83 – Coperthwaite on “Simplicity” with Kenneth Kortemeier

I mean, that is so much what this chapter is about is trimming away the superfluous, the stuff you don't need and getting down to what's really beautiful and good and necessary and helpful.

Yeah.

So I'll say just a quick bit more.

So what Josh was referring to.

So here at the craft school, we don't have grid tide power.

We hand carry water.

We heat with wood.

A lot of the things that I was inspired by from seeing Bill's examples.

Now we don't live in a yurt, which I think Bill was probably, he never said as such, but I bet he wished we had hadn't built a yurt, but the, um, one of the things we were doing was, um, thinking about passive solar and we had all these salvaged windows we had collected from buildings that were being torn down and that doesn't, passive solar and yurts don't work so well together, it turns out.

And, um, so we, we didn't build a yurt.

We do have a yurt now where our intern stays and has been, we have other yurts now, but,

uh,

but the other, the other more, many, many other areas like our woods, wheelbarrows and our, uh, our yokes we use for carrying the water on and on.

I could talk about how he's influenced us.

Yeah, that's great.

Well, let's dive into this chapter then.

Let's start looking at this chapter.

We both were, you know, we've been revisiting these things and I've been reading this book since it came out and rereading it over and over.

And this time again, going through, I have layers of highlighting and annotations that I keep adding to every time I read it.

And There's just a lot here to think about.

So Bill starts the chapter off kind of laying out what he's talking about with simplicity.

Simplicity, I think it could be misunderstood pretty easily to mean like plainness or simply no decoration at all.

But I think he means something more than that.

I think he does have things to say about ornamentation, but specifically there's a word that he gravitates to that he uses the word elegance.

He says it's elegance, physical, moral, philosophical, and aesthetic elegance.