SIMPLICITY
Cistercian abbey of Fontenay, France. 11th Century.
The simple is almost but not quite nothing. Etymologically, the word derives from the Latin simplex, from semel, meaning ‘once’, and plecto meaning ‘pleat’, ‘fold,’ or ‘weave.’ But simplicity is always relative. It only has meaning in relation to its polar opposite - complexity, or the ‘many folded.’
These roots suggest that the simple is very close to the untouched, unworked, or unmade, that is, close to nothing of apparent value. Often, simplicity is associated with the negative characteristics of naïvity, primitiveness, the childlike and untutored.
But within cultures characterized by constant activity and ever-increasing complexity, the intimate relationship between simplicity and meaningless has proven especially compelling. When a mystic, artist or scientist says they are seeking ‘simplicity’ it is usually in order to draw attention to the fact that they are searching for a revitalizing or clarifying essence. The relationship between simplicity and spiritual enlightenment was recognized long ago, as it was perceived that attention to the unadorned has a tranquilizing effect on the mind and the senses, relieving us from the ceaseless and painful task of thinking and doing.
In the West, Roman Catholicism embraced a complex theology, which manifested itself visually in prolific ornamentation and visual display, and theologically, in a complex metaphysics. But in teachings of the early Desert Fathers, and then in the Romanesque period within the monastic order, simplicity was highl valued. The architecture of Cistercian abbeys, for example, emphasise simple forms and the play of light upon stone surfaces, a reflection of the belief that the unadorned embodies God’s benign presence.
But the Cistercians were an exception with Catholicism, and the Protestants attacked what they saw as the carnality and idolatry of the Church of Rome. The demand for a return to the pure roots of Christianity meant the destructive purging of the many accretions that concealed the simple truth. Unnecessary visual display was judged to be vanity, and the appropriate relationship to the temptations of the world must be abstemious. Thus plainness in dress and in behaviour were encouraged.
Inspired by the spirit of the age epitomised by Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s faith in the simple virtues of the ‘natural man’, the French revolutionaries of 1789 rejected all traditional religions , and in order to demonstrate they had repudiated its decadently flamboyant values also adopted a simpler dress code to that of the Ancien Régime.
As industrialization and urbanization spread, belief in the intrinsic value of simplicity as a way of drawing close to a more pure and untroubled way of life, spread. In England, the painter John Constable explained that his subject-matter was to be found under every hedgerow. It wasn’t necessary to take a degree at Oxford, fill one’s head with obtuse philosophy, or journey to Rome to look at masterpieces. All on needed to do was look humbly at the world around you. The American writer Henry David Thoreau declared from his hide-away beside Walden Pond: ‘simplify, simplify.’
To create the blueprint for a purer, more elemental and universal, and hence less troubled, world, one that lay behind or hidden within the complex one we inhabit, it was necessary to seek a ‘condition of complete simplicity / (Costing not less than everything)’, as T.S. Eliot put it in ‘Little Gidding’. Bereft of the old securities, we must learn to contemplate a more primal world. ‘After the leaves have fallen, we return / To a plain sense of things’, as Wallace Stevens writes.
But the importance of simplicity has been more clearly recognized beyond the West. In the austerely beautiful temple gardens of Kyoto, Japan, the importance of simplicity for Zen Buddhism is made tangible through carefully unforced arrangements of stone and raked sand. In Confucian Korea, simplicity was also highly valued. Even the households of the ruling elite were characterized by an austerity that is in stark contrast to the ostentatious display of Western aristocrats.
‘Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious, and adding the meaningful.’, writes the contemporary American designer and theorist John Maeda. But fertile simplicity is just a thin hair’s-breadth away - a single ‘pleat’ away – from the meaningless, and the creative use of simplicity therefore involves much more than merely the removal of the apparently superfluous or decorative, or the reliance on pure primary forms. As the German designer Dieter Rams declares: ‘Less, but better.’
Ryoanji temple rock garden, Kyoto, Japan.
A Korean hanok, home of the yanbang ruling class of Joseon Korea.
A radio designed by Dieter Rams for Braun in the 1950s.