"It's my goal to make a building as immaterial as possible. Architecture is a very material thing. It takes a lot of resources, so why not eliminate what you don't need as long as you're able to achieve the same result?"
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Jahn’s provocation lands because it turns architecture’s oldest flex on its head. Buildings have long been proof of means: weight, permanence, presence. He’s arguing for the opposite kind of power, a prestige of restraint. “Immaterial” doesn’t mean magical; it means stripping a project down until the experience is doing more work than the structure. The line is engineered like one of his towers: a clean surface with the hard stuff hiding underneath.
The intent is partly ethical, partly aesthetic. Architecture is the art form that can’t pretend it’s not consuming the world. Saying it “takes a lot of resources” is a blunt admission of guilt, especially from a designer associated with high-tech corporate modernism. Jahn isn’t renouncing that world so much as trying to discipline it: if the same performance, comfort, and clarity can be achieved with less, then excess becomes negligence, not luxury.
The subtext is also a critique of architectural ego. “Eliminate what you don’t need” is a swipe at ornamental heroics and at the industry’s tendency to confuse complication with intelligence. He frames reduction as competence: you don’t get credit for adding; you get credit for not having to.
Context matters. Jahn built during an era when glass-and-steel optimism met rising environmental accounting, when “lightness” shifted from a visual metaphor to a carbon problem. His immaterial building is really a demand that modernism grow up: make it still sharp, still ambitious, but less wasteful and more exacting.
The intent is partly ethical, partly aesthetic. Architecture is the art form that can’t pretend it’s not consuming the world. Saying it “takes a lot of resources” is a blunt admission of guilt, especially from a designer associated with high-tech corporate modernism. Jahn isn’t renouncing that world so much as trying to discipline it: if the same performance, comfort, and clarity can be achieved with less, then excess becomes negligence, not luxury.
The subtext is also a critique of architectural ego. “Eliminate what you don’t need” is a swipe at ornamental heroics and at the industry’s tendency to confuse complication with intelligence. He frames reduction as competence: you don’t get credit for adding; you get credit for not having to.
Context matters. Jahn built during an era when glass-and-steel optimism met rising environmental accounting, when “lightness” shifted from a visual metaphor to a carbon problem. His immaterial building is really a demand that modernism grow up: make it still sharp, still ambitious, but less wasteful and more exacting.
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| Topic | Art |
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