On a grey morning in late October you can walk along Tallinn’s old city walls and meet almost no one. The stone is pale limestone, worn smooth by seven centuries of wind off the Baltic. The towers have fairy-tale names, Fat Margaret, Kiek in de Kök, “peek into the kitchen”, yet not one of them was built to be looked at. Every arrow slit sits where an arrow slit was needed. Every tower juts out exactly as far as it had to in order to cover the stretch beside it. Nothing is there for show.
And yet that is what stays with you. Not the decoration, because there is none. What stays is a kind of clarity: the sense that whoever built those walls knew precisely what a wall was for, and built only that. Down in the lanes the merchants’ houses show off coats of arms, carved doorways, pastel colours. They are lovely too. But the thing you remember that evening is the wall.
Some buildings ask to be admired. Others ask to be understood. And in the ones that let themselves be understood, the decisive part is almost never what was added. It is what someone, at some point, decided to leave out.
What you cannot see
It is the hardest part of any design to notice, because what has been taken away leaves no trace. The detail drawn and then rubbed out, the material rejected, the window never cut because it would have broken the rhythm of the wall: none of it is present in the finished building. Yet all of it shapes what the building conveys. The coherence of a well-made space is the sum of many decisions that are no longer visible.
Anyone who works knows the same holds for almost everything. A clear report is one with three paragraphs cut. A useful meeting is one with four people invited instead of twelve. A good day is often one in which you said no to two things before nine o’clock.
Which raises a question. If taking things away works so well, why do we do it so rarely?
The Lego roof
Leidy Klotz, an engineer at the University of Virginia, says the idea came to him while playing with his young son, Ezra. They were building a Lego bridge, and its two supports were different heights. Klotz turned round to find a brick to add to the shorter one. By the time he looked back, the boy had already taken a brick off the taller one. The bridge was level. From that afternoon on, Klotz started seeing the same blind spot everywhere: in engineering projects, in regulations, in diaries. In 2021 it became a book, simply titled Subtract, and a paper in Nature.
The paper, written with the psychologists Gabrielle Adams and Benjamin Converse, has a title that says it all: people systematically overlook subtractive changes.
In one experiment, participants were given a small Lego structure: a roof resting on a single brick, which in turn sat on a base. Their task was to make it stable enough to bear a weight. Success earned them a dollar, and every brick they added cost ten cents. The simplest fix was to remove the single supporting brick so that the roof sat directly on the base. It cost nothing. Yet when nobody pointed this out, most participants added bricks. Only when the instructions said explicitly that removing pieces was free did nearly two-thirds choose to subtract.
The other experiments told the same story in different forms. Asked to make a grid of coloured squares symmetrical, only one participant in five removed squares rather than adding them. When an incoming university president invited ideas for improving the institution, just eleven per cent of the 651 suggestions proposed getting rid of something. And people asked to do the task while keeping a string of numbers in their head subtracted even less.
That last detail is the most revealing. Adding is the answer that arrives on its own, the one the mind reaches for first when it is busy or tired. Subtracting takes a second look. It is not harder to do; it is harder to see.
Shorter
The habit is older than Lego. In December 1656, closing the sixteenth of his Provincial Letters, Blaise Pascal apologised to his reader: this letter, he wrote, was longer than usual only because he had not had the time to make it shorter.
The line became famous because everyone recognises something in it. Writing a lot is easy. Writing little, and writing exactly what is needed, takes time: rereading, choosing, giving up a sentence you like that is not pulling its weight. Brevity is not where a text starts. It is the result of work the reader never sees.
Nearly three centuries later an aviator, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, watched the same process in the machines he flew. In Wind, Sand and Stars, published in 1939, he described how the lines of aircraft had grown simpler year by year, until they seemed almost to belong to nature. And he concluded that perfection is reached not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
Saint-Exupéry was not talking about style. He was talking about engineering, weight, drag. Every part removed from a wing was a part that could not fail. Simplicity, in that case, was not an aesthetic choice. It was the shape a thing takes once it has been thought all the way through.
In the 1970s a German designer, Dieter Rams, who spent four decades designing radios, record players and shavers for Braun, distilled his work into ten principles. The last says that good design is as little design as possible. His motto was shorter still: weniger, aber besser, less, but better. It was not a call for austerity. It was the idea that every element removed leaves more room for those that remain, and that you can recognise a successful object because it lacks nothing and has nothing to spare.
A single note
One Estonian made this idea a lifetime’s work. In 1968 the composer Arvo Pärt premiered a Credo for piano, choir and orchestra in Tallinn. Its religious text displeased the Soviet authorities; the piece was banned and his music vanished from concert halls for a time. But the deeper crisis was another one. For almost eight years Pärt could barely compose. He studied Gregorian chant and medieval polyphony, filled notebooks with exercises, and searched for a language he did not yet have.
When he re-emerged in 1976, his music had changed completely. Pieces such as Für Alina, for piano, were made of very few notes: a slow melody, a chord ringing like a bell, a great deal of silence around them. Pärt called the style tintinnabuli, after the sound of bells. And he said more than once that sometimes a single note is enough, provided it is played beautifully.
Listening today, you might take it for simple music, almost elementary. It is not. It is the music of someone who spent eight years taking things away, until only what could not be removed was left.
A building without a façade
Thirty-five kilometres from Tallinn, in a pine forest near the sea at Laulasmaa, stands a building that tries to do with space what Pärt does with sound. The Arvo Pärt Centre, designed by the Spanish architects Fuensanta Nieto and Enrique Sobejano, opened in October 2018. It holds the composer’s archive: scores, sketches, musical diaries.
From outside it is remarkably discreet. It stays below the tops of the pines, apart from a slender spiral tower with a view of the Baltic. The walls are largely glass, so the forest comes into the rooms. The slim, closely spaced columns outside echo the tree trunks. And the architects wrote a sentence that reads like a manifesto: the building has no beginning and no end, and no main or secondary façade.
A building without a main façade is one that has given up being seen from a privileged spot. No side matters more than the others; there is no grand entrance. There is only what is needed by people who come to listen to music, study an archive, or sit in silence in a small chapel in one of the courtyards. Here too, the decisive part is what is missing.
Building a life
At this journal, Calm Performance is our name for a way of working that judges performance partly by what it manages to preserve: energy, attention, clarity. Seen from here, intention is not mainly a matter of goals. It is a matter of selection. Not what can be added, but what deserves a place.
Klotz’s work suggests that this selection does not happen by itself. Faced with a problem, our reflex is to add: one more meeting, one more app, one more commitment to make up for whatever is not working. Crowded lives are often not the product of too much ambition. They are the product of many reasonable additions, made one at a time, without anyone ever asking what to take away.
A few simple habits follow. The first is to ask the question that does not come naturally: faced with an overfull day, a project that will not hold together, a draft that does not convince, ask first what could be removed, and only then what to add. The second is to give that question a fixed slot, because under pressure the mind subtracts even less: half an hour at the end of the week to go through the diary and cross things out. The third is to accept that subtraction has a cost. Everything you leave out was probably a good idea. That is exactly why leaving it out says something about who you are.
This kind of restraint is often mistaken for simplicity, or for a lack of ambition. It is the opposite. As with Pascal’s letter or Saint-Exupéry’s wing, visible simplicity is the surface of invisible work: decisions made before anyone was looking, about what mattered enough to keep.
The walls
In the afternoon the light in Tallinn changes quickly. The merchants’ façades dim one after another, their pastels turning grey. The walls, by contrast, seem almost brighter, as if the limestone were holding on to the last of the light.
From one of the towers you can see the whole old town: red roofs, spires, the harbour beyond. And you understand why the wall is what you remember. Not because it is more beautiful than the houses, but because every stone still shows the question it was answering, and the discipline with which its builders gave up everything else.
Perhaps this is what a good building teaches without preaching: that intention has a look you can recognise. Not the look of fullness, but the look of choice. And once you have seen it, it is hard to mistake it for anything else.
