Architectural Aphorisms

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Architectural AphorismsSandra Kaji O'GradyPublished 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

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SANDRAKAJI 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 affirma-

tions 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 onlineª 2010 Taylor & FrancisDOI: 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 state-

ment. 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

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 func-

tion 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 1. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Figure 2. Louis Kahn.

ATR 15:3-10 ARCHITECTURAL APHORISMS

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literature of architectural practices and schools,

where they operate as shorthand for ideolo-

gical 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, FindingPerfection 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

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 manage-

ment, clinical practice, quality assurance, diet-

ing, 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 aphor-

ism in architecture have implications for all

forms of architectural writing, thinking, educa-

tion 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 auto-

biographical 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 thisFigure 3. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.

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insight seriously, then it is simply not enough to

challenge the dogmas of architectural moder-

nity 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 aphor-

ism functions will be understood as sympto-

matic 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 ofHippocrates 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

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 moder-

nity, 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, bound-

ary). 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 manipula-

tion of syntactic and rhetorical mechan-

isms; 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 experi-

ment 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 play-

fulness and richness of expression, aphor-

ists 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 con-

tingencies of all claims to truth. In this, the

aphorism has the creative power to challenge

ideologies, to express scepticism while main-

taining a relationship with the poetic. Gray

explains, ‘‘No other literary form is so

adequate to the task of presenting a uni-

versally 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,

cliches 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 in-

nocuously in maxims’’.11

Deleuze observes that, when gathered to-

gether 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 immedi-

ate 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 cen-

sored’’.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

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 pre-

tentious, 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 depend-

ing 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

Figure 4. Frederick Nietzche.


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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 post-

structuralist 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 com-

monly used by the architectural discipline have

obscure origins that have evaded my forensic

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 con-

siderably 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 super-

human,

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 char-

acterises 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 irrefut-

ability. 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 oper-

ate 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 conceal-

ment. 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

influence on what forms can be conceived.27

Drawing is not a neutral vehicle for commu-

nication, 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 repeat-

ability. Aphorisms do not reveal truths, as Karl

Kraus humorously aphorises, ‘‘An aphorism can

never be the whole truth; it is either a half-

truth or a truth-and-a-half ’’.28 Architectural

aphorisms purport to express truths in con-

texts 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 counter-

aphorism. 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 sub-

stitutes the act of repetition. Architectural

aphorisms function as mantras and slogans

Figure 5. Le Corbusier.


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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, disagree-

ments. 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 costsmore’’.32 It also has weight in the construction

industry. In his textbook Managing ResidentialConstruction 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 TooMuch Is Never Enough. Despite having designed

1200 buildings, including many hotels in the

1950s and 1960s, Lapidus was critically de-

nounced 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,

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 ofFigure 6. Frank Lloyd Wright.

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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 com-

plexity, 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 under-

stood 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 comic-

book 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’’.

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

facade—Koolhaas proposed ‘‘maybe a little

bit more could be more’’.41 For Koolhaas,

By never ‘‘explaining’’ himself except in

the most lapidary terms, Mies con-

demned all of us—especially his inti-

mates—to second guess his motives.

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 aphor-

ism 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

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: ‘‘Architec-

ture is the will of an epoch translated into

space’’; ‘‘Architecture starts when you carefully

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 mod-

est 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 Command-

ments?’’ (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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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 Vander 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 inter-

ventions 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

all he had amassed since emigrating, was

donated to the Library at the University of

Illinois.

I detail these well-known facts about the

architect so as to emphasise that the predilec-

tion 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 Archi-

tecture and Form’’—four aphorisms rejecting

formalism and aesthetic speculation for pro-

blems 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 onArt, 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 mis-

attributed to Sullivan. In fact, Greenough had

Figure 9. Philip Johnson.


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sketched out the principles of modern func-

tionalism 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’’. Green-

ough had also written, long before Corbusier,

that for buildings that are not monuments, ‘‘the

laws of structure and apportionment, depend-

ing 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 fail-

ure was to find the right literary form for his

ideas.

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 individu-

ally 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

have the appearance of facts, they are almost

object like, yet unlike other facts, cannot be

proven true or false.

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.

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.

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 dis-

covery 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.

Notes

1. Philip Johnson, ‘‘Mies vander Rohe’’, in Mies van derRohe, New York: Museumof Modern Art, 1947.

2. Alejandro Lapunzina, Archi-tecture of Spain, WestportCT: Greenwood Press,2005, p. 78.

3. Dieter Rams in conversa-tion with Deyan Sujdic,filmed in September 2008,http://www.creativereview.co.uk/cr-blog/2009/november/dieter-rams-interview,(accessed June 2010).

4. Terry Eagleton, Literary Theo-ry: An Introduction, Minneapo-lis: University of MinnesotaPress, 1983, p. 205.

5. Ronald Bogue, Deleuzeon Literature, New York:Routledge, 2003, pp. 187–188.

6. Hippocrates, Aphorisms,trans. Francis Adams,Whitefish, Montana: Kes-singer Publishing, 2004.

7. Jill Marsden, ‘‘Nietzsche andthe Art of the Aphorism’’, inKeith Ansell Pearson, (ed.),A Companion to Nietzsche33, Oxford: Basil Blackwell,2006, p. 22.

8. Richard T. Gray, ‘‘Aphorismand Sprachkrise in Turn-of-

the-Century Austria’’, OrbisLitterarum, 41 (1986): 333.

9. Gray, ‘‘Aphorism andSprachkrise’’, p. 347.

10. Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilightof the Idols, ‘‘What I Owethe Ancients’’, trans. R. J.Hollingdale, Harmonds-worth: Penguin, 1968, sec-tion 1.

11. Nietzsche, Samtliche Werke.Kritische Studienausgabe,quoted in Jill Marsden,‘‘Nietzsche and the Artof the Aphorism’’, inPearson, Companion toNietzsche, p. 31.

12. Gilles Deleuze, ‘‘Nomadthought’’, 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 andthe Art of the Aphorism’’,p. 25.

15. Jacques Derrida, ‘‘AphorismCountertime’’, in Derek At-tridge (ed.), Jacques DerridaActs of Literature, New York:Routledge, 1992, Aphorism11, p. 419.

16. Marsden, ‘‘Nietzsche andthe Art of the Aphorism’’, p.29.

17. Derrida, ‘‘Aphorism Coun-tertime’’, p. 417.

18. Plato, Protagoras 342B d-e,in C.C.W. Taylor, Oxford:Oxford University Press,1996, p. 151.

19. Nietzsche, Samtliche Werke,quoted in Marsden,‘‘Nietzsche and the Art ofthe Aphorism’’, p. 27.

20. Nietzsche, Twilight of theIdols, ‘‘Expeditions of anUntimely Man’’, trans. R. J.Hollingdale, Harmonds-worth: Penguin, 1968, sec-tion 51.

21. Walter Benjamin, SelectedWritings, Vol 1, Cambridge:Harvard University Press,1996, p. 444.

22. Murray Davis, ‘‘Aphorismsand Cliches: The Genera-tion and Dissipation ofConceptual Charisma’’, An-nual Review of Sociology, 25(1999): 252.

23. Gray, ‘‘Aphorism andSprachkrise’’, pp. 332–354.

24. John Maciulka, ‘‘AdolfLoos and the AphoristicStyle: Rhetorical Practice in


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Early Twentieth CenturyDesign Criticism’’, DesignIssues 16/2, (Summer2000): 75–86.

25. Louis Sullivan, ‘‘The TallBuilding Artistically Consid-ered’’, Lippincott’s MonthlyMagazine, LVII (March1896) in Wiliam A. Colesand Henry Hope Reed,Architecture in America: ABattle of Styles, New York:Appleton-Century-Crofts,1961, p. 42.

26. Le Corbusier quoted inMatilda McQuaid (ed.), En-visioning Architecture: Draw-ings from the Museum ofModern Art, New York:The Museum of ModernArt, 2002, p. 68.

27. See Robin Evans, The Projec-tive Cast: Architecture and itsThree Geometries, Cam-bridge, MA: MIT Press,1995 and Translations fromDrawing to Building and OtherEssays, MIT Press, 1997;Marco Frascari, JonathanHale and Bradley Starkey(eds), From Models to Draw-ings: Imagination and Repre-sentation in Architecture, NewYork: Routledge, 2008; StanAllen, Practice: Architecture,Technique and Representation,Amsterdam: OPA, 2000; Al-berto Perez-Gomez, Archi-tectural Representation andthe Perspective Hinge, Cam-bridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000.

28. Karl Kraus, Half-Truths andOne-and-a-Half-Truths: Se-lected Aphorisms, trans. HarryZohn, Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 1990.

29. Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘‘OfReading and Writing’’, inThus Spoke Zarathustra,trans. R. J. Hollingdale,

Harmondsworth: Penguin,1961, section I.

30. Franz Schulze, Mies van derRohe: A Critical Biography,Chicago: The University ofChicago Press, 1985, p. 238.

31. FAT, ‘‘Everything counts inlarge amounts (The soundof geography collapsing)’’, inKester Rattenbury (ed.),This is Not Architecture: Med-ia Constructions, London:Routledge, 2002, p. 247.

32. B.H. Friedman, ComingClose: A novella and threestories as alternative autobio-graphies, New York: FictionCollective, 1982, p. 79.

33. Derek Graham, ManagingResidential Construction Pro-jects: Strategies and Solutions,New York: McGraw Hill,2006, p. 93.

34. Graham, Managing Residen-tial Construction Projects, p.93.

35. Robert Venturi, Complexityand Contradiction in Architec-ture (1966), 2nd edition(1977), New York: Museumof Modern Art, 2002, pp.16–17.

36. Venturi, Complexity and Con-tradiction in Architecture, pp.16–17.

37. In 2005, as part of theChicago Humanities Festi-val, Venturi delivered alecture in Mies‘ restoredCrown Hall at IIT withthe title, ‘‘Mies is More:Learning from Mies’’, inwhich he accused Miesof being a closetsymbolist, thus claiminghim for complexity andcontradiction.

38. Robert Venturi, ‘‘Mal Mots:Aphorisms—Sweet andSour—By an Anti-Hero Ar-chitect’’, Grand Street, 54,special issue ‘‘Space’’ (Au-tumn, 1995): 82–87.

39. Amy Stein and AnthonyMiksitz, ‘‘About Architec-ture: An Installation by Ven-turi, Scott Brown andAssociates February 13–18April 1993, Architronic, In-stitute of ContemporaryArt, Philadelphia, Pennsylva-nia http://corbu2.caed.kent.edu/architronic/v2n1/v2n1.11d.html (accessed 22 July2010).

40. Stuart Wrede, ‘‘Complexityand Contradiction Twenty-Five Years Later: An Inter-view with Robert Venturi’’, inJohn Elderfield (ed.), Amer-ican Art of the 1960s, NewYork: The Museumof Modern Art, 1991, p. 158.

41. Rem Koolhaas, ‘‘Miestakes’’,in A!T, special issue: NewMateriality, 23 (2004), http://www.aplust.net/permalink.php?atajo"miestakes0 (ac-cessed 11 June 2010).

42. Koolhaas, ‘‘Miestakes’’.



45. Nietzsche, Samtliche Werke,quoted in Marsden,‘‘Nietzsche and the Art ofthe Aphorism’’, p. 31.

46. Gilles Deleuze, The Logicof Sense, trans. M. Lesterwith 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 gavemyself a shock: Mies andthe Pavilion’’, 1997 http://www.ucalgary.ca/ev/designresearch/publications/insitu/copy/vo lume2/h is tor y/Kevin_Harrington/index.html (accessed 10 June2010).

49. Marco Frascari, ‘‘The Tell-the-Tale Detail’’, VIA, 7(1984): 23.

50. Franz Schulze, Mies van derRohe: A Critical Biography,Chicago: The University ofChicago Press, 1985, p. 288.

51. Beatriz Colomina, ‘‘Miesnot’’, in Detlef Mertins, The

Presence of Mies, New York:Princeton ArchitecturalPress, pp. 193–222.

52. Detlef Mertins, ‘‘Architec-tures of Becoming: Miesvan der Rohe and theAvant-Garde’’, Mies in Berlin,New York: Museum ofModern Art, 2001.

53. Philip Johnson, ‘‘Writings byMies van der Rohe’’, in Miesvan der Rohe, New York:Museum of Modern Art,1947.

54. Mies van der Rohe, ‘‘ThePreconditions of Architec-tural Work’’, in Fritz Neu-meyer, The Artless Word:Mies van der Rohe and theBuilding Art, Cambridge,

MA: MIT Press, 1991, p.301.

55. Horatio Greenough, Formand Function: Remarks onArt, Design and Architecture,ed. Harold Small, Berkeley:University of California,1947, pp. 61–62.

56. Greenough, Form and Func-tion, p. 65.

57. Greenough, Form and Func-tion, pp. 61–62.

58. Paul-Alan Johnson, The Theoryof Architecture: Concepts,Themes and Practices, NewYork: John Wiley, 1994, p.294.

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Coles, Wiliam A. and Henry Hope Reed, Architecture in America: A Battle of Styles, New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts 1961.

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