After the splash of Bjarke Ingel’s career-making monograph Yes is More, Thomas de Monchaux explains, in the op-ed pages of the Times, Why Less Isn’t Always More. Is it Mies van der Rohe backlash? A sign of the times? Or one architect’s (very real) fear that as a culture we don’t properly value formal invention and creation?
While I’m excited to see an architecture debate carried out in such a popular forum, I’m wary of conflating architectural aesthetics with economic policy. The image illustrating de Monchaux’s essay, a photograph of the all-white interior of a John Pawson house, is terribly seductive. And, in its overzealous denial of profile, color and texture, it’s not austere at all; it’s excessive. I’ll wait for Paul Krugman to weigh in on the advantages of economic austerity, although he too, for the record, seems to be opposed to it. But I’m all for aesthetic austerity, the act of seeing past appearances to something deeper, and striving to make things that are timeless and permanent by building what absolutely needs to be, of which ornament might be an essential part. De Monchaux points out, correctly, that it takes a lot (of time, materials, and effort) to make architecture look as if it is doing very little. But what if we as a culture build fewer things, and if the act of architecture becomes more special. Would we build things in a finer, more thoughtful way? Would each thing be more beautiful? And would we value them more?