smallprojects

Details.

Mies said God was in them. Pawson designs in order to hide them. Foster cant sleep if theyre hidden. Ive heard that a famous japanese architect pours low grade concrete to sharpen them.

I have a theory about the creation of details. It begins with a passion, like the early work of all the great architects who spawn them, simple, innocent and so fresh. Rain at the end of a hot day. The expression of a child who has just seen the sky for the first time. Then details, like midlife, commonly get bogged in finding answers for too many questions. Whiny, tiring, mired. Repetitive. It can follow through into old age, our need to exhume, rebury. For every and each thing we live through, simplicity catches us only once in our experience of it. Detail reveals itself only once in unspoiled definition.

Few are those who ever succeed in redefining that simplicity.

For the seeker, simplicity can be found again in the beginnings of journeys and of things, both of which have one thing in common: context. When we reduce the reasons for detailing to the smallest building blocks of context, like the effects of water, wind and light, redefining that simplicity becomes that bit closer.

Think small. Water. Wind. Light. And know that the quality of a detail almost always comes from its response to context.