Simplicity
Select a recent design project on which you are working. Discuss the characteristics of the project in regards to simplicity and complexity, in light of the discussion and texts introduced today. What attitudes regarding simplicity and complexity does your work illustrate?
Jenjarom, a town located in Selangor, Malaysia about 55 km west of Kuala Lumpur in the Kuala Langat district. It has a significant Chinese (Hokkien) population, and the town is the site of the Dong Zen Fo Guang Shan Buddhist Temple and Institute in Sungai Jarom. Though this is predominantly for the Chinese Buddhist population, the non-Chinese community benefits from the tourism it attracts: there were about a quarter of a million visitors in 2004.
Jenjarom was one of the New Villages, set up in the 1950s during the Malayan Emergency to segregate the rural Chinese villagers from the Communist insurgents within Malaysia under the Briggs Plan. This aimed to cut off supplies to the insurgents. Like other typical new villages, most of the residents are warm and friendly.
The idea of my gallery design came from the integration of history of Jenjarom New Village, from their darkest past during World War II until now. It shows simplicity while the gallery has its main space separating among each other very clearly, from space to space, compartment by compartment.
‘Simplicity, as a process of adhering to the essence of use, to lack of ornament, and to mimesis of the technical reproducibility and expressive rigor of utensils, has, as we know, been the most prominent and common stylistic banner of modernity in this century’.
It can be identified clearly that simplicity is applied on the gallery design, with its almost fully covered raw concrete façade among this building. I strongly agree with the quote ‘Less is more’ by Mies Van De Rohe, in which the gallery was applied with simple rectangular forms, with open, flexible and multi-functioned spaces, following by the exposed structure details in the building, without any ornamentation when I was identifying what is superfluous without confusing it with the richness of curiosity.
On the other hand, I also believe that Gregotti’s saying goes ‘A building is never simple enough’, in which I designed the gallery as its simplest form, but with deep thinking in order to enable the visitor to experience the history of Jenjarom itself by visiting the gallery. From the entrance, the gallery was designed to have a low ceiling point in order to offer a feeling of stress like what the olden day people experienced. The interior lighting is well defined with different density of light and the openings provided, all were designed to blend in with the timeline of Jenjarom.
Besides that, like what Frank Lloyd Wright’s Falling Water did to blend in the house with nature, a timber walkway was provided to offer access from lobby to the outdoor garden. Louvers and pond were provided in order to enable the gallery blending in with the nature and to ensure a close relationship between human and the nature.
In conclusion, the simplicity of a building also represents an aspiration to find one’s place near the origin of architecture itself.
