The term minimalism has not always been used in a faporable sense, especially in architecture, and even today it my be the cause of some confusion and ambiguity. The Problem comes from the word's use in defining a creative chronologically well defined either and, moreover, interacts as different as Tado Ando, Eduardo Souto de Moura, Jacques Herzog, Pierre de Meuron, or Luis Barragan, among others.

 

The introduction that opens this selection of minimalist buildings, whish covers the decade of the 1990s and the first years of the 21st century, inquires into the origins of the term minimalism and into how a phenomenon like minimal art-which originated in the United States in the 1960s in the fields of painting and sculpture-has filtered into other sector of society. Minimalism is now used in such endeavors as fashion, music, decoration, and architecture, and it has come to define the result of the use of pure and and simple lines, the reduction of languange elements, and, as far as architecture is concerned, the investigation of the treatment of space and of building possibilities.

 

--Taken from book "Minimalism DesignSource"--