Architectural Aphorisms

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Architectural Aphorisms Sandra Kaji O'Grady Published online: 08 Dec 2010.

To cite this article: Sandra Kaji O'Grady (2010) Architectural Aphorisms, Architectural Theory Review, 15:3, 332-349, DOI: 10.1080/13264826.2010.524308 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13264826.2010.524308

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SANDRA KAJI O’GRADY ARCHITECTURAL APHORISMS Observing the popularity and penetration in architecture of aphorisms delivered by the modernist masters, this paper explores the contexts, motivations and consequences of the aphoristic as a textual mode. The aphorism is recognised as a strategic form whereby personal experience is captured in the more authoritative voice of the third person. Mies’ ‘‘less is more’’ is used as a case study for understanding the dissemination and afterlife of aphorisms through affirmations and refutations that echo its form. The serial quality of the aphorism is made apparent. The mnemonic quality of the aphorism through which it circumvents interpretation and achieves status, is revealed as also leading, through mindless repetition, to gradual loss of potency.

ISSN 1326-4826 print/ISSN 1755-0475 online ª 2010 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/13264826.2010.524308

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The architectural profession has delivered and disseminated its key intellectual disagreements since the 1900s through aphorisms. Each of the modernist ‘‘masters’’—Adolf Loos, Mies van der Rohe, Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, Alvar Aalto, Louis Kahn, Jean Prouve´—is invoked through aphorisms that stand in for, and justify, their architectural oeuvre. In his 1947 essay ‘‘Mies van der Rohe’’, Philip Johnson writes, ‘‘As in architecture, [Mies] has always been guided by his personal motto, ‘less is more’’’.1 Johnson may indeed have coined the aphorism to which Mies became inseparably linked, but it was Mies’ buildings that verified the claim and authority of the aphorism (Fig. 1). In turn, his architecture came to be understood as the embodiment of the aphoristic statement. For example, the German Pavilion in Barcelona ‘‘stands today as one of the most revered representatives of Mies van der Rohe’s famous axiom ‘less is more’’’.2 This relationship between architectural object, aphorism and authority is the concern of this essay. Consider the familiarity, yet also the ambiguity, of a small selection: ‘‘A House is a Machine for

Figure 1. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.

living in’’; ‘‘Architecture is the learned game, correct and magnificent, of forms assembled in the light’’; ‘‘Architecture is the reaching out for the truth’’ (Fig. 2); ‘‘A great building must begin with the unmeasurable, must go through measurable means when it is being designed and in the end must be unmeasurable’’; ‘‘Architecture is the art of how to waste space’’; ‘‘What works good is better than what looks good, because what works good lasts’’; ‘‘Never design anything that cannot be made’’; ‘‘Touch the earth lightly’’; ‘‘Architecture starts when you carefully put two bricks together. There it begins’’; ‘‘Truly a work of Art is one that tells us, that Nature cannot make what man can make’’; ‘‘Only a very small part of architecture belongs to art: the tomb and the monument. Everything else that fulfils a function is to be excluded from the domain of art’’; and ‘‘God is in the details’’. Some are easily recognised, with others you may have struggled to recall who said it and when. Aphorisms circulate in all fields of design and creativity, as axioms and homilies for the student, war cries for the practitioner and clues to authorial motivation for historians. In architectural practice their penetration is deep and their repetition uncritical. Aphorisms are commonly deployed in the promotional

Figure 2. Louis Kahn.

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literature of architectural practices and schools, where they operate as shorthand for ideological commitments and are an effective tool in branding through association with the original and revered author. Architectural aphorisms appear as the titles of books, films and exhibitions. ‘‘Less is more’’ and ‘‘God is in the details’’ (Fig. 3) were both included in Mies’ short essay ‘‘On Restraint in Design’’ in the New York Herald Tribune, 28 June 1959. These three words went on to adorn numerous texts in Mies studies, for example, Less is More: Minimalism in Architecture and Other Arts and Mies van der Rohe: Less is More, Finding Perfection in Purity. Less is more/Less is a bore was the title of an exhibition of glassware at the Brisbane City Gallery in 2002 and of the 2008 annual student fashion show and exhibition at the Accademia Italiano in Florence. At the Seventh Gallery in Melbourne’s Fitzroy in 2007, the November exhibition bore the title ‘‘Less is a bore, consume more’’—a group show in which the architecture of the international style was re-presented using wallpapers, curtains and veneers. The industrial designer Dieter Rams, known for his credo ‘‘less, but better’’ was celebrated with a 2009 retrospective at

Figure 3. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.

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London’s Design Museum titled Less and More.3 Architectural aphorisms also drift into other fields. A simple Google search of ‘‘Less is more’’ reveals it to be found, with Mies credited as the author, in articles in fields as diverse as electronic information, organisational management, clinical practice, quality assurance, dieting, ecology, life enrichment and even Lung Volume Reduction Surgery. Many of these repetitions are inconsequential and have little bearing on the discourses in which they are included, but they do present an oddly amputated view of architecture to a lay audience. They also reveal something of both the power and the dangers of the aphoristic form. The popularity and penetration of the aphorism in architecture have implications for all forms of architectural writing, thinking, education and practice. These consequences arise only in part out of their subject matter. It is, as Terry Eagleton emphasises, a question of the power-laden performance of forms of writing.4 Certain effects are achieved through rhetorical style, and the aphorism, as will be further revealed, has very specific stylistic effects. One of the effects of any stylistic form is the performance of the self and identity. Writing, as I am now, in the academic format and voice, I appropriate the authority of the objectivist text, at the same time as I might find myself experiencing the disappearance of my autobiographical voice. The distinctive third-person voice of the aphorism is one of its theatrical potentials, and will be returned to. For Deleuze, language is a mode of action and literary works are ‘‘machines’’ that make something happen. The critical questions for any text are not so much to do with meaning as with function.5 What is opened up by the work, what is closed down? If we take this

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insight seriously, then it is simply not enough to challenge the dogmas of architectural modernity at the level of ideas while remaining uncritical of the stylistic values at the level of the text. One aim of this essay is to understand the effects of the aphorism as a textual form for architectural history and practice. In the other direction, the ways in which the aphorism functions will be understood as symptomatic of the cultural habits and desires of the architectural profession. Sorting through these symptoms can be a diagnostic tool. If language is the vehicle of thought, then it follows that forms of writing permit ideas to flourish or wither. The different forms of writing, the ways in which authors choose to use language, have the potential to reinforce or, conversely, to break the inertia of our conceptual habits. What is the operative potential of the aphoristic for architecture? The name was first used in the Aphorisms of Hippocrates in 400 BC , a long series of rules and prescriptions for living well and propositions concerning the symptoms and diagnosis of disease and the art of healing and medicine. Hippocrates opens with the still provocative phrase, ‘‘Life is short, and Art long’’’, but the following aphorism concerns bowel disorders and vomitings.6 What is significant about these medical aphorisms is that they are formulated out of experience and experimentation and in this respect depart from logical axioms. Axioms are self-evident truths, requiring no proof, and which stand up to pure reason. Aphorisms declare their experiential basis through their tone and the position of the speaker. The term came to be applied later to other sententious statements of physical science, and later still to statements of all kinds of principles from the conduct of one’s romantic life to warfare. Aphorisms have been especially used in dealing with subjects to

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which no methodical or scientific treatment was applied until well into the eighteenth century, such as art, agriculture, medicine, jurisprudence and politics. They are often concerned with questions of morality or principle in which there is no self-evident truth, and written by those in positions of moral authority or influence—originally prophets, poets, philosophers and kings and, in modernity, artists, politicians and intellectuals such as Oscar Wilde. Morphologically an aphorism is succinct. Aphorisms are always terse and trenchant, demonstrating maximum comprehension in minimum expression. With its closed, inverted form the aphorism is read in an instant. Yet this shortness belies the ambition of the aphorism and its capacity to disorient and dissemble. Etymologically, aphorism is derived from the Greek term aphorismos, meaning definition (from aphorizein to define, from horos, boundary). As a textual form its horizon is elastic and projective. Jill Marsden writes, the aphorism is a singular and sinuous form which frames thought like a skin, enclosing yet growing with what it confines. In this respect it does not so much add to existing orthodoxy as indicate new ways in which philosophical activity might yet be possible.7 Richard T. Gray associates the aphorism with writers and cultures concerned with the polarity between rationality and mysticism. He writes that: Aphorists are motivated by a desire to test the adequacies of language on two levels: structurally through the manipulation of syntactic and rhetorical mechanisms; semantically through such devices as

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word-play, metaphor, neologism, and pun. While in the first instance they sound out the potential inherent in the logic of language, in the second case they experiment with the illogical, metaphysical dimension of language. Yet the aphorist’s experience of language as communicative medium remains ambivalent, reflecting fluctuation between faith and doubt with regard to the expressive capacities of language. While enjoying language’s playfulness and richness of expression, aphorists simultaneously sense that such equivocality impedes precise, truthful expression8 The aphorism preserves the discord between precision and ambiguity. It allows the writer to intertwine the ossified structures of language with subtle paradoxes that reveal the contingencies of all claims to truth. In this, the aphorism has the creative power to challenge ideologies, to express scepticism while maintaining a relationship with the poetic. Gray explains, ‘‘No other literary form is so adequate to the task of presenting a universally comprehensible external sense while divulging a secretive, not wholly graspable significance behind this clarity’’.9 Additionally, the aphorism lends itself to the parody of established beliefs expressed as proverbs, cliche´s and dictums. Nietzsche recognised the power of the aphoristic on reading Sallust: ‘‘Compact, seer, with as much substance as possible, a cold malice towards ‘fine words’, also towards ‘fine feelings’—in that I knew myself ’’.10 In choosing to call the opening series of aphorisms in Twilight of the Idols ‘‘Maxims and Arrows’’, it is apparent that Nietzsche embraced the form as a fusillade of dangerous and barbed insights. ‘‘One can’’, he wrote, ‘‘express disturbing things quite innocuously in maxims’’.11

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Deleuze observes that, when gathered together as a collection, aphoristic writing permits a discontinuous or pluralistic character of thought to develop. Aphoristic writing need not pursue unity or a totality in the work and allows multiplicity to flourish. Deleuze defines the aphorism as an amalgam ‘‘or play of forces, the most recent of which—the latest, the newest and provisionally the final force—is always the most exterior’’.12 The exteriority breached by the aphoristic, and which is its power, arises out of its detachment from an authorial voice. Paul Patton proposes that the aphorism is an anonymous form of expression and one that lays no claim to any such definitive meaning: Aphoristic writing therefore conveys a thought which is not tied to any field of interiority, whether defined in terms of the consciousness of its author or a supposed unitary object with which it deals. Such a thought entertains immediate relations with the outside, not mediated through any such interiority.13 While the aphoristic is not tied to a subject, it conveys what Marsden calls a ‘‘transpersonal affectivity’’.14 That is, the aphoristic captures an impersonal core to feeling and experience and registers subjective testimony in the third person. Because of the impersonality of the form, the aphorism provides insight but does not provide a basis for dialogue between the author and the reader. As Derrida aphorises, ‘‘There is no place for a question in aphorism’’.15 The essay takes time to be read, and encourages a dialogue of thought between author and reader. The essay is suggestive—it explains and argues. The aphorism, on the other hand, is essentially dictatorial—it asserts. Marsden

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concurs: ‘‘One has the sense of a thought arriving fully fledged in a moment of brilliant insight, marking a striking contrast to the more even tempo of discourse in which revelations have been checked, standardized and censored’’.16 The aphorism can be strategically used to undermine the essay and the essayist. Derrida reveals: Aphorism can, of course, turn out to be a device of rhetoric, a sly calculation aiming at the greatest authority, an economy or strategy of mastery which knows very well how to potentialize meaning (‘‘See how I formalise, in so few words I always say more than would appear’’).17 Socrates also held this view, suspecting that the blunt speech of the Spartans might not be the product of their lack of interest in education and literature as the Greeks assumed, but might be, in fact, strategic: they conceal their wisdom, and pretend to be blockheads, so that they may seem to be superior only because of their prowess in battle . . . [I]f you talk to any ordinary Spartan, he seems to be stupid, but eventually, like some expert marksman, he shoots in some brief remark that proves you to be only a child.18 Nietzsche certainly saw the aphoristic form as a game of one-upmanship, bragging ‘‘I do not write treatises: they are for asses and journal readers’’ (Fig. 4).19 Furthermore, he boasts, ‘‘The aphorism, the apophthegm, in which I am the first master among Germans, are the forms of ‘eternity’; my ambition is to say in ten sentences what everyone else says in a book— what everyone else does not say in a book’’.20 This view of the book and the essay as unnecessarily verbose, flaccid and timid is

Figure 4. Frederick Nietzche.

widely held in the literature and philosophy of modernity and amongst the avant-garde. Hence the widespread preference during the 1920s and 1930s for manifestoes in the arts, film and architecture. Walter Benjamin, for example, wrote that he hopes to attain ‘‘literary effectiveness’’ by eschewing ‘‘the pretentious, universal gesture of the book’’ in favour of more ‘‘inconspicuous forms’’ such as ‘‘leaflets, brochures, articles, and placards’’.21 Murray Davis proposes that the essay ‘‘is an aphorism exploded’’ in which authors ‘‘inflate an aphorism’s compressed solidity into an article’s bloated superfluity’’.22 Forms of writing are differently valued depending on their contexts of production and reception. Academic culture—if metrics of research accountability are taken literally— values the book over the journal article or essay, and the essay over the note, the note over the aphorism. The arcane and heavily footnoted text like this that you are currently reading is appreciated within architectural academia, but is a mode that is often derided by the architectural profession. On the other hand, in architectural practice, as in a number of historic cultures, the ability to spontaneously produce aphoristic sayings at the right moment brings great social status. The Spartans with

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their commitment to austerity, greatly valued the laconic phrase. There are many fine examples of collections of moral aphorisms from ancient Arabic societies, for example the wisdom literature known as hikma in Arabic, Hesiod’s Works and Days and the Islamic Hadith. Modern use of the aphorism shifts it from a conferring and condensing of moral truths to a contestation of truth’s conventions. Turn of the century Austria saw several intellectuals— Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Robert Musil, Karl Krauss and Ludwig Wittgenstein—employ the form of the aphorism or ‘‘Sprachkrise’’ to confront the social hypocrisies and moral uncertainties of their time. The phenomenon of aphoristic writing in Vienna, Richard T. Gray finds, arises out of a perceived crisis in language, itself related to a crisis in ‘‘truth’’, and a desire to push the limits of expression.23 Of course, this crisis extended beyond Vienna, and Kafka, Nietzsche and Kierkegaard were also attracted to the aphorism in their individual critiques of language. The aphorism, as a subject and a mode of writing, re-emerges in the work of poststructuralist philosophers such as Baudrillard, Derrida and Deleuze, who are each indebted to these earlier philosophers of language, and committed to the ongoing interrogation of the limits of language and the text. For the architect Adolf Loos, the aphoristic style of writing used by Nietzsche and writers of the Viennese milieu, including Wittgenstein and Kraus, was consciously adopted for its ironic theatrical effect, with the additional benefit that such a style underscored one’s participation in the European avant-garde.24 Other architects have arrived at the aphorism less knowingly. Many of the aphorisms commonly used by the architectural discipline have obscure origins that have evaded my forensic

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attempts to pin them down. Occasionally, aphoristic phrases are extracted from longer, more nuanced, narratives by readers and editors, and are then re-appropriated and repeated by the original author. The phrase ‘‘Form Follows Function’’, for example, was taken from Louis Sullivan’s 1896 article ‘‘The Tall Building Artistically Considered’’ and considerably improved by shortening. In full, this paragraph of Sullivan’s text reads: It is the pervading law of all things organic and inorganic, Of all things physical and metaphysical, Of all things human and all things superhuman, Of all true manifestations of the head, Of the heart, of the soul, That the life is recognizable in its expression, That form ever follows function. This is the law.25 The desire for the aphoristic along with the concerted deployment of the form has seen it become the prevailing mode of reading as much as of writing. In this sense its production and dissemination take place at a broader level than that of the individual author. As a phenomenon, the aphorism appears in certain strands of architectural culture, indeed characterises them and establishes the horizon of debate and the mode of engagement, just as the scholarly essay, the critical review and the hagiographic monograph appear in other strands and for different purposes. Each textual mode is symptomatic of the values of that architectural sub-culture and the purpose to which writing is put to work. My interest, as an academic, lies in the way that the preferred modes of writing amongst these sub-cultures or disciplinary communities serves to reinforce misunderstandings and conflict, as well as

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collective identities and cohesion. For example, the production of aphoristic writing by Loos and Mies in both content and form is closely allied to their engagement with philosophy, the avant-garde and their formal interests. The provocations contained in their aphorisms opened up debates amongst their peers, both architects and critics. The citing of aphorisms by these two in the context of neo-modernist ‘‘minimalisms’’, however, becomes a means of closing down discussion, as if the longevity and penetration of the phrase confer its irrefutability. The architectural aphorism’s closure and impenetrability to critical interpretation, along with its persistent repetition, may in part be found in the character of the profession and, in other part, in the nature of the aphorism. Attempts to unfold the aphorism into an extended thought, and to explain and account for it, fail to be affected by its material and textual form. The architectural aphorism is not proffered for elaboration, for academics to dilute, explain, qualify and construct longer texts around their provocation. Indeed, under close scrutiny all aphorisms fail the test of logic and universal applicability, because they operate by exclusion and simplification. Take, for example, Corbusier’s ‘‘drawing is faster [than talking], and leaves less room for lies’’ (Fig. 5).26 This maxim does not stand up in the face of architectural drawings, which are one of the most persuasive means of seduction in the profession. Drawings, it is clear, leave a great deal of room for exaggeration and concealment. Drawings have historically offered a rhetorical power no less than that of talking. In addition, Robin Evans, Marco Frascari, Stan Allen, Alberto Perez-Gomez and Catherine Ingraham, amongst others in a rich body of theoretical work on architectural drawing, have demonstrated that the tools of architectural drawing have a direct and often unrecognised

Figure 5. Le Corbusier.

influence on what forms can be conceived.27 Drawing is not a neutral vehicle for communication, but carries with it historically, culturally and technologically specific imperatives. But, never let the truth get in the way of a good story, as the homily runs, for the ‘‘truth’’ at stake in the aphorism is not that of literal meaning, historical veracity or scientific repeatability. Aphorisms do not reveal truths, as Karl Kraus humorously aphorises, ‘‘An aphorism can never be the whole truth; it is either a halftruth or a truth-and-a-half ’’.28 Architectural aphorisms purport to express truths in contexts of unpredictability and relativity that guarantee truth’s impossibility. The aphorism asks for a response that takes the form of an action, a putting into play, or a counteraphorism. Its target is the practitioner. As Nietzsche writes, ‘‘He who writes in blood and aphorisms does not want to be read, he wants to be learned by heart’’.29 The aphorism, with its rhythmic phrasing and alliteration, its speed and density, insists itself upon the reader before it might be questioned or judged. For the process of interpretation, the aphorism substitutes the act of repetition. Architectural aphorisms function as mantras and slogans

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for rival teams. They are tools in an internecine battle for the minds of the next generation and for this purpose must take memorable form. Consider, for example, the historic circulation of affirmations and refutations of Mies’ ‘‘Less is more’’. While there are numerous affirmations of the idea that, as painter Josef Albers puts it in 1969, ‘‘In design sometimes one plus one equals three’’, there were, from the outset, disagreements. Mies’ American contemporary, Frank Lloyd Wright, apparently remarked ‘‘Much ado about next-to-nothing’’ at Mies’ New York show in 1947, triggering the decline of their friendship (Fig. 6).30 It also very quickly became apparent that ‘‘less costs more’’ and that particular counter-aphorism has been much repeated. The English architectural practice FAT claim ‘‘As Mies’ clients might tell you, less costs more’’.31 The phrase is found in the 1982 novel/ autobiography of the art historian, Bernard Harper Friedman, Coming Close, wherein the author’s uncle—a developer—observes ‘‘that good architecture is expensive, that less costs more’’.32 It also has weight in the construction industry. In his textbook Managing Residential Construction Projects: Strategies and Solutions, Derek Graham warns the budding builder to take into account when calculating their fee that

less not only costs more, it takes more work. Worse, Graham continues, ‘‘the less there is to be seen, the more defects stand out’’.33 Graham observes that minimalist design necessitates a ‘‘high level of exactitude that requires more skill, greater clarity and perfections of point, line and plane’’.34 Without mouldings, trims and textures the contractor has no ability to hide crudely executed substrates or poor jointing methods. There is, of course, Morris Lapidus who pointedly titled his 1996 autobiography Too Much Is Never Enough. Despite having designed 1200 buildings, including many hotels in the 1950s and 1960s, Lapidus was critically denounced by the architectural establishment for most of his career. Thus it is Robert Venturi’s trenchant ‘‘Less is a bore’’, that has come to represent the most significant critique of modernist principles. ‘‘Mies’’, Venturi writes in Complexity and Contradiction, makes wonderful buildings only because he ignores many aspects of a building. If he solved more problems, his buildings would be less potent. The doctrine ‘‘less is more’’ bemoans complexity and justifies exclusion for expressive purposes . . . Mies’ exquisite pavilions have had valuable implications for architecture, but their selectiveness of content and language is their limitation as well as their strength . . . Where simplicity cannot work, simpleness results. Blatant simplification means bland architecture. Less is a bore.35 Furthermore,

Figure 6. Frank Lloyd Wright.

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I am for richness of meaning rather than clarity of meaning . . . an architecture of complexity and contradiction has a special obligation toward the whole: its truth must be in its totality or its implications of

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totality. It must embody the difficult unity of inclusion rather than the easy unity of exclusion. More is not less.36 While Venturi wrote at length on the historic significance and contemporary need for complexity, contradiction and inclusivity, it is the aphorism ‘‘Less is bore’’ that came to spearhead the post-modern campaign against reductive design methodologies.37 Venturi well understood the power of the aphoristic over the extended essay. In 1995 he published ‘‘Mal Mots: Aphorisms—Sweet and Sour—By an Anti-Hero Architect’’, an article consisting entirely of aphorisms.38 He and Scott-Brown are the source of numerous exhortative phrases, including ‘‘mess is more’’, ‘‘learn from the ordinary’’ and ‘‘Architects shouldn’t play God’’.39 They often seem to be parodying this form, their ‘‘Main Street is almost alright’’ sets itself against the certitude of other architectural aphorisms. Asked in an interview if he would revise ‘‘Less is a bore’’, Venturi replies, ‘‘No, but I hope someone of today’s younger generation will do that appropriately’’.40 The younger generation have. The young Danish architect, Bjarke Ingels of BIG, released his office manifesto in 2009 with the title, ‘‘Yes is more’’, and a comicbook series of images of aphorists that includes Mies with ‘‘Less is More’’, Venturi and ‘‘Less is a bore’’, as well as Barak Obama’s ‘‘Yes we can’’.

Mies is (too) easily misread. To what extent is Mies—his pronouncements, his example, his method, his aura—to blame for his own misreading?42 Counter-aphorisms are not the product of inevitable misreadings of a lapidary form, as Koolhaas ironically suggests, while enjoying the textual play of ‘‘Miestakes’’ and Mies-readings. The aphorism is, by definition, available to multiple readings—it invites misuse. The aphorism operates virally, setting forth echoes and distortions—indeed, ‘‘less is a bore’’ depends on knowledge of the aphorism it sets out to corrupt. ‘‘Despite appearances’’, Derrida writes, ‘‘an aphorism never arrives by itself, it doesn’t come all alone. It is part of a serial logic’’ (Fig. 7).43 Further, ‘‘One aphorism in the series can come before or after the other, before and after the other, each can survive the other’’.44 Not only are aphorisms members of series, or as Nietzsche writes, ‘‘links in a chain of thoughts’’, the serial itself always crosses over with other series, spawns the serial.45 ‘‘The serial form is’’, as Deleuze observes, ‘‘essentially multi-serial’’.46 The serial form is ‘‘realized in the simultaneity of at least two series’’.47 ‘‘Less is more’’ spawned a generational series, as described above, but it also belongs—as do

Defending OMA’s 1998 competition-winning entry for the McCormick Tribune Campus Center in Chicago—with its six-metre-high coloured portrait of Mies on the entry fac¸ade—Koolhaas proposed ‘‘maybe a little bit more could be more’’.41 For Koolhaas, By never ‘‘explaining’’ himself except in the most lapidary terms, Mies condemned all of us—especially his intimates—to second guess his motives.

Figure 7. Jacques Derrida.

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all architectural aphorisms—to several other series. In one series are other declarations in favour of aesthetics linked to the simplicity of volume—those of Boullee, for example—and the 1885 Robert Browning poem in which the sixteenth century painter Andrea del Sarto laments to his unfaithful wife Lucrezia, I could count twenty such On twice your fingers, and not leave this town, Who strive—you don’t know how the others strive To paint a little thing like that you smeared Carelessly passing with your robes afloat,— Yet do much less, so much less, Someone says, (I know his name, no matter)—so much less! Well, less is more, Lucrezia: I am judged. Prior to making the phrase ‘‘Less is more’’ his own, Mies had written that the task of architecture as an artistic form is to be ‘‘more than just a manifestation of technical skill’’. Mertins suggests that he meant by this that the ‘‘more than’’ is the ‘‘surplus or supplement to what is perceived to be the necessary, rational and material base of modern civilization’’, and that it lay in the service architecture performs in critically interpreting the will of the historical time. Architecture served artistically. In a copy of a book on crystallography he underlined the phrase beinahe nicht (almost nothing) which he often used in describing what he hoped to achieve in his own work.48 ‘‘Less is more’’ also belongs in a series that contains other Miesian aphorisms: ‘‘Architecture is the will of an epoch translated into space’’; ‘‘Architecture starts when you carefully

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put two bricks together. There it begins’’; ‘‘I don’t want to be interesting, I want to be good’’; etc. (Fig. 8). Some of the aphorisms which the architectural community, following Philip Johnson’s lead, has ascribed to Mies are not his. ‘‘God lies in the details’’, for example, was used by Aby Warburg to point to the foundation of the iconographical method of research in art history.49 Schulze writes of Mies, The more he drank and the later it got the more he warmed to the occasion. Reminiscences flowed, anecdotes and aphorisms; it became increasingly difficult for anyone in his presence not to be moved and even charmed by what seemed so incontestably great and modest a human being . . . it is little wonder no one knew his personal life very well at all or challenged him in matters of principle. ‘‘Do you ask God’’, Philip Johnson once remarked, ‘‘where He got the Commandments?’’ (Fig. 9).50 The image of Mies is an inconsistent one: a man voluble and charming with drink, viewed by some as rude and a snob, by himself as the

Figure 8. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.

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all he had amassed since emigrating, was donated to the Library at the University of Illinois.

Figure 9. Philip Johnson.

son of a stonemason who remained true to the tectonics of materials and making. Some of these images were carefully and actively cultivated.51 In fact he was also a reader and amateur philosopher, who pursued theoretical projects, texts and exhibitions, and a prolific, albeit self-described ‘‘unwilling author’’. As Fritz Neumeyer details in The Artless Word: Mies Van der Rohe on the Building Art and Franz Schulze in Mies van der Rohe: A Critical Biography, although Mies was untrained in philosophy, he was a committed reader and much influenced by the Catholic church architect and writer Rudolf Schwarz, the Bauhaus thinker Siegfried Ebeling, and the Catholic scholar Romano Guardini as well as Plato, St. Augustine, Kant and St. Thomas Aquinas. Mies admired the writings of scientists too, such as botanist Raoul France´ who popularised the idea that human interventions could learn from the biotechnics of nature. In 1952, Mies told students at the School of Design of the North Carolina State College that he owned 3000 books in Germany and that he had brought 300 with him to America. Of these he could have sent back 270. He would not, he said, have discovered the remaining 30 unless he had read the 3000. Upon his death his library, with

I detail these well-known facts about the architect so as to emphasise that the predilection for the aphoristic is not, as it may have been in Sparta, the product of lack of reading and education. Nor is it that Mies was God bringing forth commandments. The form was consciously chosen early in his career, just as it was by Loos. Mies began to write manifestoes that were published in art journals, both mainstream publications and small magazines in the 1920s.52 All of these texts, the first of which was ‘‘Skyscrapers’’ (1922) take the form of aphorisms or paragraph-long statements. In 1923 in G Mies wrote ‘‘Aphorisms on Architecture and Form’’—four aphorisms rejecting formalism and aesthetic speculation for problems of building.53 The tenor of Mies’ writings from the 1920s was that a new architecture must respond to its time. In 1928 he spoke of building the ‘‘unleashed forces’’ of ‘‘our time’’ into a ‘‘new order, an order that permits free play for the unfolding of life’’.54 The aphorism was understood by Mies, and other modernist architects, as a literary form that seemed modern and that allowed a kind of free play of thought. The historic shift is apparent in the fate of the arguments made by the American sculptor Horatio Greenough in the 1840s. Greenough’s writings were for a long time largely forgotten, and were rediscovered only in the 1930s; in 1947 a selection of his essays was published under the title Form and Function: Remarks on Art, Design and Architecture. Because of this title, which serves to place Greenough as the precursor to Sullivan, there are some who believe that ‘‘Form Follows Function’’ is misattributed to Sullivan. In fact, Greenough had

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sketched out the principles of modern functionalism in 1843. In designing architecture, he wrote, ‘‘instead of forcing the functions of every sort of building into one general form, without reference to the inner distribution, let us begin from the heart as nucleus, and work outward . . . The connection and order of parts, juxtaposed for convenience, cannot fail to speak of their relation and uses’’.55 ‘‘Beauty’’, he added, ‘‘is the promise of function’’. Greenough had also written, long before Corbusier, that for buildings that are not monuments, ‘‘the laws of structure and apportionment, depending on definite wants, obey a demonstrable rule. They may be called machines each individual of which must be formed with reference to the abstract type of its species’’.56 And of ornament, he observed well before Loos that, ‘‘Most works are most beautiful without ornament’’.57 Greenough’s career failure was to find the right literary form for his ideas.

have the appearance of facts, they are almost object like, yet unlike other facts, cannot be proven true or false.

The architectural aphorisms, through which we can map the arguments and movements of the twentieth century, are not unique ideas articulated for the first time, but rather, widely held ideas uniquely expressed. Taken individually the aphorisms of the modernist period give an impression of great certainty. Only when considered as a set does the volatility of our discipline’s history and the internal divisions that rage at any time become apparent. What is common is not the subject matter, but the textual mode in which ideas are conveyed and disseminated. As I hope has been made clear, the aphoristic form is as symptomatic of the culture of the architectural discipline as the laconic phrase is symptomatic of Spartan culture. Repeatability, authority and status are at work in its popularity. So too is the suspicion of words and talking, over things and making, that characterises the profession. Aphorisms

In repetition, though, something is lost. The aphorism is an ideal medium for questioning experience beyond the specifically personal. It asks the reader to reassess assumptions, to confront the unfamiliar in the everyday. In their first formulation, many of the now familiar aphorisms had the power of Nietzsche’s barbs. The power of ‘‘Less is more’’ and ‘‘Form Follows Function’’ lay originally in the internal paradox, a capacity to maintain a kind of logical irresolution or mystery in a seemingly logical statement. Yet over time, both of these, along with other aphorisms took on the form of a mantra. The ambiguity receded. In architectural histories and criticism, ‘‘less is more’’ is referred to as a credo, a homily, a dictum, an axiom, an admonition and an adage.

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Paul-Alan Johnson opines that ‘‘the tendency to aphorise seems to arise in part as a device by practicing architects to efficiently convey their intentions to their staff, a habit that in time spreads into their writings and teachings’’.58 This misses both the motivation, and the process of their coming into being and retelling. The aphoristic has been used knowingly. It functions as a ‘‘strategy of mastery’’ and mnemonic, the shorter more memorable aphorisms correlate with the more revered architects. Being succinct in form, aphorisms are easily slipped into speech or writing, garnering social support for an opinion, not from tradition as the proverb does, but from influential individuals. In quoting the aphorisms of others it is hoped that some social status is transferred from the quoted.

Lastly, aphorisms circulate in series. Their meaning is contextual and relative to other

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aphorisms within the multiple and parallel series that each participates in. Characteristic of the series is its open-endedness, its potential to proliferate. Perhaps the greatest opening in the aphorism for the historian or critic of architecture lies in the opportunity, no, the invitation, to counter-aphorise. For

the architect, there lies in Nietzsche’s discovery of the explosive potential of the aphoristic form the challenge to find an equivalent architectural form that is at once memorable, expansive, disturbing, evocative and condensed and that opens up new horizons.

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Notes 1. Philip Johnson, ‘‘Mies van der Rohe’’, in Mies van der Rohe, New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1947. 2. Alejandro Lapunzina, Architecture of Spain, Westport CT: Greenwood Press, 2005, p. 78. 3. Dieter Rams in conversation with Deyan Sujdic, filmed in September 2008, http://www.creativereview. co.uk/cr-blog/2009/novem ber/dieter-rams-interview, (accessed June 2010). 4. Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983, p. 205. 5. Ronald Bogue, Deleuze on Literature, New York: Routledge, 2003, pp. 187– 188. 6. Hippocrates, Aphorisms, trans. Francis Adams, Whitefish, Montana: Kessinger Publishing, 2004. 7. Jill Marsden, ‘‘Nietzsche and the Art of the Aphorism’’, in Keith Ansell Pearson, (ed.), A Companion to Nietzsche 33, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 2006, p. 22. 8. Richard T. Gray, ‘‘Aphorism and Sprachkrise in Turn-of-

the-Century Austria’’, Orbis Litterarum, 41 (1986): 333. 9. Gray, ‘‘Aphorism Sprachkrise’’, p. 347.

and

10. Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, ‘‘What I Owe the Ancients’’, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968, section 1. 11. Nietzsche, Sa¨mtliche Werke. Kritische Studienausgabe, quoted in Jill Marsden, ‘‘Nietzsche and the Art of the Aphorism’’, in Pearson, Companion to Nietzsche, p. 31. 12. Gilles Deleuze, ‘‘Nomad thought’’, in D. B. Allison (ed.), The New Nietzsche, New York: Delta, 1977, p. 145 13. Paul Patton, ‘‘Introduction’’, Paul Patton (ed.), Nietzsche, Feminism & Political Theory, London: Routledge, 1993, p. x. 14. Marsden, ‘‘Nietzsche and the Art of the Aphorism’’, p. 25. 15. Jacques Derrida, ‘‘Aphorism Countertime’’, in Derek Attridge (ed.), Jacques Derrida Acts of Literature, New York: Routledge, 1992, Aphorism 11, p. 419.

16. Marsden, ‘‘Nietzsche and the Art of the Aphorism’’, p. 29. 17. Derrida, ‘‘Aphorism Countertime’’, p. 417. 18. Plato, Protagoras 342B d-e, in C.C.W. Taylor, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996, p. 151. 19. Nietzsche, Sa¨mtliche Werke, quoted in Marsden, ‘‘Nietzsche and the Art of the Aphorism’’, p. 27. 20. Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, ‘‘Expeditions of an Untimely Man’’, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968, section 51. 21. Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Vol 1, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996, p. 444. 22. Murray Davis, ‘‘Aphorisms and Cliches: The Generation and Dissipation of Conceptual Charisma’’, Annual Review of Sociology, 25 (1999): 252. 23. Gray, ‘‘Aphorism and Sprachkrise’’, pp. 332–354. 24. John Maciulka, ‘‘Adolf Loos and the Aphoristic Style: Rhetorical Practice in

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Early Twentieth Century Design Criticism’’, Design Issues 16/2, (Summer 2000): 75–86.

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25. Louis Sullivan, ‘‘The Tall Building Artistically Considered’’, Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine, LVII (March 1896) in Wiliam A. Coles and Henry Hope Reed, Architecture in America: A Battle of Styles, New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1961, p. 42. 26. Le Corbusier quoted in Matilda McQuaid (ed.), Envisioning Architecture: Drawings from the Museum of Modern Art, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2002, p. 68. 27. See Robin Evans, The Projective Cast: Architecture and its Three Geometries, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995 and Translations from Drawing to Building and Other Essays, MIT Press, 1997; Marco Frascari, Jonathan Hale and Bradley Starkey (eds), From Models to Drawings: Imagination and Representation in Architecture, New York: Routledge, 2008; Stan Allen, Practice: Architecture, Technique and Representation, Amsterdam: OPA, 2000; Alberto Perez-Gomez, Architectural Representation and the Perspective Hinge, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000. 28. Karl Kraus, Half-Truths and One-and-a-Half-Truths: Selected Aphorisms, trans. Harry Zohn, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990. 29. Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘‘Of Reading and Writing’’, in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. R. J. Hollingdale,

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Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961, section I. 30. Franz Schulze, Mies van der Rohe: A Critical Biography, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1985, p. 238. 31. FAT, ‘‘Everything counts in large amounts (The sound of geography collapsing)’’, in Kester Rattenbury (ed.), This is Not Architecture: Media Constructions, London: Routledge, 2002, p. 247. 32. B.H. Friedman, Coming Close: A novella and three stories as alternative autobiographies, New York: Fiction Collective, 1982, p. 79. 33. Derek Graham, Managing Residential Construction Projects: Strategies and Solutions, New York: McGraw Hill, 2006, p. 93. 34. Graham, Managing Residential Construction Projects, p. 93. 35. Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (1966), 2nd edition (1977), New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2002, pp. 16–17. 36. Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, pp. 16–17. 37. In 2005, as part of the Chicago Humanities Festival, Venturi delivered a lecture in Mies‘ restored Crown Hall at IIT with the title, ‘‘Mies is More: Learning from Mies’’, in which he accused Mies of being a closet symbolist, thus claiming him for complexity and contradiction.

38. Robert Venturi, ‘‘Mal Mots: Aphorisms—Sweet and Sour—By an Anti-Hero Architect’’, Grand Street, 54, special issue ‘‘Space’’ (Autumn, 1995): 82–87. 39. Amy Stein and Anthony Miksitz, ‘‘About Architecture: An Installation by Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates February 13–18 April 1993, Architronic, Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania http://corbu2.caed.kent. edu/architronic/v2n1/v2n1. 11d.html (accessed 22 July 2010). 40. Stuart Wrede, ‘‘Complexity and Contradiction TwentyFive Years Later: An Interview with Robert Venturi’’, in John Elderfield (ed.), American Art of the 1960s, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1991, p. 158. 41. Rem Koolhaas, ‘‘Miestakes’’, in AþT, special issue: New Materiality, 23 (2004), http:// www.aplust.net/permalink. php?atajo¼miestakes0 (accessed 11 June 2010). 42. Koolhaas, ‘‘Miestakes’’. 43. Derrida, ‘‘Aphorism Countertime’’, p. 416. 44. Derrida, ‘‘Aphorism Countertime’’, p. 417. 45. Nietzsche, Sa¨mtliche Werke, quoted in Marsden, ‘‘Nietzsche and the Art of the Aphorism’’, p. 31. 46. Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. M. Lester with C. Stivale, New York: Columbia University Press, 1990 (1969), p. 37.

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47. Deleuze, Logic of Sense, p. 36 48. Kevin Harrington, ‘‘I gave myself a shock: Mies and the Pavilion’’, 1997 http:// www.ucalgary.ca/ev/design research/publications/insitu/ copy /vo lume2/histo r y/ Kevin_Harrington/index. html (accessed 10 June 2010).

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49. Marco Frascari, ‘‘The Tellthe-Tale Detail’’, VIA, 7 (1984): 23. 50. Franz Schulze, Mies van der Rohe: A Critical Biography, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1985, p. 288. 51. Beatriz Colomina, ‘‘Mies not’’, in Detlef Mertins, The

Presence of Mies, New York: Princeton Architectural Press, pp. 193–222. 52. Detlef Mertins, ‘‘Architectures of Becoming: Mies van der Rohe and the Avant-Garde’’, Mies in Berlin, New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2001. 53. Philip Johnson, ‘‘Writings by Mies van der Rohe’’, in Mies van der Rohe, New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1947. 54. Mies van der Rohe, ‘‘The Preconditions of Architectural Work’’, in Fritz Neumeyer, The Artless Word: Mies van der Rohe and the Building Art, Cambridge,

MA: MIT Press, 1991, p. 301. 55. Horatio Greenough, Form and Function: Remarks on Art, Design and Architecture, ed. Harold Small, Berkeley: University of California, 1947, pp. 61–62. 56. Greenough, Form and Function, p. 65. 57. Greenough, Form and Function, pp. 61–62. 58. Paul-Alan Johnson, The Theory of Architecture: Concepts, Themes and Practices, New York: John Wiley, 1994, p. 294.

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