THEORIES OF ARCHITECTURE DESIGN
SIMPLICITY OR COMPLEXITY
PROLOGUE
Understanding simplicity and complexity from different point of view, each person has their opinion on each building. For example, the Fallingwater is a masterpiece by Frank Lloyd Wright, from my point of view I feel that this building is towards the simplicity but other people don’t other people don’t think that way. So, it’s a hard to decide what is simple and what is complex.
I’m trying to discuss about my project, the Jenjarom Galleria ( semester 3’s work ), about does it belong to simplicity or complexity. It’s talking about a gallery to repay what Jenjarom has gone thru in the past history, showing what is truly significant to Jenjarom.
JENJAROM GALLERIA'S CHARACTERISTICS
JENJAROM GALLERIA'S ATTITUDE
CONCLUSION
From my opinion I would like to express my Galleria is more towards simplicity, there is so much that I had gone through to find this design.
After all those hardworking site visits to Jenjarom, I had found problems that happen in Jenjarom and had resolved it with my design. It has become a complicated task for me to analyze Jenjarom due to it’s big site but Vittorio Gregotti said”Designing a simple building has become a very complicated problem, at least for those who believe that simplicity in architecture is not something natural or spontaneous”. From Vittorio Gregotti words, designing this building is complicated because I had understand the problems of the site and by understanding comes resolving problems to achieve simplicity, there’s another quote by Vittorio Gregotti “Architecture is not simple; it can only become simple”.
First, from the site plan, the bus stop on the left side of the site is placed like that because opposite of that bus stop is a primary indian school that makes the road crowded during peak hours. The playground serves a reason of replacing the old playground, destroying what means to the community destroys the nature of architecture. The parkings for vehicles are place separately to reduce the carbon emitted from the tar road. The park on the right side of the site serve a purpose of trying to connect the 2 old folks home. I had done all these changes and by balancing the green and structure, it could related to simplicity like what Vittorio Gregotti said “something that has reached a state in which it seems that nothing can be added or taken away, and in which all the reasons in its composition have found their own, provisionally definitive arrangement.”.
From my opinion, I personally thinks that the site plan reach the simplicity peak, but for the internal spaces I do not agree that it reach simplicity because of my lack of spatial quality and the space organization. My Galleria spaces is like an example of function follows form more than like what Louis Sullivan said “Forms follow function”. I deeply felt that I could do better by trying to reduce the problems that the building had, it’s also can be relate by Vittorio Gregotti “Architecture—great architecture—has always attempted to reduce the problems of construction, use, context, and symbolism to one single reason.”.
In conclusion, “solely liberating oneself from the superfluous clearly does not guarantee access to the heart of simplicity”by Vittorio Gregotti, from this quote, I would not confirm 100% that my design is following simplicity because like what he said reducing problems don’t guarantee access to simplicity. I could only conclude that all my hardwork and problem resolving of the site could be at simplicity.