Is less more?

Clean lines, absence of decoration, avoidance of clutter, simplicity, and above all functionality – these are the characteristics of modernist architecture that were encapsulated in the phrase ‘less is more’. Although originally coined in Robert Browning’s poem , ‘less is more’ is more often associated with the modernist architect Ludwig Mies Van der Rohe, famous for his clean-lined glass and steel tower blocks in Chicago and New York City. But it was another architect, Adolf Loos, who started this obsession with simplicity. In 1908 he published a bizarre essay called . There he challenged received opinion by declaring that obsession with ornament, far from being a mark of sophistication, was rather a characteristic of a primitive stage in cultural evolution. Ornament, as he saw it, was fit for savages and degenerates, but not for and echoed Loos’s conclusions when he wrote: “The more cultivated a people becomes, the more decoration disappears.”