10/11/2019 Why Less Isn’t Always More - The New York Times

SundayReview | OPINION

Why Less Isn’t Always More

THOMAS DE MONCHAUX FEB. 25, 2012

AUSTERITY is an appealing word. It feels good to say: spacious and articulate, lingual and incisive. Echoing through the
debate about our continuing global financial crisis, it connotes a self-evident truth — one that is entirely unearned by its actual
etymological or economical denotations.

Etymologically, “austerity” is a dispiriting word, descending from an Old French term for harshness and cruelty — and
ultimately, perhaps unsurprisingly, from a Greek word describing bitterness so brutal it dries out the very tongue, on its way to
breaking the heart.

Economically, austerity — which the Germans, among others, are intent on forcing upon their southern brethren — can
sound like a good idea, but might actually exacerbate the conditions it ostensibly ameliorates. One day, we might look back on
cuts in public services and infrastructure during a downturn with the same disbelief with which today’s doctors recall the
medieval medicine of deliberately cutting and bleeding the sick.

And yet austerity, the beautiful word alone, is simply irresistible. It feels decadent and vulgar to ask one’s government, or
oneself, not to be austere.

Why? To start, there’s a hint of ethical propriety: it feels righteous to contemplate tightening the belt, cutting the fat,
putting the house in order (especially when it’s someone else’s belt, fat and house). Although the management of an economy
is entirely different from the kitchen-table budgeting to which it is reductively compared, it feels vaguely virtuous to imagine
avoiding borrowing and lending altogether — even as our current system of capital depends on those very practices.

But there’s more. It may be that the real associative power of austerity as a word is not ethical, but aesthetic. Austerity is,
above all, a thing of beauty.

In art and design, and especially in architecture, austerity means modernism and minimalism: the concept, famously
advanced by the architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, that “less is more.” Some of this expresses the obligation of any good
designer to honor an economy of means, to acknowledge that architecture, like governance, is primarily the art of spending
other people’s money. But most of it is a little more mysterious.

Not just any “less” is the right “more.” A minimal design must be progressively reduced and refined to its essential and
sometimes surprising causes and effects, just as a divinely immanent David was discovered by Michelangelo inside an
unpromising block of stone. All else is decoration, deception and distraction. Thus because some cuts are figuratively as well
as literally incisive, any cut can seem wise: austere art is smart art. It’s an architecture of revealed order and selective filtering
and pattern recognition.

The aesthetic austerity that results requires and rewards our inclination to look and think: wander long enough around
Mies’s glassy Farnsworth House of 1950, and you see crystallized in every simple and delicately floating surface the bones of
every good house ever made — a severe and serene dream of comfort and clarity, refuge and prospect. At least in theory.

In architecture, this kind of theory dates from at least the Austrian modernist Adolf Loos and his 1908 essay “Ornament
and Crime,” in which he didn’t exactly say that the former was the latter, but did observe that, “If I want to eat a piece of
gingerbread I will choose one that is completely plain.” To him, “it tastes better this way.”

When the plain architecture advanced by Loos had become an increasingly mainstream taste, this aesthetic austerity was
easy to conflate with the no-nonsense mood of emerging economic and political crises — prompting the editors of The
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impress of this sensation of aesthetic restraint will remain, because it is sympathetic to any age preoccupied, as is the present
one, with very serious problems requiring strong sobriety of thought and action.”

Such austerity, though, is as much glamorous as solemn. As an aesthetic category, it’s strangely aspirational. It can
become a mode of luxury, even excess. The difference between a minimalist room and an under-furnished room is freedom of
choice.

Today’s minimalism conjures a life of such intangible ease that the mere creature comforts of visibly abundant stuff are
transcended. It makes a near ethical virtue out of an aesthetic practice of refusal (perhaps extending, disconcertingly, to
notions of physical aesthetics in which obesity is associated with poverty and to be too rich is to be too thin). While Mies and
his contemporaries introduced their skinny-framed, flat-roofed, white-walled architecture in the context of prototype public
housing, they perfected it in deluxe retreats like the Farnsworth House.

Today’s most celebrated Minimalist architect, John Pawson, counts among his clients both poverty-sworn monks and the
fashion designer Calvin Klein, whose own designs specialize in enabling you to pay much more for the right much less.
Pawson’s work happens to be beautiful and kind; its proportions are the natural ratios that you find in shells and flowers. It
gives you room to breathe. And yet it’s subject to elegant deceits.

A building of few details would seem to be a building of few secrets. But austerity in architecture connotes a visual and
functional transparency that it completely fails to provide. Any seamless-seeming building is full of complex joints and
junctions, fixes and fudges that make a thousand parts look like a single monolithic, sculptural whole. To look as if you left
everything out, you have to sneak everything in. What seems spartan is usually, invisibly, baroque.

In today’s architecture, in which labor is generally expensive and materials cheap, there is a tendency to slap stuff over
stuff until it all lines up or looks finished — whether the resulting form amounts to something you’d call minimal or colonial or
anything in between.

Consider the strip of baseboard that usually hides the irregular gap between the base of a plaster wall and the edge of a
floor. Recently I was considering some details for a house, and had the bright idea of eliminating that baseboard in favor of a
simple beautiful linear gap — which would look great if every other piece of carpentry in the house were aligned as perfectly as
a Shaker barn.

I told the contractor about my idea. He gave me that long, legendary look somewhere between contempt and compassion,
to which architects are often subjected by builders: the look that means, “Yeah, that’s gonna end up costing somebody.”

As in architecture, so in public life — and, one has to suspect, public policy. Those who, consciously or not, exploit the
aesthetics of austerity as a way of framing a debate on public ethics may discover, too, a hidden cost.

Thomas De Monchaux is an adjunct professor of architecture at Columbia, who is at work on a book about style.

A version of this op-ed appears in print on February 26, 2012, on Page SR9 of the New York edition with the headline: Why Less Isn’t Always More.

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