LESS IS ENOUGH: ON ARCHITECTURE AND ASCETICISM | Pier Vittorio Aureli

Charting the rise of asceticism in early Christianity and its institutionalisation with the medieval monasteries, Pier Vittorio Aureli examines how the basic unit of the reclusive life – the monk’s cell – becomes the foundation of private property. And from there, he argues, it all starts to go wrong.

“Less is more” goes the modernist dictum. But is it? In an age when we are endlessly urged to do “more with less”, can we still romanticise the pretensions of minimalism?
By late capitalism, asceticism has been utterly aestheticised. It manifests itself as monasteries inspired by Calvin Klein stores, in the monkish lifestyle of Steve Jobs and Apple’s aura of restraint. Amid all the hypocrisy, it must still be possible to reprise the idea of “less” as a radical alternative, as the first step to living the life examined.

For Pier Vittorio Aureli, the return of “austerity chic” is a perversion of what ought to be a meaningful way of life. Charting the rise of asceticism in early Christianity and its institutionalisation with the medieval monasteries, Aureli examines how the basic unit of the reclusive life – the monk’s cell – becomes the foundation of private property. And from there, he argues, it all starts to go wrong. By late capitalism, asceticism has been utterly aestheticised. It manifests itself as monasteries inspired by Calvin Klein stores, in the monkish lifestyle of Steve Jobs and Apple’s aura of restraint. Amid all the hypocrisy, it must still be possible to reprise the idea of “less” as a radical alternative, as the first step to living the life examined.

03.09.2013 Pier Vittorio Aureli “Less is enough” from Strelka Institute on Vimeo.

LESS IS ENOUGH: ON ARCHITECTURE AND ASCETICISM

For many years, ‘less is more’ has been the catchphrase of minimalist design. Instantly associated with the restrained work of the German architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who borrowed this dictum from a poem by Robert Browning,¹ ‘less is more’ celebrates the ethical and aesthetic value of a self-imposed economy of means. Mies’s stripped-bare architecture, in which formal expression was reduced to a simple composition of readymade industrial elements, implied that beauty could only arise through refusal of everything that was not strictly necessary. In recent years, but especially since the 2008 economic recession, the ‘less is more’ attitude has become fashionable again, this time advocated by critics, architects and designers in a slightly moralistic tone.²

If in the late 1990s and early 2000s architecture was driven by the irrational exuberance of the real-estate market towards the production of increasingly redundant iconic objects, with the onset of the recession the situation started to change. Those who had previously acclaimed (or even produced) the acrobatics of architecture in the previous decade now took to complaining about architecture’s shameful waste of resources and budgets.³ This change of sensibility has provoked two kinds of reaction. Some architects have tried to translate the ethos of austerity in merely formal terms.⁴ Others have advocated a more socially minded approach, trying to go beyond the traditional boundaries of architecture.⁵ It would be unfair to put these positions on the same level (as the second may be more plausible than the first), but what they seem to share is the idea that the current crisis is an opportunity to do – as an Italian architect turned politician put it – ‘more with less’.⁶

It is for this reason that ‘less is more’ is no longer just an aesthetic principle but the kernel of the ideology of something else, something where economy of means is not just a design strategy but an economic imperative tout court.

Within the history of capitalism, ‘less is more’ defines the advantages of reducing the costs of production. Capitalists have always tried to obtain more with less. Capitalism is not just a process of accumulation but also, and especially, the incessant optimisation of the productive process towards a situation in which less capital investment equals more capital accumulation. Technological innovation has always been driven by the imperative to reduce the costs of production, the need for wage earners. The very notion of industry is based on this idea: to be industrious means being able to obtain the best results with fewer means.⁷ Here we see how creativity itself is at the very root of the notion of industry. Creativity depends not just on the investor finding ways to spare resources but on the worker’s capacity to adapt to difficult situations. These two aspects of industriousness and creativity are interlinked: the worker’s creativity forcibly becomes more pronounced when capital decides to reduce the costs of production and economic conditions become uncertain. Indeed it is creativity, as the most generic faculty of human life, that capital has always exploited as its main labour power.

And in an economic crisis, what capital’s austerity measures demand is that people do more with less: more work for less money, more creativity with less social security. In this context, the principle of ‘less is more’ runs the risk of becoming a cynical celebration of the ethos of austerity and budget cuts to social programmes.

LESS IS ENOUGH, ON ARCHITECTURE AND ASCETICISM, Pier Vittorio Aureli, Strelka Press, book

1.
The word ‘ascetic’ comes from the Greek askein, which means exercise, self-training. Asceticism is a way of life in which the self is the main object of human activity. For this reason the practice of asceticism is not necessarily related to religion. Indeed it is possible to argue that the very first ascetics were philosophers. In ancient times the fundamental goal of philosophy was to know oneself: to live was understood not simply as given fact but as an art, the art of living. Within asceticism life becomes ars vivendi, something to which it is possible to give a specific form. In the case of the ancient philosophers this meant a life entirely consistent with one’s own teachings, where there was no difference between theory and practice, between logos and bios. Philosophers were thus individuals who, through their chosen form of life, deeply informed by their thinking, inevitably challenged accepted habits and social conditions.¹²

Asceticism is thus not just a contemplative condition, or a withdrawal from the world as it is commonly understood, but is, above all, a way to radically question given social and political conditions in a search for a different way to live one’s life. It was for this reason that early Christianity absorbed asceticism, in the form of monasticism. In the process, however, asceticism acquired a very different meaning. Its main goal was no longer to change the existing social order, but rather to prepare for the Second Coming of Christ: it was practised as a precondition for salvation. And yet those who embraced monastic life also did so as a way of refusing the integration of the Christian faith within the institutions of power. The origins of monasticism in the West coincide with the recognition of the Catholic Church by the Roman Emperor Constantine and the beginning of a political and cultural alliance between Church and State.

In his Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche puts forward a fundamental critique of asceticism, attempting to demonstrate how the desire to refuse the world is not a mere withdrawal, as the hermits and early monks maintained, but a subtle manifestation of man’s will to power.

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4.
The historical evolution of the modern city is unthinkable without the concept of private property. With the decline of feudalism, people acquired individual rights thanks to the rise of economic entrepreneurialism. In the reborn cities of the Middle Ages, owning private property was a precondition for citizenship. In this way, individual ownership became the foundation of modern political institutions. The house was no longer just a shelter, or the ancient oikos, the private household clearly separated from public space. It was now both a space of inhabitation and the economic and legal apparatus through which the rising modern state governed citizens by defining their most intimate conditions, that is their habits, customs and social and economic relationships. From the vantage point of governing institutions, property in the form of housing serves a two-fold purpose.

It was in the early modern period that rental housing started to become a diffuse practice within the city. Houses were built not only to shelter the family or the clan, but also to be rented to people outside the boundaries of kinship.

The sixteenth-century architect Sebastiano Serlio devoted one of his seven books on architecture to houses.²³ What is novel about Serlio’s treatise is its focus on the design of houses for all classes. For the first time in history, even the houses of the peasant and the artisan are considered as a design problem. For these subjects Serlio proposes a minimum dwelling unit which clearly reflects the ascetic character of the inhabitant. But here asceticism is not the inhabitant’s choice. Serlio’s little house is not for the hermit, or for those who have consciously chosen to reject private property.

(…)
Perhaps the best embodiment of this model for dwelling is Le Corbusier’s Maison Dom-Ino (1914), a simple structural concrete framework that could be built by the inhabitants themselves with minimal resources and filled in according to their means.²⁴ And yet, the very goal of the Dom-Ino model was to provide the lower classes with a minimum property that would allow them to become entrepreneurs of their own household condition. This same principle has been applied on a mass scale in the development of many Mediterranean cities since the postwar period, most notably Athens and Rome. Here the possibility of ownership has been extended to all classes, especially the lower classes, by tacitly encouraging the small-scale building industry. The goal of these economic processes is to form a society of owners where even the smallest, seemingly most worthless property is seized as an opportunity for financial investment.

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For Benjamin, the bourgeois apartment was filled with objects whose sole purpose was to reaffirm the ideology of the private home. He observed how furniture and interior design were driven not by necessity but by the inhabitants’ urge to leave their own traces, that is to make the living space familiar, to claim it as their own.
(…)
Against this model of inhabitation, Benjamin proposed the possibility of emptiness in the form of a ‘tabula rasa’, a space devoid of identity, possession or a sense of belonging. His famous essay, ‘Experience and Poverty’, describes the bare concrete structures designed by Le Corbusier as the incarnation of such architecture.²⁶

6.
If there is a real scarcity in the world (which the rhetoric of austerity does not mention at all), it is the scarcity of attention, which has now been consumed by a state of permanent distraction, driven by increasingly sophisticated means of communication and production. Actually distraction is not bad in itself. Within industrialisation, distraction in the form of idle talk, lack of focus, daydreaming, was a way in which subjects would be able to disconnect themselves from production and stay within themselves. But in a cognitive production in which every fraction of our life is put to work, distraction becomes a form of production, because it pushes people to do many things at the same time. While the capacity to focus on something for something longer than five minutes is dramatically reduced, the compulsive dependence on the internet feeds the frantic production machinery of the web. Lack of focus is no longer caused by sloth, one of Christianity’s deadly sins, but by a form of default Stakhanovism, which forces us to work more even when we don’t work at all. While Jobs perfected his asceticism to rule himself (before strictly ruling others), the users of the devices he helped to spread are no longer able to control themselves.³⁴

To say enough (instead of more) means to redefine what we really need in order to live a good life
– that is, a life detached from the social ethos of property, from the anxiety of production and possession, and where less is just enough.

References

¹_{‘Less is More’ comes from Robert Browning’s poem ‘Andrea del Sarto’, and was used by Mies in reference to restraint in a interview in the New York Herald Tribune on 28 June 1959}

²_{For an interesting critique of how architects have responded to economic austerity by simply translating it into a formal aesthetic see: Jeremy Till, ‘Scarcity Contra Austerity’ in Places, last retrieved July 2003, http://places.designobserver.com/feature/scarcity-contra-austerity/35638/}

³_{There are many examples of overnight volte-faces after the 2008 crisis, but the most blatant was a piece written by the then architecture critic for the New York Times, Nicolai Ourousoff, significantly titled ‘It Was Fun Till the Money Ran Out’. After years of celebrating starachitects’ conquest of the world, Ourousoff concluded his 2008 with praise for more socially oriented architecture. See New York Times, 19 December 2008}

⁴_{As in the case of Rem Koolhaas and his office OMA. Just a month after the beginning of the economic crisis, OMA associate Renier De Graaf launched a manifesto called ‘Simplicity’ where the proposal for a seven-star high-rise hotel in Dubai designed as a simple monolith was presented as an architecture against the spectacle of iconic buildings. See Renier De Graaf, ‘Simplicity’ in Hans Ulrich Obrist (ed), Manifesto Marathon, Serpentine Gallery (Cologne: Walther Koenig, 2013), 28}

⁵_{See Nishat Awan, Tatjana Schneider, Jeremy Till, Spatial Agency: Other Ways of Doing Architecture (London: Routledge, 2011)}

⁶_{Stefano Boeri, Fare di più con meno (Milan: Il Saggiatore 2012)}

⁷_{For an interesting philosophical enquiry on the concept of industry and its role within human creativity see Gerald Raunig, Factories of Knowledge, Industries of Creativity (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2013), 111–22}

¹²_{See Elettra Stimilli, ‘Il Carattere Distruttivo dell’Ascetismo’, in Seminario di Studi Benjaminiani (ed), Le Vie della distruzione: a partire dal Il carattere distruttivo di Walter Benjamin (Macerata: Quodlibet, 2010), 123–42}

²³ _{Sebastiano Serlio, On Domestic Architecture (London: Dover, 1996)}²⁴ _{One of the most accurate and interesting discussions of Le Corbusier’s Maison Dom-Ino is in Adolf Max Vogt, Le Corbusier, The Noble Savage (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000)}

²⁶_{See Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 2, part 2, 1931–1934, ed Michael W Jennings et al, trans Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 731–36}

³⁴ _{Jobs himself told his biographer Walter Isaacson how his interest in Zen meditation taught him to ignore distractions and to cultivate concentration, the very thing that has been destroyed by the technology he helped to implement. See Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2011)}

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Pier Vittorio Aureli is an architect and theorist. He currently teaches at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London, and is visiting professor at Yale University. He is the author of many essays and several books, including The Project of Autonomy (2008) and The Possibility of an Absolute Architecture (2011).

We thank Strelka Institute for kindly providing us the text and the images.
Find out more here.

SOURCE: STRELKA PRESS

LESS IS ENOUGH: ON ARCHITECTURE AND ASCETICISM | Pier Vittorio Aureli

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