Minimalism emerged in the United States in the early 1960s as a reaction against Abstract Expressionism's personal, gestural intensity. Artists including Donald Judd, Carl Andre, Dan Flavin and Robert Morris created work of extreme reduction — rectangular solid forms in industrial materials (steel, aluminium, bricks, fluorescent light tubes), serialised and arranged without compositional hierarchy. There was no expression, no metaphor, no reference to the world beyond the object itself. Judd called his works 'specific objects' — neither painting nor sculpture but something new. Carl Andre's controversial Equivalent VIII (1966) — 120 fire bricks arranged in a rectangle on the gallery floor — caused outrage when the Tate Gallery acquired it in 1972. Minimalism's influence on architecture and design was enormous: the clean, planar surfaces of contemporary buildings and interiors descend directly from it.