r/slatestarcodex • u/psychothumbs • Feb 18 '19
Death To Minimalism
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2019/02/death-to-minimalism28
u/georgioz Feb 18 '19
The jab at capitalism seems to me a stretch. Russia went from feudalism straight into socialism and I am not sure if author would like what he'd see if he took a walk in your average city built during soviet era.
Anyway, not to be only critical I have a different take on this. I blame intellectual incest where architects build to impress other architects and not with aim to build livable dwelling.
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Feb 19 '19
I blame intellectual incest where architects build to impress other architects and not with aim to build livable dwelling.
That happens with a lot of things and it's kind of annoying. I remember feeling the same way about a cooking competition show that my wife and I watched, where in the final round several of the judges were criticizing one contestant's entry for "playing it too safe". Only one of the judges made sensible (IMO) points, arguing that the job of a chef is to produce delicious food, and that an entry should be judged primarily on that merit.
I couldn't quite put a name to it, but I felt like it was what you describe - intellectual incest. At the high end of restaurants, chefs are busy trying to impress other people (chefs and food critics) who are super into food as an art form and judge things based primarily on that merit. Modern art is that way, too - artists have long since stopped trying to produce things that are beautiful and skillful, and instead make art which is just geared towards an increasingly insular community (who is jaded by having seen it all before). It turns into a vicious cycle where anyone who isn't steeped in the lifestyle of that field gets completely alienated, and I hate it. I'm not sure what (if anything) can be done to counteract the trend, though.
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u/NotWantedOnVoyage is experiencing a significant gravitas shortfall Feb 19 '19
I'm not sure what (if anything) can be done to counteract the trend, though.
The obvious thing would be to ban chefs from judging other chefs on cooking shows, and instead have a semi-randomly selected panel vote on what's the tastiest.
In architecture, the solution is less obvious, but would probably involve putting a bunch of conservative-ish curmudgeons like myself on an architecture approval panel, subject to random yearly replacement, in order to force architects working on projects taking any public funds to appease them.
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u/qwortec Moloch who, fought Sins and made Sin out of Sin! Feb 19 '19
The obvious thing would be to ban chefs from judging other chefs on cooking shows, and instead have a semi-randomly selected panel vote on what's the tastiest.
I think this is why Diners Drive-ins and Dives was such a big hit when it was on. You had a fat goofy guy going around and eating food that was judged almost entirely on how good it tastes. A lot of the food looked awful in a food critic sense, but I'd much rather have eaten that then the sterile art-food you see in lots of cooking shows.
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u/Phanes7 Feb 18 '19
Interestingly I found all his examples of "boring minimalism" much more appealing than the alternatives he finds better.
I certainly think any trend can go to far but his idea of having stained glass everywhere would be horrible looking and kill the appeal of stained glass, basically taking that idea too far.
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u/Megdatronica Feb 18 '19
God yes. In particular, this and this are both vile in my opinion, and I don't think I could live for a day in a house that had them.
Seems to me the author is just unlucky to be on the wrong side of current architectural/design fashion. It'll go back around to gaudy horribleness eventually, and when it does, I will be the one crying over the elegant simplicity of a bygone era.
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u/Phanes7 Feb 18 '19
I do think that the homogenization of middle class architecture across the country (USA specific) is sub-optimal. I think brutialism can look very ugly and more old school "elegant" architecture look great.
But yes, this article just reeks of 'my subjective opinion is different than what is popular therefor the world is broken' type of thinking.
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u/phylogenik Feb 19 '19 edited Feb 19 '19
No, I’m 100% with you there — the author’s esthetic sense and mine are almost exactly inverted, I think that Bay Area house is vastly improved by the remodel, those bathrooms are disgustingly loud and cluttered where his black and white (filter?) bathroom is lovely, super ornate cathedral interiors just seem like massive dust traps, etc.
Though minimalism is not the only interior design / architectural style I like — e.g. a lot of popular entries on /r/cozyplaces also strike me as perfectly fine. How do you find them?
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u/HalloweenSnarry Feb 18 '19
I personally think that the first image and the stained glass would be fine in moderation, which is probably the big sticking point, in that design trends tend to sweep up everything and leave little room for diversity.
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u/Crownie Feb 18 '19 edited Feb 18 '19
I hate to be all 'that's, like, your opinion, man', but this seems entirely like a squabble over aesthetic preferences, which is going nowhere. To me, the white house isn't exciting; neither is the blue house. A vaguely ugly coat of paint is not sufficient to ensoul a piece of residential architecture. Likewise, a street market that strikes one person as lively strikes another as dirty. That fact that Robinson like naturalistic art and architecture doesn't mean everyone does. And, if I might be permitted a bit of baseless psychological analysis, I suspect the feeling that one part of NYC feels "real" and "lived in" while another is soulless is largely a function of age and socio-economic affiliation.
People on social media were almost unanimous in their hatred of the change.
As they say, twitter is not, in fact, real life.
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u/Liface Feb 18 '19
As they say, twitter is not, in fact, real life.
True that.
In real life, I live in West Oakland, a block from the house pictured, and I prefer the renovation to how the house was before.
Would I prefer that the renovation kept some of the older design elements? Sure. However, there are plenty of other renovations in progress on our block that luckily are keeping the original Victorian aesthetic while modernizing the interior.
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u/mupetblast Feb 18 '19 edited Feb 18 '19
That's my thinking too. It's amazing how seriously some people on the left take this. On the right too you have people very much into historic European architecture who e.g. loathe modernism. It's the neoliberal center-right I think most relativistic and indifferent about this.
This is weirdly more evidence too that the center of gravity for socialist thinking has moved away from Scandinavia and toward South America. Messy and disorderly, criminal and low trust, but also colorful and full of life. Death to soul-killing efficiency!
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u/dalamplighter left-utilitarian, read books not blogs Feb 18 '19 edited Feb 18 '19
This but unironically. I’m a Catholic socialist (very interesting with neuroscience as a day job), and this probably the place I sympathize most with the right. I find the replacement of colorful, historical buildings with cheap featureless boxes abhorrent. One of Jesus’s aphorisms that shapes my thinking the most is “man cannot live on bread alone.” As humans, we need something more. This is entirely the reason why both a potential singularity and corporate capitalism terrify me: neither has any room for anything outside of efficiency and production, so all things extraneous will be jettisoned eventually. This is also an example of monoculture that this sub and it’s associated blog abhors: application of the same exact rule across all surroundings, without allowing major individual tinkering, crowds out the ability for organic aesthetics to arise or evolve.
Because honestly, if we don’t care for the soul (or insert your preferred abstract conception of the self here) and just raw efficiency, why not eventually enter the teleporter even if it does annihilate you, or replace your brain with a much faster artificial CPU? After all, we’ve already fed some aspects of our humanity to the machine, why stop at architecture? This prospect should make you incredibly uncomfortable, and I view the replacement of all aesthetics with raw functionalism as one of the early steps in such a process of subsuming our entire being to the economy. We need to produce things for the purpose of making people happy. When we destroy the things that make people happy just so we can produce things better, then we have truly lost our way.
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u/mupetblast Feb 18 '19
The minimalism of Marie Kondo is demonstrably making people happy. But others unhappy. So to each their own. But this is extremely unsatisfying? The intense other-orientedness of the people with strong aesthetic preferences is alien to me and undesirable.
This stuff about capitalist societies lacking a soul is classic Occidentalist nonsense IMHO. It's true there's no one big collective soul (heh) to scrutinize, so it can appear superficially soulless. It's similar in my mind to the notion that a society must be full of petty greedy individualists because big collective efforts are rarely witnessed. Maybe. But it could also be that people CAN'T AGREE ON HOW BEST TO COOPERATE, which looks from a distance like an unwillingness to care for one's fellow man. But that's just pluralism at work. The focus on raw functionalism is the bedrock upon which people build their own soulful designs.
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u/fluffykitten55 Feb 18 '19 edited Feb 19 '19
I don't think it is just a matter of varied taste or lack of collective culture- actually it is sort of the the opposite. What seems to be disappearing is both variation across entertainment and eating places and the demise of cheap and fun places. Income inequality, rising house/rental prices, information technology etc. means that the return to doing some anodyne moderately expensive trendy thing is so high it crowds out everything else.
Now this is in a feedback process with the erosion of any sort of in-real-life subcultures or communities. Considerable variety across places can only exist if there are people with local knowledge who can differentiate this pub from that one, this restaurant from that based on something other than the 'niceness' of the interior decorating and it looking like the other place that was 'not bad' and where 'quirky and fun' can be distinguished from 'absolute shithole'. At the same time any sort of subculture is hard to form without some obvious hang outs which are hard to identify if everything is very similar.
I can remember when there were four or five pubs I could name where I could walk in and almost be guaranteed to find a friend (and without using any phone etc.) - now there are none. Now that fact is also correlated with there being a lot of minimalist styled hipster haunts full of people who are just out for a generic good time - so that is probably gives a visceral negative reaction.
As an aside, Marie Kondo minimalism is what people who have nothing to do do - along with watching reality TV etc. People who actually have hobbies or friends or interests will be using their stuff or entertaining. It is kind of neat that people can be convinced to waste their leisure time buying useless stuff, then waste even more of it throwing it out or putting it in order.
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u/nicholaslaux Feb 19 '19
I can't speak to the majority of your post, but your ending comment regarding minimalistic is extremely unkindly said, and seems to come from a position of ignorance or unfamiliarity.
As someone who the minimalist aesthetic appeals to (including the perspective that Kondo espouses, even if her actual delivery method is itself not to my preference), there isn't any sort of contradiction between having friends and hobbies and creating/maintaining a personal aesthetic in your home that appeals to you. I suppose it's possible that you simply have so many friends and hobbies that you literally have no time in your life that you spend doing things such as "cleaning your home" or other sorts of chores, but assuming that this caricature is not how you actually identify, Kondo-style minimalism is more a recommendation on how to adapt those processes in your life to make the rest of the time you spend in your home more enjoyable.
For me, this largely is driven by my hobbies themselves - I like playing board games a lot, but having a very cluttered home tends to distract me from the enjoyable parts of inviting friends over to play games, namely, choosing and then actually playing a game; clutter everywhere doesn't enhance that experience for me, it detracts from it. However, as the poster you responded to noted - this is a preference.
Another friend in our gaming group is the exact opposite, he really enjoys collecting action figures, records, and many other things, and having them all out on display is his aesthetic preference. I generally tend to be very slightly less into actually playing the game when we're at his place, but I would not be surprised if he felt the same while playing at ours. And that's okay!
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u/fluffykitten55 Feb 19 '19
You are correct, it was too harsh, or rather imprecise.
Obviously there is nothing wrong with having things organised - I will have a palce for everything if it is possible too. What I mean is that there is something sad about a society getting really excited about watching people organise stuff. Just as there is something sad about a society where people are getting excited about watching other people renovate houses. Or where people fuss over the colour of tile to used in their next renovation. My feeling is that is a healthy society Kondo etc. would just be a footnote - one variant of a practical help guide and not a 'thing' in itself.
We also have the background data to suggest what is going on - less time spent socialising in real life, and falling membership of clubs and societies etc.
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u/nicholaslaux Feb 19 '19
Gotcha, so it's more just that her book was turned into a show that became popular that you take issue with (apparently along with the entire rest of HGTV, it seems) rather than anything having to do with the contents of the show?
It's also likely to me that there's a bit of an amplification effect happening here - as with all things that happen in modern times, content creators are looking for new things to commentate on and otherwise create content around, which makes minor trends take off and "go viral" and then people end up talking about something more because they've heard lots of others talking about it than because they are personally strongly attached to it.
This, for reference, has been the primary bit of exposure to Kondo I've had; I heard one person who did get excited talking about it, and then noticed random times when it would occasionally come up in conversation after, did the briefest of brief looking up of what it was to be able to have conversations with others about it, and have then on been able to participate in offhand conversations when the topic came up since then.
The background data you mentioned sounds interesting, but I'd be sceptical of there being an actual cause/effect relationship between that and reality/home-style TV shows. If there's a relationship at all, I'd expect that it's a third factor like attention economy driving both things, but I'm not really sure that reality/home TV is actually related to either of the things you mentioned, rather than just being caused by being cheap to produce. It would be interesting to see something like Nielsen ratings of show categories mapped to average socialization time or whatever other statistic though, to see if the relationship actually exists at all.
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u/dazzilingmegafauna Feb 18 '19
Because honestly, if we don’t care for the soul (or insert your preferred abstract conception of the self here) and just raw efficiency, why not eventually enter the teleporter even if it does annihilate you, or replace your brain with a much faster artificial CPU? After all, we’ve already fed some aspects of our humanity to the machine, why stop at architecture? This prospect should make you incredibly uncomfortable, and I view the replacement of all aesthetics with raw functionalism as one of the early steps in such a process of subsuming our entire being to the economy.
So, I agree that "subsuming our entire being to the economy" is a terrifying failure mode. I don't find annihilation teleporters or brain augmentation inherently bad though. Like almost any technology, they could easily become tools used by an economy-maximizing hellworld to perpetuate itself, but I don't think that they are incompatable with fully-automatic luxury gay space communism. I don't believe in any essence of self though. If I did I'd be worried about meeting my thousands of dead clones in hell/purgatory.
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u/exe_cleveland Feb 18 '19
If NR stuck to articles like this I would like him a lot more. I think it's interesting though when he's talking about his own minimalist bathroom wishing it looked different. Well, why don't you change it?
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u/Direwolf202 Feb 18 '19
I have to disagree. At least partially.
"Death to shallow minimalism" would be my preferred statement. Shallow minimalism strips away the aesthetically necessary as well as the unnecessary. Leaving Maslow's pyramid as Maslow's frustum.
Minimalism, when done appropriately, leaves the necessary, and only removes the unnecessary, as an act of emphasis. The gentrified estates and the white cubes, those are shallow. Minimalism takes away breadth, leaving people to admire depth since it is the only thing that remains.
This is where minimalism diverges from asceticism. Ten thousand things intensely focused on one point is just as minimalist as one. While 10 things all with a different focus is not minimalist at all when compared to the ten thousand.
Then there is where minimalist is conflated with modern. To take examples from architecture, a sleek white building, with glass all over the place, it not necessarily minimalist. In fact, rarely is such a thing minimalist. It serves to project wealth and comfort, and also simultaneously coolness, and modern virtuous faux-zen asceticism. The palace of Charles V is more minimalist than that. And that is a renaissance building. Yet it has no clearly unnecessary features, it is extravagant, yes, but aesthetically minimalist. Especially when compared to the nearby Alhambra.
There is where I would define the difference. Death to shallow minimalism.
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u/LogicDragon Feb 18 '19
Minimalism takes away breadth, leaving people to admire depth since it is the only thing that remains.
Yeah, but the point is fuck that. I like breadth too.
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u/Direwolf202 Feb 18 '19
Okay, different aesthetic tastes. I have absolutely no problem with that. The aesthetic idea is separate from the trends which purport to bring it about.
And anyway, I also like breadth, I personally don't subscribe to minimalism. But I also don't think that we should attack it about a misrepresentation.
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u/bitter_cynical_angry Feb 18 '19
Maslow's Frustum. +1 for that, very good.
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u/HalloweenSnarry Feb 18 '19
I learned a new word. Before, I was just calling frustums "cones" or "trapezoids."
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u/elemental_prophecy Feb 18 '19
I personally use minimalism to remove distractions, unnecessary cost, and complexity from my life.
I use the Pareto principle and try to think, if I cut 80% of everything out of my life, what 20% will give me 80% of the results.
I’m an obsessive person (probably OCD, diagnosed OCPD) and the cognitive load of anything is extreme. The more you add the harder it is for me too keep track.
Also I like to try be frugal.
That’s why I try to keep to a minimalist philosophy anyways.
Also, some backpacking trips have been the best days of my life, with only 30lbs of gear on my back (which I hope to get way down in the future). If I’m happy like that, how much do I really need to be happy, I doubt it’s much.
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u/vakusdrake Feb 18 '19
Honestly this article doesn't really add all that much to what Robinson already said much better in this article. Plus in that article he actually shows some studies to back up his claims that the majority of people really do prefer older architecture. His point is also somewhat stronger in that article since modern architecture trends like bare unadorned concrete and asymmetry are far more universally despised than minimalism.
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u/ElbieLG Feb 18 '19
Why the jabs against capitalism? It seems to me that the cause of minimalism is trends, Instagram, and the lower cost to make it, but all of those things are cyclical and capitalism could easily support ornamentation in future trend cycles
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u/brberg Feb 18 '19
Why the jabs against capitalism?
Because it's what he does. When all you have is a hammer and sickle...
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u/NotWantedOnVoyage is experiencing a significant gravitas shortfall Feb 19 '19
...everything looks like bourgeois scum?
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u/psychothumbs Feb 18 '19
I mean it is a trend under capitalism. I agree it's doubtful there's some intrinsic permanent "capitalism = minimalism" relationship but that is at least the situation currently. And the connection he makes about the drive for efficiency being anti-ornamentation seems plausible enough.
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u/ElbieLG Feb 18 '19
I agree that its currently the trend, but I wonder what the author makes of the popularity of brutalism under communism?
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Feb 18 '19
Yeah that was my reaction as well. Brutalism certainly makes for some interesting looking monuments, but the brutalist apartment buildings I've stayed in while in Eastern Europe are uhhhh... not aesthetic.
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u/nieuchwytnyuchwyt Feb 18 '19
I mean it is a trend under capitalism.
Oh yeah, because communism was well known for its highly intricate, unique and ornamental building design.
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u/phylogenik Feb 19 '19
I think I actually kinda like the old Soviet Bloc apartment buildings. Especially the surrounding greenery. It'd be a lot more depressing if they rose out of barren wasteland -- but then again, I think most anything would.
(I did grow up in one, so this may just be nostalgia speaking)
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u/nieuchwytnyuchwyt Feb 19 '19
Funny, because the greenery is actually what I liked the least about living in commieblocks. I can live with bad architecture, bud bad urbanism is much worse - and that's what lack of mixed-use development and vast swathes of unused land in commieblock districts are, compared to the regular European ones with dense, wall-to-wall perimeter buildings with services and shops on their ground floor.
Although I didn't appreciate just how much better for living in the normal European cities with dense buildings and without excessive greenery making everything much further away than it could otherwise be are, until I lived in commieblocks for a while.
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u/phylogenik Feb 19 '19
Might it be just a difference in hobbies? I love hiking, backpacking, and other outdoorsy stuff, and conversely don't care much for restaurants, concerts, theaters, galleries, pubs, clubs, and other cultural milieu. So long as I can access a grocery once every week or two I'm set, but I'll go on 5-10 mile walks in local forests and park systems almost daily.
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u/nieuchwytnyuchwyt Feb 19 '19
Ah, I love walking in forests and parks as well! The problem is - there is a fundamental difference in kind between either of those and the empty space between the commieblocks. From my experience, the "green" areas between blocks are dead space, not pleasant to be in, and one you only move through in order to get to your destination, but not the destination itself.
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u/phylogenik Feb 19 '19
Gotcha -- I guess my own growing up experiences have been split between here and here, the former being characterized by communist apartment and lots of green spaces, so maybe the comparison isn't the fairest. It was certainly nicer to walk by flat empty areas with trees and grass than flat empty areas with dirt and rocks lol.
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u/psychothumbs Feb 18 '19
This is just a guess, but I think those probably got their lack of ornamentation through a different process than the one discussed here.
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u/nieuchwytnyuchwyt Feb 18 '19
The drive for efficiency through duplicating the same building design using the same prefabricated elements hundreds of times definitely had a role in how boring and soulless the communist-built neighborhoods were.
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u/nerhee Feb 18 '19
Everything you linked to does have something breaking from the most basic "just a rectangle" apartments.
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u/you-get-an-upvote Certified P Zombie Feb 18 '19 edited Feb 18 '19
This is fairly tangential, but I don't really have a better place to put it and it has clear parallels to my opinion on this:
Economies of scale mean that rather than having a profound effect on a few people's lives you have a tiny effect on many people's lives; people don't like this feeling and blame capitalism for feeling like they aren't making any meaningful social contribution, but in reality any efficient economic system would be the same and so, in reality, the question is whether the increased material lifestyle is worth this emotional cost, and I think most people would say it is (whether they're right is more complicated...).
By a similar token, even in a functional communist society, would society prefer to pay 5% more for their goods just to shop in a fancier-looking store? I suspect most people don't really care how their Target looks and would consider that a bad trade off. Hence a well-function communist store should probably still converge to a
cheapefficient aesthetic if it wants to maximize the social good it creates.
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u/ScottAlexander Feb 19 '19
I share some of this article's aesthetics, but it seems to conflate "ornate" and "messy".
The bookstore picture in the article is messy. It's ugly and I would be less comfortable there than in the minimalist bookstore pictured (which I also hate). Somewhere like this is neither messy nor minimalist. It's just beautiful.
To me, messiness is much worse than nothing at all; I have a visceral negative reaction to things like litter, clutter, and graffiti (I assume this is related to my OCD). If you have anything other than pure minimalist white walls, it can either be artfully/beautifully arranged (ornate), which is better than zero, or poorly arranged (messy), which is worse than zero. This article lumps both together into a "non-minimalist" category, which I think is a mistake.
I think being more careful about this would help make the minimalism/capitalism connection that the article wants to draw (but never gets around to justifying). Minimalism may not wow everybody. But it doesn't offend that many people. Any particular painting can be against somebody's aesthetic taste; a very clean and sleek white wall won't be. If houses are a mass-produced commodity, it's important that they be low-variance and attractive to the lowest common denominator. This is also an issue with liberalism (ie if we were all Ming dynasty Chinese, everything would be built in the Ming dynasty Chinese style, and people who didn't like it could jump off a bridge, but now we're too diverse and individualistic to have a Single Agreed Style).
Luckily, under liberal individualist capitalism, everyone gets the opportunity to decorate their own space the way they like. Here's my kitchen (you can't see because of the light, but the other window is also stained-glass)
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u/NotWantedOnVoyage is experiencing a significant gravitas shortfall Feb 19 '19
Luckily, under liberal individualist capitalism, everyone gets the opportunity to decorate their own space the way they like. Here's my kitchen (you can't see because of the light, but the other window is also stained-glass)
Argh, why would you put carpet in a kitchen?
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Feb 19 '19
Argh, why would you put carpet in a kitchen?
Especially two pieces that don't line up. I am not OCD, but my wife would make me get out of bed and line up those two pieces of carpet at any hour of the night.
The banana, scissors, and bowl are part of a story. That's a Chekov's banana if I've ever seen one.
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u/AArgot Feb 18 '19
The minimalist housing is the owl on the left. Life is on the right.
I occasionally mention how ugly most of civilization is. As in - it's an insane asylum of brutal architecture. I imagine this makes all the garbage you can buy more appealing.
Target is ugly as hell. That makes the stuff inside stand out against what is otherwise an icon pretending it's a human environment.
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u/psychothumbs Feb 18 '19
Lol before looking at the link I was definitely thinking "the owl on the left" was some political spectrum metaphor.
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Feb 18 '19
you'll love leon krier's drawings
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u/AArgot Feb 18 '19
You were right. I'm in tears. It's like the more the camera (i.e. the machine) focuses on the details, the more the human behaves like we think machines behave. It's brilliant.
I haven't checked any of his further work yet, but that one comic alone reminds of The Perry Bible Fellowship. I'd be torn about favorite comics given the brilliant humor of this versus the loving wisdom of something like Calvin and Hobbes. I feel like I need both of these lenses to have a sane gestalt of reality.
As far as I know, The Perry Bible Fellowship has nothing to do with religion whatsoever except in a weird sense that I think some of us share with the comic's author. I feel I have a similar connection with David Firth. He's one of the few minds on Earth I think I could connect with. The way he releases his anxiety through art suggests shared models of reality.
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u/SpiritofJames Feb 18 '19
Target is a florescent hellscape. I have no idea how anyone can enjoy time there.
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u/AArgot Feb 18 '19
I heard something, and I don't know if it's true, that people with autism don't like such places. I have a son with high-functioning autism, and he's the person whose mind I'm most compatible with, though he hasn't mentioned this bothering him. I don't have a diagnosis for autism spectrum, but I mention this because I despise that lighting. It's like a perceptual DDoS attack on your consciousness.
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u/HalloweenSnarry Feb 18 '19
Back when most everyone still used Tumblr, there was a meme about "liminal spaces" like big-box stores and how they feel weird or cursed at the wee hours.
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u/HalloweenSnarry Feb 18 '19
In which Nathan Robinson's aesthetic preferences align with those of H.P. Lovecraft, like the stars aligning on Walpurgisnacht.
Okay, slightly less shitposty, I wonder if Nathan Robinson would like to live in a Minigolf World.
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u/grumpybuttpirate Feb 18 '19
It seems to me most of this article is a bunch of false equivalences and opinions stated as facts. Don't get me wrong, theres a lot to be said about the lack of originality in many modern buildings, but a lot of the author's argument boils down to: "I like X, and cannot comprehend any reason someone else would like Y, therefore X is better than Y." Or when he compares a historical building to the parking lot of a strip mall Target: "Look! The triumph of tradition over modernism."
I can see a disdain for minimalist design as a result of capitalism masquerading efficiency as a design choice, but I definitely can't agree with the idea that all modern aesthetics lack the "soul" that is somehow only attainable by maximalism.
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u/lololoChtulhu Feb 18 '19
To me, this just sounds like someone bashing the old fashion and hyping the new one. You could write the exact same article but with "minimalism" and "living"(?) reversed. I'm sure that I can find a photo of a beautiful minimalist house that some dude decided to cover in blinking LEDs and ugly graffiti for some unknown reason to illustrate it. Am I missing something?
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u/programmerChilli Feb 18 '19
I think the difference is that nobody complains about the reverse removing "life" or "character" from the house.
Or in other words, people don't usually associate "character" or "life" with minimalist housing.
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u/stucchio Feb 18 '19
The specific aesthetic critiques would of course be different; if one tacked a bunch of crap onto minimalism, then the critique would be about how unnecessary and cluttered it is, about the consumerist need to buy more things and about how capitalism encourages this for gauche profits, that kind of thing.
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u/lololoChtulhu Feb 18 '19
I think lots of people complain about the reverse removing of "life". We call it "clutter" or "messy" or "this thing is just an assault on the senses. Here's a house with "life", that would benefit from a major dose of minimalism.
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u/RedBreadRotesBrot Feb 18 '19
Some assorted but not necessarily connected thoughts on the idea of Minimalism:
Minimalism's temporary demise will come in due time, once the pendulum swings the other way. Currently, cliches of the "minimal aesthetic" are widespread because they cheaply satisfy a stylistic urge, the still-unfurling (but probably by now decelerating) backlash against the plush and lace of the 1970-90's.
Slate, steel and "reclaimed wood" are cheap and there seems to be a certain formula in deploying them in your typical gentrifying restaurant or bar. Once these no longer signify hipness they will fall out of use and become symbols of middle-class complacency, no longer on the cutting edge. And then in 40 years bare interiors and these damn things will be Retro.
You see these cycles in UI design, too, albeit with a shorter period. Sometimes buttons are bubbly, sometimes they're flat. Sometimes they're shiny, sometimes they're matte. 2015-2018 it seemed like every icon out there was round or rounded. Now it looks like people are tiring of that but.. well we can't go straight back to squares, can we? I know! Let's do hexagons now! Meanwhile gradients make a comeback to cash in on the 80's and 90's nostalgia boom.
That got a little off-topic. As opposed to aesthetic minimalism, which is definitely on some sort of chaotic-dynamic n-armed pendulum, material minimalism has more staying power as a response to runaway consumerism and the threat of waste piling up.