Rules · Theory · Plans · Structure
Reduce a building to the fewest, most exactly made elements (a regular structure, a clear enclosure, an open and adaptable space) and let their proportion and detail carry the whole effect.
Mies used the phrase, which he may have learned in Peter Behrens’s office, for an architecture in which nothing is superfluous and every junction is resolved. In the Barcelona Pavilion a roof slab rests on eight cruciform steel columns; free-standing planes of onyx, marble and glass direct movement without ever forming closed rooms. In his later American work the idea became universal space: a single column-free hall under a long-span roof, which any use can occupy.
Venturi’s retort, “less is a bore”, marks the point at which the doctrine lost its authority.
A saddle surface in which two opposite corners are raised and two lowered is a hyperbolic paraboloid; it contains two families of straight lines, so it can be formed with straight boards and yet has double curvature.
y = k·x·z (or any bilinear patch through four points not in one plane)
A thin curved shell carries load by the membrane forces in its surface, not by bending; so shape it to its loads and supports, and it can span great distances with a thickness of a few centimetres.
span ÷ thickness of a good shell ≈ 400–1000 (an egg: ≈ 100)
Span the whole depth of the building with the structure so that each floor is a single open plate, adaptable to uses that cannot be foreseen.
Pompidou: 48 m clear span between column lines, 13 bays of 12.8 m
In a framed building the columns and beams carry every load; the outer wall can be reduced to a light cladding hung on the frame, floor by floor, and need grow no thicker as the building rises.
load-bearing wall: thickness grows with height · frame: cladding thickness constant
The outward form of a building should arise from, and express, what the building does and how it is made, as the form of every living thing expresses its life.
Omit applied ornament from buildings and everyday objects: it wastes work, money and material, dates quickly, and adds nothing that fine material and exact workmanship cannot give.
Cite this page Chris Paton, “Less is more”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/less-is-more. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.