2023年极简主义设计作品主要风格分析.doc

Not So Simple The New Classical Landscape "Minimalist Gardens," by Peter Walker, Spacemaker Press, Washington, D.C. and Cambridge, MA, 1997, distributed by Watson-Guptil Publications and Hearst Books International, pp. 207, $35. By Carter B. Horsley Peter Walker is one of the great design poets of the 20th Century as the more than 280 color illustrations and photographs in this large and handsome paperback testify. More than 30 of Walker's projects are presented in considerable detail. Both his own essay and an accompanying essay and project notes by Leah Levy illuminate much of the artistic, philosophic and intellectual foundations of his designs, but the illustrations really need little exposition. Walker's projects are brilliant integrations of the natural and man-made environments that are distinctly modern and abstract, at times mysterious and sometimes awesome. "Minimalist" is an inappropriate adjective to describe this work for it is far too rich in beauty and power to be less than grand. But one must respect the artist's own interpretation and here Walker is wonderfully incisive, not only about his own oeuvre, but about much of modern architecture and, in particular, the "Minimalist" era/school. While none of the projects are in New York, almost all offer exciting clues to the thrilling potential cityscapes that can and should be wrought. Any intelligent mayor should appoint Walker as the city's "Master Designer," with powers over all development and planning. Walker, of course, is not the only great environmental designer. Others are Martha Schwartz and Michael Heizer. In her essay on Walker's work, Levy finds traces of the Nazca Lines in Peru and Stonehenge in England in some of his work "an awareness of and quest for connection with earthly and celestial mysteries": "There are many instances when the work focuses on the enigmatic qualities of nature represented by the sound of water, the stasis and weight of stone, rustling changes by the wind, blocks and patterns of shifting color, shimmering and magical mists, and elusive light." She also finds that "the classical order of seventeenth century French gardens, especially those of Andre Le Notre, serves as strong precedent to individual elements of Walker's approach," adding that "His intuitive as well as intellectual affinity with patterns, rhythms , and order, and a to a kind of Cartesian synthesis, is apparent throughout his work." Not surprisingly, also she finds the influence of Zen gardens: "An underlying philosophical distillation of the complex to achieve the simple is evidence in both distinct components and the unifying wholeness of many of his gardens…The work of garden makers of the mid-twentieth century, especially Thomas Church and Isamu Noguchi, was particularly inspiring to Walker in his formative years." Her brief but pithy essay tries to place Walker in his proper and self-proclaimed "minimalist" niche: "Since its most crucial years in the 1960's, minimalism, arguably the first truly American art, has become a loosely used catchall term absorbed into the culture to refer to styles that are non-figurative, non-referential, geometric, or merely of few and simple parts. But the term minimal art was coined to refer to and identify a very specific point in time, approximately 1963-1968, and a small collection of individual artists working primarily in New York City…" Levy proceeds to relate some of Walker's work to that of such artists as Gordon Matta-Clark, Christo, Richard Serra, Walter de Maria and Robert Smithson, Maya Lin, Siah Armanjani and others. Walker's own essay is much more rewarding for its provocative insights into Modern architecture and the Minimalist temperament. "As a late second-generation modernist trained in the 1950's. I was denied, along with a generation of my peers in the design disciplines, an integrated view of architectural history because our professors, including Gropius and Giedion and their followers, did not present the full historic information that they themselves had been given by their teachers, and thus did not grant us the opportunity to make our own ideological choices. I have, therefore, not had the historic perspective that the educated professional of a hundred years ago might reasonably expect….Until recently little debate or theoretical refinement had occurred in modernism, leaving the legitimate ideas of modernism unseparated from those that perhaps should have been discarded. Most criticism related to modernism has come in the form of denunciation from postmodernists. Abstraction had removed most of the expressive content and narrative from modernists design, and references to nature were generally missing from 'internationalist' thinking. Social, democratic, or economic purpose had largely replaced metaphor, though how a dialogue with the users would be achieved was not clear. Without this dialogue, or even an agreed-upon language, what 'democratic design' might m