Arguing for Elegance

Patrik Schumacher, London 2006,

Published in: Elegance, AD (Architectural Design), January/February 2007
Editor: Helen Castle, Guest-edited by Ali Rahim & Hina Jamelle

Elegance speaks for itself. In everyday life elegance suggests sophistication, taste and
refinement. It is an unquestioned value of immediate appeal and in no need for argument.
However, as a new explicit watch-word claiming to guide the next stage of avant-garde
architecture it constitutes a provocation. It is precisely this mainstream appeal of elegance
that runs counter to the very self-conception of any avant-gardism. In fact the pursuit of
elegance is most probably incompatible with radical newness. On the count of radicalism the
pursuit of strangeness and the construction of “abstract machines”(1) is more productive than
anything one might expect from the pursuit of elegance. However, innovation involves more
than radical newness. Mutation is to be followed by selection, recombination, and refinement
before the avant-garde can release its results to mainstream reproduction.(2) The time is ripe.
We have reached the final stages of the current cycle of avant-gardist innovation: Folds and
blobs are heading mainstream. The escape from the rarefied realm of academia and art – the
twin feeding grounds for potential innovations in architecture and design – should not be
denigrated. What else should be the destiny and purpose of the avant-garde? Its function is to
advance the development of the discipline. Avant-garde and mainstream are two
complementing sides of a single evolution: architectural progress. Like any evolutionary
process this process has differentiated specific evolutionary mechanisms for mutation (avant-
garde), selection (critics & early adopters) and reproduction (mainstream profession).

Ali Rahim is rightly arguing that the scene is set for a phase of refinement rather than a phase
of further radical newness. “Elegance” is perhaps the most pertinent slogan for this phase.
Other candidates and contenders might step forward – but there can be no doubt about the
need for effective slogans to direct and cohere our creative energies into an effective
collective effort.
The immediate appeal of “elegance” is certainly an asset in the push towards the mainstream.
I would like to argue that the current theoretical emptiness of “elegance” is also an asset
rather than a liability. Elegance is certainly a much more clever choice than the traditional
theoretical heavy-weight “beauty”. While “beauty” is so loaded and contested that it will stir up
a burdensome deadload of theoreticians wasting our time with irrelevant quarrels about the
essence of beauty, “elegance” is lite, a theoretical virgin territory, giving plenty of space to
maneuver, allowing us to elaborate all the specific semantic connections, connotations and
nuanced demarcations we require to define this concept for our purposes and harness its
positive energy to push the particular trajectory of avant-garde architecture at this current
juncture. What follows is the attempt to help in the forging of such a particular notion of
elegance.

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Elegance is a mainstream value with a wide-spread application in many arenas. There is
nothing new or original about using this term in the architectural arena. What is original and
provocative is the attempt to push this term into the forefront of the current avant-garde
architectural trend and to do this by giving this term a well defined thrust and theoretical
underpinning.

Theory of Elegance

The elegance we are talking about is not the elegance of minimalism. Minimalist elegance
thrives on simplicity. The elegance we are promoting here instead thrives on complexity.
Elegance in our terms achieves a visual reduction of an underlying complexity that is thereby
sublated rather than eliminated. This is my fundamental thesis: Elegance articulates
complexity.

This new theory of elegance in contemporary architecture has two distinct components:
1. descriptive: the elaboration of a descriptive language that provides the resources to
distinguish and characterize the style in question and the particular agenda of its
refinement
2. argumentative: the stipulation of form-function relationships and the formulation of
hypotheses about the social efficacy and pertinence of “elegant architecture” in the
context of contemporary societal challenges.(3)

Attributed to a person elegance suggests the effortless display of sophistication. We also talk
about an elegant solution to a complex problem. In fact only if the problem is complex and
difficult does the solution deserve the attribute “elegant”. While simplistic solutions are
pseudo-solutions, the elegant solution is marked by an economy of means by which it
conquers complexity and resolves (unnecessary) complications.
It is this kind of connotation that we would like to harness. An elegant building or urban design
should therefore be able to manage considerable complexity without descending into
disorder.

We might adopt the language of system theory and speak of more or less complex systems.
We can distinguish two types of items that might differentiate/compose a system: elements
and sub-systems (collections of related/connected elements). With respect to the measure of
(ordered) complexity we might distinguish several dimensions:
1. the number and diversity of distinguishable items within the complex
2. the density and diversity of relationships between distinguishable items
3. relations between ordered sets of elements (correlations)

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 4. relations between relations (systems of relations)

An elegant composition displays a high level of complexity in all dimensions, including the
higher dimensions 3 & 4, which imply a move from complexity to ordered complexity. As
ordered complexity the elegant composition is highly differentiated, yet this differentiation is
rule-governed. It is based on a systematic set of lawful correlations that are defined between
the differentiated elements and subsystems. These correlations integrate and (re-)establish a
visible coherence and unity across the differentiated system.(4)

Elegance and Organisation

We need to distinguish two parallel applications of the concept of complexity in our domain of
reference: The underlying complexity of the institutional arrangements and life-processes on
the one hand needs to be distinguished from the complexity of the spatial arrangements and
architectural forms that help to organize and articulate those life-processes on the other hand.
The underlying social complexity has to be somehow translated into the spatial complexity of
an architectural complex. The concept of organisation operates at a level of abstraction that
encompasses both domains. It is possible to elaborate types, patterns, systems and
dimensions of organization that can guide both the analysis of the (complex) social processes
as well as the synthesis of the appropriate (complex) spatial forms. Complex social
organization is to be registered, facilitated and expressed by elegant spatial formations.
The primary argument here is that elegance understood in this way facilitates orientation
within a spatial complex arrangement and thus ensures the legibility of a complex social
formation. Again: Elegance articulates complexity. And: The articulation of complexity
prevents perplexity.

Elegance as second nature

It is the sense of law-governed complexity that assimilates this work to the forms and spaces
we perceive in organic as well as in inorganic natural systems, where all forms are the result
of lawfully interacting forces. Just like natural systems, elegant compositions are so highly
integrated that they cannot be easily decomposed into independent subsystems – a major
point of difference in comparison with the modern design paradigm of clear separation of
functional subsystems. In fact the exploitation of natural forms like landscape formations or
organic morphologies as a source domain for analogical transference into architecture makes
a constructive contribution to the development of this new paradigm and language of
architecture.
Frei Otto went a step further and literally harnessed the lawfulness of physical systems as
form-finding procedure to generate his design-morphology. The results have been striking.

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Lars Spuybroek has described these processes as “material computing”(5). Such analog
form-finding processes can complement the new digital design tools that might in fact be
described as quasi-physical form-finding processes.
Elegant compositions or complexes are highly integrated formal/spatial systems that look like
those highly integrated natural systems where all forms are the result of the lawful interaction
of physical forces or like organic system where the forms result from a similar play of forces
selected and integrated in adaptation to performance requirements. Such elegant
compositions resist decomposition, just like their natural models.
A specific aspect of this overall lawful and integrated nature of elegance is the capacity of
elegant compositions to adapt to complex urban contexts. Adaptive capacity or adaptation is
another key ambition of the contemporary avant-garde trend that might suggest comparison
with natural organic systems. An architectural system that has an enhanced capacity to adapt
to its environment will result in an intricate artifact-context ensemble that has sublated initial
contradictions into a new complex synthesis that further enhances the overall sense of
sophisticated elegance.

Designing Elegance

This effect, which in nature emerges through self-organisation, has to be elaborately

constructed in sustained design efforts, guided by appropriate recipes and principles.
Robert Venturi made an early contribution by formulating a compositional principle that is
useful here. His notion of the “difficult whole” is concerned with the compositional integration
of diversity. “It is the difficult unity through inclusion rather than the easy unity through
exclusion.”(6) One of the specific techniques he has identified is the technique he has termed
“inflection”. “By inflecting towards something outside themselves, the parts contain their own
linkage.”(7) He identified this technique and its integrative effect in baroque architecture, in
comparison with the more additive structure of Renaissance compositions where each
subsystem rests complete within itself. In contrast, baroque inflection achieves the integration
of parts (subsystems) by means of imposing an overarching curvature which leaves the part
asymmetrical/incomplete requiring the other complementary parts to continue and complete
the curvature.
The concept of inflection can be generalized, so that we can propose:
Elegance requires that the layers and subsystems of a complex composition are mutually
inflected. Every new element or new layer that enters the complex will both inflect the overall
composition and will in turn be inflected. Elegance can never result from a merely additive
complication.(8)

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Computing Elegance

Current digital modeling tools are able to facilitate integrative effects: lofting, spline-networks,
soft-bodies, working with force-fields ect. Morphing – the ultimate effect of animation movie
technology - has been an often emulated paradigm for achieving the continuity of the
differentiated.
There is an inevitable, powerful relationship between the new digital tools (like animation
software), compositional tropes and stylistic characteristics. Intensive coherence (Kipnis),
pliancy, multiple affiliations (Lynn), intricacy (Lynn) etc. are the concepts coined to describe
the compositional ambitions that emerged early in the wake of the new modeling tools. In fact
it has become increasingly easy to achieve abstract sketch-designs (surfaces) that satisfy
these terms and thereby achieving a measure of elegance as defined here. However, surface
compositions are only the first sketchy step in the design of an elegant architecture.
Only in limit cases such as the installation “ice-storm” (Zaha Hadid & Patrik Schumacher,
Vienna 2003) does the modeled surface translate directly into a built reality – in this case an
extensive experiment in morphing.

Constructing Elegance

The next obvious challenge was to go beyond pure surfaces and to elaborate structural
systems that are compatible with this ambition for continuous differentiation, perhaps even
enhancing the overall effect of integrated complexity. One of the most convincing
contributions was Jesse Reiser’s notion of a “space-frame” exemplified in his competition
entry for Manhattan’s West Side (9) in 1999. In the work of Reiser + Umemoto the space-
frame becomes a space-filling medium that could receive continuous deformations that inform
the system by allowing disturbances (squeezes, clearances, inserted objects) to radiate
through the space-frame.
The next step was the focus on the envelope: how to tessellate or panelize continuously
changing double-curved surfaces and further, how to integrate (rather than merely impose)
openings.
Naturally, on the way to the elaboration of fully functional, fully detailed designs, whereby
evermore systems or layers need to be integrated, the principle of inflection (organic inter-
articulation) becomes evermore difficult to maintain. Also the visual field is in danger of being
overcrowded, compromising legibility and orientation.
It is at this moment of mounting difficulty - in the face of bringing the new paradigm into large
scale realization - that elegance becomes an explicit priority, not least because the built
results have all too often been disappointing in this respect. Already on the level of detailed
digital modeling, every new layer of function or detailing requires a new, increasing ingenuity
to be (seamlessly) incorporated. With view to execution further demands of geometric

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lawfulness, precision and high order surface continuity become paramount concerns.
Contemporary car design affords a challenging benchmark both in terms of the tight inflective
nesting of multiple functional features and in terms of surface continuity. The obvious
progress of the last few years is equally reliant upon digital design and manufacturing. For
instance, observe the way the headlights of the latest Mercedes sport-cars are massaged into
the subtle surface of the chassis.

Criteria and Postulates of Elegance

The notion of elegance promoted here still gives a certain relevance to Alberti’s criterion of
beauty: you can neither add, nor subtract without destroying the harmony achieved. Except in
the case of contemporary elegance the overall composition lacks this sense of perfect closure
that is implied in Alberti’s conception. Alberti focused on key ordering principles, like
symmetry and proportion. These principles were seen as integrating the various parts into a
whole by means of setting those parts into definite relations of relative position and proportion
in analogy to the human figure. Perhaps the best example of this ideal is the Palladian villa. In
contrast contemporary projects remain incomplete compositions, more akin to the Deleuzian
notion of assemblage than to the classical conception of the organism. Our current idea of
organic integration does not rely on fixed ideal types. Neither does it presuppose any
proportional system, nor does it privilege symmetry. Instead the parts or subsystems mutually
inflect and adapt to each other achieving integration by various modes of spatial interlocking,
soft transitions at the boundaries between parts, and morphological affiliation etc.
The principle of elegance postulates: do not add or subtract without elaborate inflections,
mediations or interarticulations.
While the classical concept of preordained perfection has thus been abandoned, there still
remains a strong sense of increasing tightness and stringency, approaching even a sense of
internal necessity, as the network of compositional relations is elaborated and tightened. I
guess every designer knows this from his/her own design experience. The more the
compositional cross-referencing, inflection and organic inter-articulation within the design has
been advanced, the harder it becomes to add or subtract elements. This kind of design
trajectory - although wide open at the beginning - beyond a certain point becomes heavily
self-constraining. One might be inclined to talk about the increasing self-determination of a
composition: an emergent (rather than preordained) perfection.
The systems theorist Niklas Luhmann has emphasized this phenomenon - which he has
termed the “self-programming”(10) of the individual artwork - that might be observed within all
artistic work that is concerned with the elaboration of complex artifacts, whether they might be
elaborate paintings, musical compositions, or literary works. Luhmann takes account of “the
necessity that manifests itself in the artwork”. He elaborates: “In this sense, creating a work of
art … generates the freedom to make decisions on the basis of which one can continue one’s

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work. The freedoms and necessities one encounters are entirely … consequences of
decisions made within the work. The necessity of certain consequences one experiences in
one’s work … is not imposed … but results from the fact that one began, and how. This
entails the risk of running into insoluble problems …”.(11)
I guess every designer knows how a design-trajectory can lead into a dead end, can fail to
“work”, or remain unresolved. The elegance we mean - elegance on top of complexity - is a
tall order, and can not be secured in advance. Although we can provide certain recipes - e.g.
the employment global distortions to cohere a field of fragments etc.- the result can not be
guaranteed.
With increasing complexity the maintenance of elegance becomes increasingly demanding.
Complexity and elegance stand in a relation of precarious mutual amplification: a relation of
increasingly impropable mutual enhancement, i.e. mutual amplification with increasing
propability of collapse.

Arguing for Elegance

Why should we bother to strife for this increasingly difficult elegance? Does this elegance
serve a purpose beyond itself?
The overriding headline here is: Orientation within complex organizations.
Contemporary architectural briefs are marked by a demand for evermore complex and
simultaneous programmatic provisions to be organized within evermore complex urban
contexts. Elegance allows for an increased programmatic complexity to coincide with a
relative reduction of visual complication by means of integrating multiple elements into a
coherent and continuous formal and spatial system. The general challenge is to find modes of
composition that can articulate complex arrangements and relationships without losing
legibility and the capacity to orient users.

Elegance as defined here signifies this capacity to articulate complex life processes in a way
that can maintain overall comprehension, legibility and continuous orientation within the
composition.
In this vein, for instance, Zaha Hadid Architects have been promoting an architecture without
corners because corners pollute the visual field usually without signifying anything (unless
they are specifically made to signify something).

Complex organizational relations of overlapping, or interpenetrating domains can be

articulated and made legible, so that a complex order is perceived rather than allowing the
complexity to appear as disorder. The user might, for instance, be able to perceive his
position as a position where several domains intersect, or (more ambitious) where multiple
perspectives unravel the spatial interpenetration of multiple simultaneous use-patterns

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relating to the multiple audiences which tend to coincide in contemporary institutions. How
can this be achieved?
Traditionally spatial orientation has been operating primarily on the basis of relations of
inclusion or containment - the Russian doll principle of nesting domains. Spatial position is
defined as series of relations of containments: continent, country, region, city, district,
neighborhood, estate, building, floor, apartment, room. Each domain has a clear boundary
and is fully contained within a larger domain with an equally crisp boundary. This is how you
know where you are at any time. A change of position implies the crossing of a boundary.
Orientation is traditionally further supported if the domains can be identified with easily
recognizable platonic/geometric figures like circles, squares or rectangles. Domains and
figures are ideally kept separate. It should be obvious that the scope of this system of
ordering is limited. A sense of order can only be maintained on the basis of a radical
reductionism that is antithetical to the realities of contemporary life. On the one hand this
predicament leads to the fallacy of minimalism craving for an artificial simplicity and on the
other hand to the fetishistic embrace of disorder as in the celebration of Tokyo’s visual chaos.

A radically different, alternative mode of ordering and orientation is afforded by the principles
of elegance discussed above. Here figures and domains need not sustain platonic simplicity
because their deformation does no longer spell the break down of order but the lawful
inscription of information. Figures/domains do not have to remain neatly separated because
we have developed lawful rules of mutual inflection, and lawful rules of gradual
transformation.
Orientation in a complex, lawfully differentiated field affords navigation along vectors of
transformation – for instance a morphing trajectory - rather than snapping from position to
position via boundary crossings. In the extreme case of a pure field condition both bounded
domains and identifiable figures have in fact disappeared and orientation along reference
objects and bounded/nested domains has been fully replaced by the navigation of lawfully
modulated field qualities like density, directionality, agitation in the field etc., affording
inferences and anticipations. Projects like the Master-plan for One North, an urban science and
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business park in Singapore, or the design for a new national Italian museum of 21 Century art and
architecture (“MAXXI) in Rome project are pursuing this thesis.

Striving for Elegance - Zaha Hadid Architects

It is an undisputable fact of life at Zaha Hadid Architects that 90% the time and energy is
spent on the achievement of elegance, after the concept has been long been clarified and all
functional arrangements are fully resolved. The real hard work is the elegant formal resolution
of the intended complex assemblage.

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As first example might serve the design for a new Guggenheim Museum in Taichung, Taiwan.
Here, the two gallery wings are mediated by allowing both to meld into the central
communication space, which itself is continuous with the surrounding park-scape. All
transitions are made smooth. Changes in surface material never coincide with or reinforce
changes in geometry. There are no add-on parts that could be easily separated out of the
overall composition. The ramps and paths are cuts and folds molded into the ground surface,
as well as into the envelope of the building, thus mediating the two domains. The lattice of the
roof bridging the central public space is not a neutral grid but an irregular triangulation that is
adapted to the wedge-shaped gap between the two gallery wings. The structural beams are
formally affiliated with the pedestrian bridges that cross this canyon space below. The glass
mullions of the roof glazing continue this game of triangulation on a smaller scale. The
openings within the building envelope are not punched out as arbitrary shapes; instead the
surface is spliced along its lines of least curvature to create louvered openings, akin to gills,
which respect the integrity of the surface.

The recently completed Science Museum in Wolfsburg (“Phaeno”) is the virtuoso masterpiece
in the articulation of complex continuities that can be followed all the way through the building.
The whole building is inscribed within a rigid trapezoid whose angles are adapted to the site-
condition. Within this sharp-edged trapezoid everything flows and melds without corners. The
ground-surface is molded into an artificial topography that registers and receives the cones
that carry the building. These cones – each with its own variation of angles and radii - blend
seamlessly into the waffle-slab above. Those cones also reemerge within the interior – either
as craters or as cones that continue to carry the space-frame above. There is an essential
symbiosis in the spatial and structural conception of the building, and a close inter-articulation
of the waffle concrete structure of the raised floor and the steel space-frame that carries the
roof. The lateral openings are of two kinds: the large openings are conic sections that produce
the characteristic paraboloidal form, and the smaller openings come in swarms that are
articulated as variations of the swarm of voids that make up the waffle slab. These regulations
structure a repertoire of operations that allow for the adaptable handling of all sorts of
functional and contextual contingencies without loosing formal consistency. Such a regulated
repertoire of design moves is the precondition (not the guarantee) of elegance. More
universal rules like balancing within an asymmetric, dynamic equilibrium, and a certain (new,
stretched) range of plausible proportions are still to be observed. Both concerns (dynamic
equilibrium and proportion) also pertain to the rhythmic flow of the interior spaces.

Perhaps the most significant example is the Central Building for the new BMW plant in
Leipzig. Its significance resides in the fact that elegance is here put to effective work with
respect to the articulation of a very dense, complex and multi-layered productive life process.
Here the fertile and pliant formalism of flow lines has been pursuit obsessively. Every system

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was forced (structure, partitions, circulation, lighting, conveyors etc.) to contribute to the
intricate play of bundling, diverging and converging trajectories.

The design for a new monumental Performing Arts Complex on an artificial island in Dubai’s
artificial creek represents the so far unsurpassed apotheosis of architectural fluidity within the
work of Zaha Hadid Architects. The compelling elegance results from the dune-like handling
of the great masses in quasi-dynamic, quasi-natural sweeps. Again, the embedding of the
buildings within an artificial topography produces the sensation of overall seamlessness within
the complex. A further factor is the consistency of the morphological repertoire across scales,
all the way to balconies and staircase details.

The arrangement of three towers within a dynamic equilibrium composition is aiming at grace
and elegance with a monumental mass of 55, 65 and 75 storeys respectively. The suggestion
of “dancing towers” once more borrows from the realm of dynamics to acquire a heightened
sense of compositional rule and logic with respect to the primary massing. Elegance further
requires the handling of variations within a framework of strict morphological regulation: All
lines meet tangentially. Secondary articulations like the facade support and extend the play of
the overall massing.

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The competition entry (1 Prize) for a new Centre for Islamic Art within the Louvre in Paris is a
recent example within the work of Zaha Hadid Architects where a play of oppositions is
choreographed by means of seamless transitions and affiliations between those diametrically
opposed elements. Thus what might otherwise be construed as a contradiction transfigures
into a symbiotic relationship. In the case of the Islamic Centre the historical courtyard, as
figural void, seamlessly involutes and transitions into a highly contemporary figural object.
The surface transition is emphasized not only by fillets and material affiliations, but it is further
emphasized by a twist that distorts the cubic figure and drags the ground surface along as it
blends into the object. This move also opens a rift that functions as entrance. The ornamental
texture is another tenuous, affiliative measure that contributes to the overall sense that there
operates a hidden logic.
This sense of hidden logic, that can be perceived but not always explicitly spelled out by the
observer, is at the heart of what we mean by an elegance that articulates an underlying
complexity of relations.

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Notes:
1. The concept of Abstract Machine has been imported from Deleuze & Guattarri’s A Thousand
Plateaus. Within architectural discourse the concept denotes open-ended design-processes that submit
to runaway graphic or computational processes, thus suspending purpose and rational control.
Eisenman’s formal transformational series have been a seminal precursor.

2.At this juncture the protagonists involved typically bifurcate into two distinct groups with two quite
different career trajectories: those who go mainstream together with the innovations they contributed to,
and those who stay within the domain of the avant-garde to move on into further unknown territory.

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3. The elaboration of a descriptive language is a precondition for any theory and an extremely important
mechanism for directed architectural creativity – however, it is this second argumentative component
that can sustain the claim for the pertinence of the trend pushed here.

4. The avoidance of the loaded concept of beauty and its attendant disputes does not exclude the
recognition that there are certain (perhaps inevitable) continuities with certain prior reflections around
the concept of beauty: In fact this emphasis on establishing coherence within the differentiated - unity in
difference – is reminiscent of Francis Hutcheson’s notion of beauty as “compound ratio of uniformity and
variety”. pp.38, Francis Hutcheson, Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, 1725,
critical ed. The Hague, 1973. Also see Hogarth’s notion of “composed variety”, p.28, William Hogarth,
The Analysis of Beauty, Yale University Press, New Haven & London 1997. My emphasis on ordered
complexity might be understood as a radicalization of William Hogarth’s notion of “composed
variety”. Hogarth, theorizing the aesthetics of the Rococo, is promoting variety against
sameness, but insists on composed variety, “for variety uncomposed, and without design, is
confusion and deformity.”(p.28)

5. What Frei Otto called “Formfinding”, Lars Spuybroek refers to as “Material Computing” in order to
emphasise the similarity of those physical processes with the by now familiar and ubiquitous digital
modelling techniques offered by animation software like Maya.

6. p.88, Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, second edition, New York 1977

7. p.89, Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, second edition, New York 1977

8. For instance, Tschumi’sParc de la villette, in contrast, still operates with layers that remain indifferent
to each other. The introduction of inflection marks the shift from deconstructivism to folding.

9. p.128, West Side Convergence Competition Entry, New York 1999, in:Reiser + Umemoto, Atlas of
Novel Tectonics, New York 2006

10. p.204, Niklas Luhmann, Art as Social System, Stanford California 2000

11. p.203/204, Niklas Luhmann, Art as Social System, Stanford California 2000

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