![]() ![]() ![]() In SoHo, artists could rent or purchase a large amount of interior space for cheap, all while being close to transit and the previous arts hub of Greenwich Village, which was increasingly becoming unaffordable. As a result, by the 1960s, blight and business abandonment made SoHo a prime target for the mid-century urban renewal schemes - and yet, much of SoHo was spared the wrecking ball, thanks to the efforts of a specific constituency: artists. The lofts’ urban profile - narrow buildings tightly packed together on even narrower streets - made shipping and logistical operations increasingly difficult. Structurally, they were inefficient for the machinery and workflows of modern industrial production, which was increasingly being farmed out to massive sprawling factories outside the city. ![]() However, by the post-war period, these structures had long outlived their usefulness in trades such as manufacturing or warehousing. The loft building, characterized by being three to five stories in height, floors consisting of thick beams of wood supported by thin cast iron columns, was once the pinnacle of 19th century structural engineering, and for centuries served their purposes as sites of light industry. Its 19th-century cast-iron loft buildings once served as the backdrop of garment manufacturing, machine shops, and warehouses. The SoHo neighborhood of New York City was once a thriving hub of industrial activity. However, aside from the obvious aesthetic heritage of European modernism, there is an important and underemphasized architectural link to the Minimalism of the 1960s, namely regarding the places in which it originated. ![]() While Minimalism was not a movement that extended explicitly to architecture (which, in the 1960s was in a very different place aesthetically than art), its ethos can be found in the oft-quoted aphorisms and manifestos of Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, Walter Gropius and other kingpins of early 20th century International Style architecture. Art begins with the getting rid of nature.”Īrchitecturally speaking, the “less is more” dogma begins much earlier than the 1960s. Ad Reinhardt, an Abstract Expressionist painter whose monochrome paintings are frequently seen by art historians as a precedent to Minimalism, described his work’s artistic underpinnings succinctly: “The more stuff in it, the busier the work of art, the worse it is. This movement was an extension of the earlier Abstract Expressionist and Op Art movements in art in music its origins lie in serialism. Minimalism, in the historic sense, refers to a movement in art and music dating back to the 1960s and ‘70s whereby artists created sculpture, painting, and musical composition using themes of large scale, cubic and geometric forms, industrial materials, limited palette, and repetition. It has become a stand-in for the equally vague “contemporary.” Succinctly put, minimalism writ large has come to mean a combination of modern design and the ethos of living with less. Minimalism refers to anything from Marie Kondo’s decluttering ethos to any architectural form devoid of a gable. Minimalism is one of those words that is reaching a breaking point as to how many things it can possibly mean. An emblematic co-working space with potted plants (image via and courtesy Piqsels) ![]()
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