Simplicity & complexity (3)

“五色令人目盲，五音令人耳聋”，越来越多的人工建成的居住和生活场所或者缺乏设计，或者太多的设计，隔离了人对阳光、空气、水以及自然生命的直接感知。张唐景观理念 www.ztsla.com

When Richard Serra did his minimalism sculpture “Shift” in 1972 (the year I was born), china was in the middle of the great revolution. When Maya Lin won “Vietnam Veterans Memorial” competition in 1982, China just started to open its door to west culture and the schools were still in Soviet Russian system. 10 years later when I was in an architecture school in southwest China, we were mainly taught early modernism. We heard about Lin’s memorial design only because she is a Chinese and we people felt proud of her success in such an event. Almost another 10 years later, when I was working in Beijing, I started to hear “minimalism garden” and “Peter Walker”. But design profession was in such a fast pace that no designer had time to really think and explore something beyond real projects. I knew nothing about minimalism other than those names.

Those experiences explain why I was shocked when I was in Dia Beacon Museum facing those minimalism art works. Since then, I always kept mind on the topic of simplicity and the work of artists such as Richard Serra, Walter de Maria, Michael Heizer, Carl Andre, Robert Smithson and Richard Long. To know something is easy but to truly understand something is much harder. I have read a lot about minimalism and its influence on modern and contemporary design. My previous boss, Martha Schwartz, once told me that, artists were always exploring new ideas; Architects falled a little bit behind of the artists while the landscape architects were very behind. I would never agree with her if I did not spend time to learn the influence of art in the field of architecture and landscape architecture in later 20th century.

Richard Serra's Shift

Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty

Here I want to skip the section of (my understanding of) the roots and the influence of minimalism movement. Maybe in the future I will write more about this. But right now, I want to focus on what I am really interested, the relationship between simplicity and complexity.

Yes, like professor Cardasis said, simplicity is unachievable and complexity is unavoidable. But I felt there is something more about it. For couple years, I lived in New England by the Atlantic Ocean and had chance to see the most significant landscape and natural phenomena. Facing the endless ocean and the seamless sky, I knew that the real beauty lies on the integration of simplicity and complexity. Who can tell me is ocean simple or complex? It is just one simple landscape, but also is the single most complex landscape: the wave and the rhythm, the light and reflection, the color and the mood, the tide and the sound, everything is changing. Together they make this single landscape simple and strong, yet super complex and rich.

It is a cliché: opposite always contains each other, like Ying and Yang. Successful minimalism works, such as Lin’s Memorial and Walker’s Tanner Fountain, concealed certain complexity under their simple appearances; while significantly complex looking works, such as Beijing Olympic “bird-nest” and “water cube”, follow very simple aesthetic principles and rules. The stronger the contrasting of integrated two characters is, the higher level a work can finally achieve.

I know, what I want to pursue in my work is neither simplicity nor complexity, but both.