Minimalism DesignSource

The label minimalism has often carried negative associations in architecture, and it still breeds muddle. The trouble is that the word is used to name a movement, a school, or a passing trend, when it really names an aesthetic sensibility. That sensibility resists neat dating and cuts across disciplines, which is why spare buildings appear in widely separated eras and among designers as different as Tadao Ando, Eduardo Souto de Moura, Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, and Luis Barragán.

This book examines minimalism as a movement, concentrating on the closing years of the 1990s and the opening years of the twenty-first century. It traces where the term came from and considers how minimalist tendencies in art, painting, fashion, and sculpture fed into architecture.

Its central concern is what the aesthetic produces: clean, pure lines, a paring back of formal vocabulary, and, in architecture, a close study of how space is handled and what building can achieve.