Mies Van Der Rohe thought the phrase ‘less is more’ a defence of the refusal of embellishments in architecture that are both non-functional and decorative rather than part of a basic form or formal concept expressed by a building, but the phrase is a kind of pleasing nonsense that the love of binaries makes possible. Consider Frank Lloyd Wright’s response which exposes the semantic games played by Van Der Rohe, whilst saying, basically, the same thing:
Yet how different their styles! It is as if Van Der Rohe believed the idea of cutting back were in itself the essence of beauty and interest. Lloyd Wright in contrast wants to allow the aesthetic adventure to be extended in architectural art so that the more his work explores the more it opens up potential for new discovery of beauty and some playful mystery: just knowing, he posits, when to stop matters most before transitioning from adding more to adding too much to basic forms. Take, for instance, the commissioned home of a rich family in the Depression Era in America, shut in the confines of a place remote from the economic realities the rich rode over, Falling Water.
I have often thought this house to be exactly the ‘too much’ that Wright claimed to avoid, even its interior plays games with basic notions of the meaning of an interior – providing interiors within interiors, spaces within spaces. Though its exterior is often described as in harmony with the nature that surrounds it, a waterfall in a forest, the fall threatened by the apparent lack of support of its tiers uggests to me the fragility to fall of American capitalism and capitalists and the lives of many they often use as tools that entirely contrasts with the beauty of a fall in nature, whether of water over rock or a season. The feeling expresses itself in shadows caused by overhangs that seem too bold and hubristic. Contrast that with the Villa Tugendhat of Van Der Rohe.
Here another millionaire’s house becomes not an expression of some concept, or even fuel for the fancy of the onlooker, but a defensive statement of ownership with every space proportioned directly for its use. The balcony is only overhung as much as declares that some part of it needs to provide shelter and has no tendency to the fall of its inhabitants – instead, it shores them up. The front angled wall seems like a statement of defence. An ‘icon of modernism’ perhaps bu an icon too of the brutalities it serves, allowing no external criticism or access to those ‘within’ except on a stage, and secreting that interior entirely – unlike the play in Falling Water, relying entirely for privacy by virtue of location. The equation of concrete palaces with brutalism is perfectly recorded here – more than in larger structures. The simplicity, however, of the lines implies a lessness that disguises functionally the excessive moreness of its inhabitants as rich connoisseurs of the modish.
Frank Lloyd Wright does not so pamper to the customer’s right to hide, except in the mysteries of its interior corridors which have a labyrinthine and deliberately shaded set of intricacies to show the rich contain needs for secrecy and privacies. It is a building that uses both the concept of more and less but not as binaries that indicate different qualities but as a range of play with other that sets as its perimeter boundary being too little OR too much. Given its purpose, it gets nearer to the latter.
And as to the question. I could think less! You ‘overthink’ people say – just forget the stuff that might be bad or in the end real – but I can’t do it. Even if I did less thinking, that could in no way be more thinking (or useful thinking – since the doctrine is deeply utilitarian in its premises). Less thinking is just less thinking. ‘Overthink’ is yet another meaningless term. And after all less IS less and more IS more – if we are talking of quantities of the same thing, which Van Der Rohe is not.
Have a good day
With love
Steven xxxxxx
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