How Form Works: Elegance and Extravagance

Dec. 2020.

Growing up in East Asia in the 1980s, I was surrounded by a particular kind of visual imagination. Science fiction was populated by giant robots, transforming machines, spaceships, and mechanical fortresses. To a child, these forms were mesmerizing. They were enormous and impossibly complex, their bodies divided into panels, joints, vents, engines, weapons, and countless mechanical details. Machines transformed into other machines; smaller units combined to become larger ones. Complexity seemed to signify technological advancement, while scale communicated power. More appeared to mean more: greater size, greater complexity, greater power, greater significance.

Years later, while studying sculpture, I encountered the much more difficult problem of making form myself. I learned about composition, proportion, balance, material, negative space, contrast, and craft. Through critiques, certain forms were described as resolved while others were awkward, excessive, or unsuccessful. These judgments could be convincing, but the principles behind them seemed surprisingly unstable. I could learn to make something within a particular formal language, but I still did not know exactly what made a form good.

The question became more complicated when I looked across different aesthetic traditions. A restrained modernist object could be beautiful, but so could a Baroque church. A nearly featureless volume could possess tremendous presence, while an elaborate mechanical object containing thousands of parts could be equally compelling. If beauty could occur within such contradictory formal conditions, I began to suspect that there might be another pattern somewhere above stylistic categories.

This led me to think less about what forms look like and more about how we perceive them.

When we encounter a form, we do not simply register its silhouette, color, or dimensions. We also seem to construct a kind of narrative about how it came to exist. We imagine, perhaps unconsciously, the movement of matter that might have produced the shape in front of us. A Constructivist composition of intersecting planes and volumes suggests assembly: one geometry placed against another, parts accumulated into a whole. A concavity scooped from a solid cube suggests the opposite movement. We imagine material being removed from an original mass. One form tells a story of addition; another, subtraction.

Of course, these stories may have very little relationship to how the object was actually made. The scooped cube might have been injection molded rather than carved. The apparently assembled form might have come from a single casting. But our perception still seems to construct a hypothetical history for the object. We read evidence of forces, decisions, operations, and transformations from the finished form. I call this formal narrative.

This narrative is partly fictional, but it still matters. Through it we seem to understand weight, effort, difficulty, precision, repetition, tension, accumulation, removal, and different kinds of transformation. A stretched surface suggests force. A polished stone suggests time and abrasion. A repeated element suggests a rule. A massive cantilever makes us aware of gravity because it appears to resist it. Form gives us an outcome, and perception works backward to imagine its causes.

The ideas of Elegance and Extravagance are predicated on this condition. They depend upon a comparison between what the viewer imagines has gone into a form and what the form ultimately achieves—what I have come to think of as the relationship between perceived input and perceived output.

Elegance occurs when the perceived input required to achieve a significant output appears relatively small. There is a disproportion between means and effect, or between effort and effect. A modest gesture produces a substantial transformation. A simple structural principle accomplishes something unexpectedly ambitious. A limited amount of formal information generates an experience considerably richer than its means initially seem to promise.

The important word here is perceived. Elegance does not mean that something was actually easy to make. An apparently effortless object may require years of development, sophisticated engineering, expensive tooling, or extraordinary craftsmanship. But the viewer does not necessarily know all of this. What matters formally is the narrative available through perception. We recognize, or perhaps believe we recognize, an economy between the means and the result.

A suspension bridge provides a useful example. Its construction is enormously demanding, yet its basic structural logic is remarkably legible. Towers, cables, tension, and gravity form a comprehensible system capable of spanning an extraordinary distance. Part of its beauty comes from recognizing how much is achieved by such a clear principle. The magnitude of the effect seems disproportionate to the conceptual simplicity of the system.

Elegance, therefore, should not necessarily be confused with minimalism. Minimalism concerns, among other things, a reduction of formal information. Elegance concerns a relationship. A simple object is not necessarily elegant, and a complex object may be governed by an exceptionally elegant idea. Reduction alone does not accomplish very much if nothing significant results from it. Elegance requires the means to produce an effect that somehow exceeds them.

Extravagance describes a different relationship between perceived input and output. Rather than allowing the means to recede, Extravagance makes them emphatically present. Scale, labor, material, expense, complexity, repetition, and power become part of the aesthetic experience itself.

European cathedrals offer an obvious example. Their immense scale, structural ambition, carved stone, ornament, stained glass, sculpture, and accumulation of detail make us conscious of the magnitude of their making. We perceive not only the building itself but an extraordinary concentration of labor, material, knowledge, time, wealth, and collective will. The perception of this expenditure contributes directly to the experience of the architecture.

Its extravagance is not incidental to its beauty. It is part of how that beauty is produced.

In retrospect, this is also what fascinated me about the science-fiction machines of my childhood. Their imagined power was communicated through visible abundance. Every panel, weapon, hinge, engine, and transformation contributed to a formal narrative of technological capability. They appeared powerful partly because they appeared extraordinarily difficult to conceive and construct.

Elegance and Extravagance might therefore appear to be opposites: one generates significance through an economy of apparent means, while the other does so through their abundance. But compelling forms rarely seem to belong exclusively to either condition. A cathedral may be extravagant in magnitude while extraordinarily elegant in structural principle. A seemingly simple contemporary object may present an elegant exterior while depending upon an extravagant technological infrastructure.

Beauty seems more often to occur through different proportions of the two.

This also helps explain why neither simplicity nor complexity is enough by itself. Complexity without some kind of intelligible order can become noise. Additional information stops amplifying the effect because the viewer can no longer construct a meaningful relationship among its parts. Extravagance then becomes merely excess. Simplicity presents the opposite problem. Removing information from an object does not inherently create Elegance. A reduced object may simply be reduced. For Elegance to occur, that economy of means has to generate some greater perceptual consequence.

The interesting territory, for me, lies somewhere between the two.

One project in which I pursued this question more directly is Mobi, a modular system composed of injection-molded polymer units. The individual unit is relatively simple in its geometry and can be understood quite easily as a discrete object. It is designed, however, to connect repeatedly with identical units. Through pattern-based multiplication, this simple component can expand exponentially into complex surfaces, volumes, and spatial structures.

The resulting complexity is not really contained within the individual component. It emerges through multiplication.

This distinction became important to me. Rather than beginning by designing a complicated form, I wanted to establish a relatively small amount of formal information and see how much complexity it could generate. As the units accumulate, repetition produces rhythm; rhythm begins to produce surface; surface produces volume and space. At larger scales, the individual component starts to recede and a new collective form becomes perceptually dominant.

Mobi became, in this way, a practical investigation into perceived input and output. The viewer can understand the relatively simple module and the elementary rule of multiplication while at the same time encountering a result that appears much more complex. Its abundance carries something of Extravagance, while the economy of its generative system approaches Elegance.

But Mobi is only one result of a broader question that has stayed with me. Elegance and Extravagance are not really intended as stylistic categories, and certainly not as a formula for deciding whether an object is beautiful. They have become, instead, a way for me to think about how we read form: how we construct narratives around matter, imagine the operations behind an object, and compare the apparent magnitude of those operations with the effect we ultimately experience.

Over time, this distinction has made me think that beauty may be less of a property contained within a particular shape, and more something that happens through our perception of it. What appears to have happened? How much seems to have been required? And what has been achieved as a consequence?

Some forms overwhelm us by revealing the magnitude of their making. Others surprise us because so little appears to have produced so much. Most compelling forms probably occupy some territory between these conditions.

Elegance and Extravagance are the names I have given to these two tendencies, and to the shifting proportion between them through which form gains much of its perceptual force.