Category: flickr

I took this pic­ture in a small atri­um over­look­ing the lob­by of the Seat­tle Library, designed by Rem Kool­haas and opened a year ago. As Mara and I enjoyed the cool, green light, we over­heard a con­ver­sa­tion that went some­thing like this:Mid­dle-age woman to her hus­band: I can't believe they spent so much mon­ey on this thing.Hus­band: It's absurd. What's in a library? Books. You don't need all this oth­er stuff.Mid­dle-age woman to Mara: What a waste of mon­ey, right?Mara: [Flabbergasted]People raise the same argu­ment when cities build new sports sta­di­ums. Of course, sta­di­ums bring in huge amounts of rev­enue and, the last time I checked, libraries were free. On the oth­er hand, sta­di­ums house teams owned by zil­lion­aires who, the last time I checked, could prob­a­bly afford to build the sta­di­ums themselves.In any case, the tax­pay­ers of Seat­tle have con­tributed to the con­struc­tion of an amaz­ing pub­lic space where EVERYONE can go, read, hang out FREE OF CHARGE and be inspired by the wis­dom of the ages sur­round­ing them. I can't imag­ine a bet­ter envi­ron­ment in which to do this. Cit­i­zens of Seat­tle, I salute you.

An arti­cle in yesterday's NYT House & Gar­den sec­tion extolled the virtues of clut­ter. Kris­ten summed it up nice­ly: Max­i­mal­ism is the new min­i­mal­ism.

"Min­i­mal­ism is easy to copy," Ms. de Lorme said at her unabashed­ly messy desk on a recent morn­ing. "Every­body can do it."

Nev­er­the­less, max­i­mal­ism isn't as easy as it sounds. The author vis­its a Bar­ry McGee exhi­bi­tion at Deitch Projects in New York and finds that clut­ter must be as care­ful­ly arranged as non-clut­ter if it is to work:

Op-art pan­els on the walls. Graf­fi­ti every­where. And one wall I stared at for a long time was cov­ered with small, framed pic­tures dense­ly hung at odd angles, some lay­ered on top of one anoth­er. Like the whole mas­sive instal­la­tion, it looked ran­dom. Of course, it wasn't.

The thing is, Bar­ry McGee was max­i­mal so long ago — Bay-Area-Now-1996 long ago — that it's strange to use him as an exam­ple of a cur­rent max­i­mal trend. I guess well-exe­cut­ed max­i­mal­ism is timeless.The pho­to above is from Bar­ry McGee's max­i­mal mur­al at the Muse­um of Vic­to­ria (fall, 2004).