Less is More
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The concept “Less is More”
“Less is more” is a fundamental concept in twentieth-century architecture, as well as any discipline related in any way to design. And, as we can imagine, it applies to all forms of art and, indeed, to all aspects of life.
Actually, we first associate it with architecture since it was enforced at the Bauhaus and “rescued” by Mies van der Rohe, architect and director of the school.
The Bauhaus, a school of modern design founded in Germany in 1919, imposed the idea of design subordinated to function (whether industrial design or architecture). The concept of a “functionalist” aesthetic emerged, which was opposed to any form of adornment or superfluous elements—a factor that has a lot to do with the imposition of abstraction in the visual arts.
When did the phrase first appear? Actually, Van der Rohe claimed to have heard this remark from Peter Behrens, who is considered the first industrial designer in history and hired Van der Rohe to work in a turbine plant when he was only 21 years old at the turn of the century.
Mies van der Rohe said: “I had to make a drawing of a facade for a factory. There was nothing to do on that thing. The columns were 5.75 meters. I’ll remember it until I die. I showed him a bunch of drawings of what could be done, and then he said, ‘Less is more.'”
And from that moment on, Van der Rohe made that concept his own, which was fundamental to the new aesthetics and functionalism that the Bauhaus imposed and also applied to minimalist architecture.
Let us clarify that the phrase had already been used by two poets: Christoph Martin Wieland, a German of the 18th century, and Robert Browning, an Englishman of the 19th century, despite the fact that it is not so significant who was the first to express the notion, but the thought itself.
As regards to painting, Kandinsky and Klee, leading abstract theorists (aside from painters), were teaching at the Bauhaus at the time. In painting, abstraction means “less is more.” There is a search for the essence, for the elemental. The search for the symbolic and even spiritual meaning of line, form, and, of course, color.
Image: Castle and Sun (1928). Paul Klee.
Recommended links:
The Bauhaus: Simplification and “Less is More”.
Fundamental Painters of the Bauhaus.
Paul Klee: “Art does not reproduce the visible, rather, it makes visible.”
Kandinsky and the Biomorphic Abstraction.
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