Elegance ← (Beauty ≙ Utility)

Sometimes, the the sheer, wonderful equivalence of an object with its function may led to immense pleasure. This perfect fit makes us feel like there was kinship between the beautiful and the utilitarian; and the easiness and simpleness of such solution (measured against the complexity of the task) creates excitement within our hearts. We are unprepared for such elegance and dignity, and it can be exhilarating.

(Paraphrasing Paul Valéry, Eupalinos, 1926)

“Everything one invents is true”

Peter Märkli's seminal quote about the nature of creation takes on another layer of meaning when applied to the digital space. The digital, of course, expands the reach of conceptual invention to the material layer:

While building a bridge requires precise engineering to assemble large amounts of steel into the sky, architects and engineers working in the digital realm are faced with inventing the very materials they may use to construct a new digital edifice – all atoms unfound, all code unwritten.

The privilege and bane of having to invent one's own materiality starkly confronts us with the constructivist nature of our reality: Websites are buildings made of pure thought, materialized into an equally human-made plane of reality by a string of decisions.

On Bigness

"In Bigness, the distance between core and envelope increases to the point where the façade can no longer reveal what happens inside. The humanist expectation of “honesty” is doomed: interior and exterior architectures become separate projects, one dealing with the instability of programmatic and iconographic needs, the other – agent of disinformation – offering the city the apparent stability of an object.

(…)

Although Bigness is a blueprint for perpetual intensity, it also offers degrees of serenity and even blandness. It is simply impossible to animate its entire mass with intention. Its vastness exhausts architecture’s compulsive need to decide and determine. Zones will be left out, free from architecture."