Minimalism DesignSource

Book excerpt: The term Minimalism has not always been used in a favorable sense, especially in architecture, and even today it may be the cause of some confusion and ambiguity. The problem comes from the word’s use in defining a creative current, school or trend when in fact it refers to an aesthetic. At the same time, this aesthetic is not chronologically well defined either and, moreover, interacts with different disciplines. This explains why we find minimalist buildings in periods very far apart from each other and in architects as different as Tadao Ando, Eduardo Souto de Moura, Jacques Herzog & Pierre de Meuron or Luis Barragán, among others. Minimalism DesignSource investigates the minimalism movement, covering the last years of the decade of the 1990s and the first years of the twenty-first century to inquires into the origins of the term minimalism and in how the minimalism phenomenon played out in other fields like art, painting, fashion, and sculpture has affected minimalism in architecture, define the result of the use of pure and simple lines, the reduction of language elements and, as far as architecture is concerned, the investigation of the treatment of space and of building possibilities.