minimalism
Less, but better
Raw size isn't enough
Omit needless words
Dieter Rams: As Little Design as Possible
Morioka Shoten
Minimum
A Book by John PawsonAdd Less
An Article by Cassidy WilliamsA few people have asked me what I did to make this [website] so fast.
The answer is: nothing.
I just didn't add anything to make it slow.I kept it simple.
The pages are pre-rendered.
The CSS is inlined.
I didn't add unnecessary javascript.
The work was done before you got there.Your websites start fast until you add too much to make them slow. Do you need any framework at all? Could you do what you want natively in the browser? Would doing it without a framework at all make your site lighter, or actually heavier in the long run as you create or optimize what others have already done?
Tanikawa House
A BuildingPhotos of the Tanikawa House, designed by architect Kazuo Shinohara.
Built in 1974, this summer house materializes the act of covering a piece of earth, making it an inhabitation only by means of a roof protecting the dirt soil of the ground. The house lies on a slope in a middle of a wood and grows through an exposed timber frame structure which supports a large pitched roof. Under the roof, a minimal section of the house located on a side hosts some specific living functions concentrated on two floors: a bathroom, a kitchen, a bedroom and a staircase. This section lies in parallel to the main “earth room” (or “summer room”) and overlooks it.
Do We Need This?
An ArticleUltimately this redesign has been a study in less, trying to dig deep and find out what it is I actually want for this site. A momentary visual “wow”, or quality content that is worthy of your attention? I decided on the latter, with less visual clutter it is far harder to try obscure bad or shallow writing behind a veneer of pretty images and effects. Posts may take longer to write but I hope this new design will push towards content that is worthy of your time.
Matter versus Materials: A Historical View
Atoms and aggregates
I see science reversing the trend toward atomistic explanation that has been so triumphant in the last 400 years, and I predict a more human future based on the symbiosis of exact knowledge (which is by its very nature limited) and experience.
...Matter cannot be understood without a knowledge of atoms; yet it is now becoming evident that the properties of materials that we enjoy in a work of art or exploit in an interplanetary rocket are really not those of atoms but those of aggregates...It is not stretching the analogy much to suggest that the chemical explanation of matter is analogous to using an identification of individual brick types as an explanation of Hagia Sophia.
Whose eyes had seen and whose fingers had felt
Aristotle’s 18 qualities of homoeomerous bodies that he chose to explain in detail in his Meteorologica, are just those fine points of behavior that would be noticed in a workshop. They are:
solidifiable
meltable
softenable by heat
softenable by water
flexible
breakable
fragmentable
capable of taking an impression
plastic
squeezable
ductile
malleable
fissile
curable
viscous
compressible
combustible
capable of giving off fumesThis redundant list of properties is not the neat classification of a philosopher. It reads more as if it were based on a conversation with a workman whose eyes had seen and whose fingers had felt the intricacies of the behavior of materials.
The alchemists in their mixings
Many wonderful things must have been seen by the alchemists in their mixings.
A holograph of itself
All [physical properties of matter] derive from the different patterns of the interaction of electrons and photons within the fields of the positively charged atomic nuclei, stabilized in a particular morphology by the interaction of the levels themselves. Matter is a holograph of itself in its own internal radiation.
To worship at the shrine of mathematics
The new [physics-based] viewpoint is so potent that it has perhaps, caused too many metallurgists to forsake their partially intuitive knowledge of the nature of materials to worship at the shrine of mathematics, a trend reinforced by the curious human tendency to laud the more abstract.
What the advancing interface leaves behind
I see in the complex structure of any material—biological or geological, natural or artificial—a record of its history, a history of many individual events each of which did predictably follow physical principles. Nothing containing more than a few parts appears full panoplied, but it grows. And as it grows, the advancing interface leaves behind a pattern of structure perfection or imperfection which is both a record of historical events and a framework within which future ones must occur.
A realization that this leaves out something essential
Nothing so fundamental lies in the realm of concern to us aggregate humans, where the need is, now, for the study of real complexity, not idealized simplicity. In every field except high-energy physics on one hand, and cosmology on the other, one hears the same. The immense understanding that has come from digging deeper to atomic explanations has been followed by a realization that this leaves out something essential. In its rapid advance, science has had to ignore the fact that a whole is more than the sum of its parts.