfort is not about a large sofa; in my view, many things that look as though they should be comfortable aren’t at all.

For me, comfort is synonymous with a state of total clarity where the eye, the mind and the physical body are at ease, where nothing jars or distracts. This emphasis on a quality of experience is important. Some people seem to have an idea that the only role the individual has in such spaces is the capacity to contaminate. In the sort of work that interests me, the antithesis is true: the individual is always at its heart.

We are living through a period of rapid change, which we fuel with our hunger for the latest new thing. Novelty as an end in itself is overrated. Instead of pleasure in its more profound forms, we chase distraction. We are preoccupied by ideas of the future when what we are really trying to do is make the present feel new and engaging.

In architecture, this translates into rolling programmes of refurbishment. We change everything and nothing. If our interest in the future is really the desire for a present that satisfies us – physically, visually and psychologically – can we develop perpetually interesting forms that exist outside the forces of time and fashion? This, I believe, is what the aesthetic of simplicity, with its vast and paradoxical potential for richness and sensuality, offers. Perhaps I am an evangelist after all.
© John Pawson 2004.

Lucy Orta writes…
People often ask us: how we can live with so many possessions around us? In this respect, I feel a kindred spirit with John Pawson. The point is that my husband Jorge and I are surrounded by meditative objects awaiting creative attention. We aren’t just artists and sculptors, we are obsessive observers, collectors and transformers of objects. One of the motivations for our art theory is based on perception of language through objects and images, and their meaning. Jorge and I share a large live-work studio in central Paris, and the Dairy, our collaborative research centre in the Brie, 30 miles from the city. Studio Orta is home to a hectic hub of activity: multilingual assistants, children, nanny and an eclectic display of traditional ritual and domestic utensils acquired from travels and direct encounters with ethnic communities all over the world (with a strong Latin influence). As an Anglo-Saxon, finding space to reflect amid the vivacious surroundings can become very problematic.

Built in the late 1800s, the Dairy is a splendid example of “modern” industrial Briard architecture, composed of functional spaces intended for the stages of milk processing. Now it is undergoing renovation for new, life-nurturing intentions: artistic research, masterclasses, creative collaborations, large-scale production and storage facilities for our artworks. The latter, however, has taken precedence.

Any visitor will be bowled over by the Dairy’s contents. A mass of army surplus is stacked floor to ceiling and bursts out of the various workshops into the courtyards and outhouses. Army trucks, Red Cross ambulances, hundreds of camp beds, 900 stretcher beds, various trailers, oxygen tanks – and this is just the ground floor! As one moves up the levels, objects become smaller (for manual transport), but no fewer in number: first-aid boxes, life jackets, tents, distilling jars donated by the Pasteur Institute, all intended for Orta reincarnation, as well as the ubiquitous milk churn.

Stacked 5m high, the 900 beds evoke, for us, a passionate sensation comparable with that evoked by Pawson’s limestone. What can be more thought-provoking than thousands of relics of a “lost war”: starched tarpaulins, unopened army canteens, unpacked medical supplies, water gourds, unused blankets, unstretched stretchers? The objects, as well as vital raw material, carry potent visual metaphors.

In order to imagine the future present we need to reflect on the strength of memory that the object conveys. The stained linen canvases, like the Carrara marble with their personalised imperfections, will not be carved, but “refashioned”, undergo a series of transformations to convey further multiple symbolic meanings, and eventually take on their sculptural value. Is it a stretcher, a dress, a couch, a bed, an Unidentified Utility object, or an Anticipation Accessory? Searching for the multiplicity of language through various tangible codes is maximising the power of interpretation.

© The Guardian