Clarity vs. simplicity

   
According to Oxford Dictionary:

clarity
the quality of being clear, in particular:
– the quality of being coherent and intelligible
– the quality of being easy to see or hear; sharpness of image or sound
– the quality of being certain or definite
– the quality of transparency or purity

simplicity
– the quality or condition of being easy to understand or do
– the quality or condition of being plain or uncomplicated in form or design

By definition, both words mean directness of expression. But being simple implies being basic, free from complications and elaborations, while being clear requires sharpness in communication, free from obscurity or ambiguity. Some people get the two words mixed up, assuming something simple would naturally mean it’s clear. In my opinion, clarity is far more demanding than simplicity. Clarity is good with or without simplicity. In fact, it requires more effort to achieve clarity with complexity. On the other hand, simplicity is only good when it’s clear. Simplicity without clarity is just dumb and meaningless.

Design is an art of communicating ideas. Clarity is intelligence and simplicity is just form.
   

Even the Death Star has a dent

   
Human Wu: Hello Darth. Hello Dave. It’s an honor to have you both here today and discuss Brutalism in architecture. Let me start with Darth. You are currently supervising the construction of the Death Star.

Darth Vader: Yes. It’s the latest project by the Empire. It features the most advanced technology, and it’s very sustainable. Tarkin and I are very proud of it.

The Death Star under construction

HW: It’s not a concrete structure. Do you think it would look less powerful than those rough concrete buildings on Planet Earth?

DV: Come on you Earth people! Who says concrete means power? Look at Dave. I don’t even know what his 2001 monolith is made of!

Dave Bowman: I can’t tell either. I woke up in my room the other day and there was this mysterious black thing standing in front of my bed. It was not very big but extremely imposing. I think it was the pure geometry that gave it the powerful look, just like Darth’s sphere.

HW: It seems there is a new trend in architecture that everybody is doing pure shapes—circles, triangles, cubes… Would you define that as the new Brutalism?

DV: It depends. The idea of our Death Star is actually trying to blend in. Look around—all planets are spherical. So in a way the Death Star is highly contextual. Camouflage, you know. Someone from your planet stole the design and put it in the desert. That doesn’t work. That’s just brutal. I also saw you guys building a giant ring in a small town with a forest in the middle. I just don’t get it.

HW: It’s interesting that you brought up the issue of context. Dave, do you think that explains what happened to the monolith?

DB: You could say that I guess. But there’s absolute beauty in platonic shapes. They are so perfect and universal. They have this omnipotent capacity to accommodate any program. If you can solve problems with simple geometry, why use all those blobs and twists? When you have a pure form, even apes understand it’s something special. It makes the concept clearer and stronger.

DV: Fuck concept! Even the Death Star has a dent, for the force’s sake. You do what it takes to make it work. Architecture is not just about form after all. Over-simplification only causes problems. I do hate those pretentious twists and shit though.

HW: With that remark, I’d like to conclude our conversation today. Thank you both very much. I can’t wait to see the completion of the Death Star.

DV: Thanks. I just hope Luke doesn’t come and demolish it 50 years later. Kids these days never respect their fathers’ achievements. Maybe I should apply for a landmark status right away.

(Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this interview do not represent the views of the author.)
   

Niemeyer’s last work

   
Legendary Modernist Oscar Ribeiro de Almeida Niemeyer Soares Filho passed away three days ago, just 10 days before his 105th birthday. He was reportedly still working from his hospital bed last month. Vera Lucia Niemeyer, Niemeyer’s wife, stated: “He has several projects and wants to know about the progress of each.” Niemeyer himself was quoted as saying that hospitalization was a “very lonely thing.” “I needed to keep busy, keep in touch with friends, maintain my rhythm of life,” the admirable man said.

Last month, I saw the Oscar Niemeyer collection for Converse, who also turned 104 this year. Compared to the horrible and obviously unwearable designer shoes in the past few years, these simple sneakers felt like a fresh breeze. The design celebrates Niemeyer’s “free and sensual curve” – “the curves that I find in the mountains of my country, in the sinuous course of its rivers, in the body of the beloved woman.”

I don’t know how much Niemeyer himself was involved in the creation of this collection, but it’s arguably the last Niemeyer-related design product. I’d better place my order before they are all sold out.
   

Apple’s Skeuomorphism

   
Apple announced on Monday that Scott Forstall would be stepping down as senior VP of iOS software. Rumor says he was actually fired because he refused to sign an apology letter for the awful and problematic Maps app. A more long-standing conflict was his skeuomorphic design approach. Skeuomorphic design keeps some of the old elements to make the new look familiar and comfortable, even such elements don’t make any sense with the new materials and techniques. In the case of Apple, it would mean creating virtual applications that mimic real-world objects. It sounds nice but it’s really conservative in nature. It’s actually quite laughable that a progressive inventor like Apple would still continue to use retro-looking interfaces. Here are some examples:

Calendar’s leather top

Contacts looks like an old-school address book

Notes takes the form of a yellow legal pad and uses awful font that looks like handwriting

Wooden bookshelves and leather-bound books in iBooks

Turning pages in iBooks

Shredder in Passbook

The worse app by Apple ever: Cards

It reminds me of Karim Rashid’s comment on digital cameras: “All of a sudden our cameras have no film, why on earth do we have the same shape we had before?” The iPhone has a digital camera, but it comes with a mechanical shutter click sound. For a company who values so much the unity of hardware and software, this mismatch is rather embarrassing. Hopefully this will change when Jony Ive takes over part of Scott Forstall’s responsibilities and heads up the new human interface (HI) department, as also announced on Monday. Actually you could smell some hints in Tim Cook’s iPad mini presentation regarding the iBooks update last week. The new version contains “a really cool new reading option – continuous scrolling. If you just flip when you are reading, the words scroll by just as you would expect.” Well, that’s what an ebook is.
   

Building anatomy

   
Thanks to Sergio for bringing up the comparison of anatomical drawing and MRI scan. Traditionally in medical sciences, we rendered organs and biological systems as components of the human body. Our perception of them was based on the three-dimensional shapes and volumes (morphology) of individual parts we saw when examining cadavers. With technological developments in the 20th century, we can now actually draw “plans” and “sections” of the body with the help of X-ray, ultrasound, and MRI.

Anatomical Chart from Cyclopaedia, vol.1, 1728

The Visible Human Project, 1989-1994

MRI slices of the head

The two modes of representation remind me of OMA’s competition entry to the National Library in France. There was a negative model that showed the voids like organs in a cube. Then a series of plans sliced the cube horizontally like MRI scans.

OMA: Très Grande Bibliothèque, Paris, 1989. Model

OMA: Très Grande Bibliothèque, Paris, 1989. Selected plans

Compared to the developments in medical sciences, I feel that the two modes of representation in architecture, at least in Western traditions, went the other way around. Plans and sections have long been the standard ways to describe a building, while accurate scale model as a professional tool was only getting popular in the 20th century. Many “old-school” architects still conceive their buildings through plans and sections. OMA’s way of designing the National Library was quite a groundbreaking milestone in this regard.

Rembrandt, The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp, 1632

Mies at IIT, 1938

Now we have computer applications. The powerful 3D programs and rendering engines have completely changed our expectations of representation in the design stage. And for better or worse, they have also changed the way we design. Perhaps the future lies in the up-and-coming Revit program, which offers a bridge that brings together the technical 2D drawings and conceptual 3D thinking of architecture.
   

Form follows content

   
In my recent trip to Paris, I visited two new museum expansion projects. One is in the Louvre – the world’s most visited museum, and the other Palais de Tokyo, the epic center of contemporary art in France.

The Louvre
First time since the glass pyramid was completed in 1989 has the Louvre introduced a second piece of contemporary architecture: the new Department of Islamic Arts opened last month. Designed by Italian architect Mario Bellini and his French colleague Rudy Ricciotti, the new wing covers the historic Cour Visconti with a shiny undulated glass and metal roof. Underneath are two levels of open gallery spaces housing the 2,500 objects from the largest and most significant collection of Islamic art in Europe.

Palais de Tokyo
In 2002, Paris-based duo Lacaton & Vassal renovated Palais de Tokyo – an old exhibition pavilion originally built for the World’s Fair in 1937 – and turned it into a contemporary art center. 10 years later, they have extended their work to the previously sealed basement, increasing the exhibition space from 8,000 to 22,000 square meters. Instead of adding or finishing, they basically stripped down the structure to raw concrete. It reminds me of HdM’s Tanks at Tate Modern. Just in this case, there’s an extra layer of French carelessness. It feels like in some old cistern or even disorienting sewers. (In fact, Paris is quite famous for its labyrinthine sewer system.) I love the floor in particular. It looks wet at first glance. But it’s actually a layer of special resin poured on the rough concrete surface to make it smoother.

Lobby

Agora

Down to the basement

Resin floor

Only in France

Modernists believe in “form follows function.” These two Parisian projects are both exhibition spaces, then why the stark contrast? Some may say, “Form follows finance.” There was a steep price tag of €100 million for the 2,800m² expansion in the Louvre, while Palais de Tokyo paid €20 million for 14,000m² new spaces. But I would argue the power to get money is also linked to the contents in the exhibition spaces. And the contents would ultimately determine the overall atmosphere generated by the form. The new Islamic wing of the Louvre houses precious antiques, so they can afford some precious looking materials like gold and silver aluminum mesh for the roof and special black waxed concrete in the basement, and the architects would at least try to do some delicate details. Palais de Tokyo, on the other hand, doesn’t own any permanent collection. The ever-changing nature of the contents sets it free from the typical clean-room type atmospheres. In fact, construction work keeps going while the artworks are being exhibited. It’s a raw space where anything could happen.

The architects of the Louvre expansion denied the references to flying carpets, Islamic veils or musciarabia. But one could easily make the convenient associations judging from its floating undulated form. For Palais de Tokyo, the architects explicitly cited Cedric Price’s Fun Palace. And I think they did a good job to make it real.