S(cienti-tecture)-Files: The appreciation of essence

Hearing an echo of the voice from Minimalist Architecture:

The dissatisfaction and unease generated in all social groups by contemporary consumer society, which sees the possession of material goods and their exaltation, totally unrelated to their necessity or usefulness, as the only support for a perverse logic of self-maintenance and inward growth, can be taken as the social and historical basis for the claims made by minimalist art and, in particular, for those architectural experiences that based the purpose of their existence on reduction, simplicity and a search for the essence.

Mies van der Rohe’s attempt to give an answer to the concerns of the world weighed down with pointless materialistic burdens, with loss of meaning and a consequent loss signalled by the most significant artistic events of the twentieth century is founded on a search for the essence: the essence of the human condition, the essence of place, the essence of materials, the essence of space, the essence of light.

~ by musafiremes on August 28, 2007.