Simplicity works like counting your fingers to do arithmetic.
It subtracts the obvious. It adds the meaningful.
This elegant, profound, stark observation comes from designer John Maeda, and powerfully recalls a quote–albeit likely apocryphal–attributed to Michelangelo describing how an oversized chunk of marble found its way to becoming the masterpiece in Florence, the David.
“I just chipped away the stone that wasn’t David.”
Upwards of 45 projects–some of them multiple winners–claimed merit and grand prize honors in 54 categories at last evening’s 55th annual Gold Nugget Awards, concluding the Pacific Coast Builders Conference in San Francisco.
Each project dealt in its way with complexity.
Budget, topography, climate, terrain, local policy, neighborhood push-back, materials challenges, illnesses, disparate stakeholder interests, the list of challenges and complications could go on and on, naming what bedevils every new project as it migrates from being someone’s idea to our collective reality.
In each case, architect, client, builder, planner, financier, developer, laborer, and, quite typically, a village of others needed to team up to carry the project across complexity’s abyss, from being a figment of imagination across a channel to the physical world. Together, they toil and fret and stumble and get up and push, all to remove the inessential from their project, be it residential, or commercial, or educational, or adaptive reuse, or affordable, or market-rate, or single-family, multifamily, custom, or high volume.
It takes those teams, dividing and conquering and uniting, to strip away the obvious and add meaning–in structure, in function, in intention, and in performance–to make this magical thing people call homes, communities, schools, workplaces, and areas to spend leisure time.
The Gold Nugget Awards each year salute these triumphs, which transform the complex into the simple, the real, the essential, and they’re all about the generative will and minds and passions of people who accept unknowns and uncertainties to start with and produce–again, and again, and again–the work, which is where we live, where we work, and where we play.
What excites the team at BUILDER and Hanley Wood’s other titles is that each of those 45-plus projects is a story of people whose passage across the project timeline from conception to delivery bonds them together, frequently with a sense of accomplishment, and empathy, and joy. Those stories become the annals, the knowledge base of a community of diverse disciplines and experts constantly learning how to learn. They contain the secrets of how projects overcome obstacles, withstand stress, unravel the mess, and, in the end, make what’s complicated simple.
It’s always magical for us to share this celebration with people, some of them legends, some prodigies, and some still finding their voices and vision, who look back at their work of a year or two earlier with love, and humility, and pride, and a heightened regard for their comrades, without whom it may have been too hard to subtract the obvious and add the meaningful.
And when the Gold Nugget night is done and the shiny prizes take their places in the trophy case, they get to get up the next morning and love what they do, to continue to chip away at the inessential, and take what is complex, and make it simple.
Happy Friday.
