From Reductionism to Simplicity: Against Modernist Minimalism and Towards a New Monastic Minimalism, #1.

Figure 1: Courtyard of the St. Benedictusberg Abbey, designed by Dom. Hans van der Laan. Photograph by author.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. Modernism and Minimalism: Reductionism as Paradigm

2. Monastic Minimalism: Six Defining Features

3. Against Mechanistic Materialism

4. Conclusion

This essay will be published in four installments, one per section.

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1. Modernism and Minimalism: Reductionism as Paradigm

If you have been a design student at some time during the last 70 years, there is no way that you could have avoided minimalism of some sort. Usually, it amounts to an aesthetic minimalism: a visual language of simple geometric volumes, clear lines, and smooth surfaces. Ever since the early 20^th-century, CIAM-centred architectural modernism adopted the “machine aesthetic” of the airplane, the grain silo, and the ocean liner during the 1920s and 1930s, there has been a tendency to reduce our visual world to its barest bones (Banham, 1970: p. 328).

20^th-century modernists like Adolf Loos, Le Corbusier, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Walter Gropius, Richard Meier, and I.M. Pei championed a technocratic and bold style of architecture that was not “cluttered” with ornament, and that would be free from any superfluous elements. Instead, exact and icy functionality would determine the physical form, a doctrine summarized in the pithy modernist slogan “form follows function.” It turned out that “functionality” resulted in physical environments that were almost universally clean, white, rectangular and strangely devoid of Life itself.

Figure 2: Atrium of the The Hague Town Hall, designed by Richard Meier. Photograph by author.

Otherwise, these spaces showcased raw material and concrete in a gesture of “honesty towards the materials and the construction.” On the modernists’ view, ornamentation only served to hide the honest elements, or the purity of the construction. That there existed an entire modern strand of Expressionism that developed new forms of ornamentation and spatial division is often seen as a phase—a mere stepping stone towards the aesthetic of untarnished purity. But take a look at the work of, for example, Behrens and Berlage, Frank Lloyd Wright, the Amsterdam School, Dom. Hans van der Laan, and the Scandinavian modernists, and then one can see that a robustly humanist and yet also fully modern architecture was at some point a real-world possibility.

Often, architectural history is written as if certain developments were unavoidable. Usually, the most recent developments are regarded as the necessary outcomes to which everything up this point led up. However, often, we forget how multifaceted and layered cultural phenomena like modernism were. Marshall Berman was in this regard completely right when he wrote that compared to 19^th-century modernism, 20^th-century modernism was a “flat totalization” of the many currents of thought prevalent in the previous century (Berman, 2010: p, 24). If anything, it is not unreasonable to point out that the project of modernity flattened out and became reduced to a kind of functionalist, sterile, and above all technocratic modernity.

This is not to argue that we should have never left behind Neoclassicism, the Wiener Secession, or the Jugendstil. The 20^th century demanded new forms of artistic and architectural expression, suited to the predicament of the modern mind, as well as facing up to the unease set in motion by Existentialism, the seemingly increasing speed of life, the emergence of the modern polis, the horror of two world wars, the Holocaust, the atomic bomb, and the Gulag. In literature, we find James, Proust, Baudelaire, Kästner, T.S. Eliot, and W.B. Yeats; in music, we encounter Bruckner, Mahler, Webern, and Prokofiev; in the visual arts, Klee, Delvaux, Picasso, Moore, and Malevich. All of them wrestled with modernity, and while some experiments were more successful than others, the attempt to convey and shape the cultural climate of late modern times through artistic means seems authentic. At least, one could discern a common set of cultural concerns underneath all them, against which this artistic output could be read, understood, and valued. Apart from the specifics of these cultural concerns, it is clear that in some form or the other, the human condition is at the heart of all early 20^th-century artistic exploration. As I’ve argued elsewhere, the Second World War created a massive black hole in the middle of the 20^th century, and after this catastrophic event, the sociocultural landscape had changed forever, as had the overall direction of the modern project itself (Hanna and Paans, 2020).

The “flattening out” of the modern project that Berman so acutely observed might well be principally due to the traumatic existential impact that the two World Wars inflicted, as well as to the role that technology came to play as a way of controlling the battlefield. Both wars enormously contributed to the development of almost all modern combat and communication technologies, ranging from chemical warfare, radio, sonar, ballistics, and civil engineering to the logic needed to develop the Internet and the computing power needed for today’s AI. The line of research and thinking that unfolded in the post-war years amplified the technological, control-oriented strand of the modern project at the expense of other latent possibilities.

One can imagine a 20^th century without the Second World War, in which the many currents of artistic thinking during the 1920s and 1930s merged into a wholly alternative modern project. This project would fully incorporate the humanist view of the polis, as we can discern it in Baudelaire and Benjamin; it would incorporate Expressionism in painting and poetry, falling prey neither to naïve realism nor to soulless abstraction; it would continue the architectural expressionism of Behrens; the humanist urban visions of Frank Lloyd Wright; the tension-laden musical composition of Gustav Mahler; the fascination for the dynamics of the new world that we find visually expressed in Russian constructivism; the neo-romantic uptake of modern ideas into the idioms inherited from the 19^th century; and even the CIAM-style fascination for urban sanitation, mass emancipation, a new world, and liberating technology. In short, it would a rich biotope of the modern mind searching for its position in the world without either anachronism or technocratic control.

Figure 3: The expressive, yet also fully modern brickwork of Peter Behrens’ 1909 AEG-turbine hall in Berlin. Photograph by author.

But of course, history actually unfolded differently. After the Second World War, artistic minimalism amplified and intensified the reductionist, purity-oriented line of thinking that was inherent in the modern mind, but which could have branched out in any number of directions. Artists like Donald Judd, Robert Serra, Richard Long, and Carl Andre resorted to an extremely reduced artistic language as they followed in the pioneering footsteps of Malevich and Mondrian. Extreme reduction and extreme simplification: those are the themes that underlie minimalism and to some degree land art in its various guises. Not coincidentally, this line of artistic production coincided with artistic conceptualism. The artist-at-work became a trope, as became the idea of the artistic “concept.” Spectators looking at two bent pieces of metal had to be informed of their transcendent artistic value and the elaborate story behind them. No, dear visitor, you are witnessing an earth-shattering artistic event, and not merely wondering why two rusty pieces of metal ended up in a museum exhibition.

One could write a gloomy history of how this esoteric visual language and the accompanying, explanatory linguistic gymnastics were fused together with the mechanistic, Fordist view of the world, resulting in cityscapes and highways that are bleak, cheap, repetitious, lifeless, and generally unhospitable. The destruction of the Pruitt-Igoe complex in 1972 seemed to seal the fate of the minimal, modernist paradigm and functionalist city planning alike. However, like the living dead or zombies, both ideas took on a more horrible form of existence and continued to plague the living.

During the 1980s, in the wake of the so-called “death of modernism,” postmodernity gradually conquered the artistic and architectural professions, and ornament as well as ironic citation of historic styles and playfulness returned to the architectural scene. At least, that was the theory. In reality, postmodernity was just modernism with a more colorful wrapping, not unlike the vividly colored packages of the multiple brands of potato chips and soaps you can find in supermarket aisles. In a world where Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol had already both made their artistic statements about mass production, the critical content of their works was disembodied from its critical context and became the lived norm of everyday life.

But amplified on a commercial scale, their once original artistic gestures morphed once again in something different: a disorienting, yet colorful flatness extending towards the horizon. The very act of repetition that in the hands of Warhol amounted to a sharp critique of mass-consumer society and its aesthetics became a suffocating blanket of feel-good artistic consumerism, brought to the customer by cultural institutions, and invested with high-brow rhetoric by curators wearing imposing designer glasses.

Emerging computer technology allowed for a certain sleekness to creep into architectural shape, a development explored by—amongst others—Bernard Cache and Greg Lynn. Interesting as these developments were, once again they coincided with the powerful thought-shapers of the mechanist worldview, but this time enabled by new technology (Hanna and Paans 2020, 2021). The result were environments that exhibit flow, and a kind of curvy, sleek, digitally-drawn dynamicism, but that also curiously lack meaningful detailing and a tangible relationship to materiality. When I visited the then-completed Arnhem railway station designed by UNStudio some 7 years ago, I could not help thinking that I was walking around in one of their diagrams. A curious lack of detail and humanity created a space of flows that was so abstract that one cannot easily relate to it. The idea was there, sure, but the architecture wasn’t.

This new, digitally powered minimalism co-existed with the more classical, composition-oriented minimalism of, for instance, John Pawson and David Chipperfield. This type of minimalism exhibits a superficial luxury and studied restraint, so as to appeal to the well-cultivated aesthetic sensibilities of the higher classes. Somehow, cultural institutions, rich organizations, luxury hotels, corporations, and wealthy business owners all prefer a style of intentional aesthetic reduction. In a gesture of studied and pretentious minimalization, one showcases one’s level of cultivation through restraint. Don’t be fooled, however, because the materials and the fine, invisible joining mechanisms that are used to create seamless transitions between walls, windows, ceilings, and floors will cost you a small or large fortune, as will that smooth concrete and white plaster.

Figure 4: David Chipperfield’s minimalist design for the James Simon gallery in Berlin. Photograph by author.

The self-conscious restraint devoid of any ascetic acumen is the most infuriating feature of such properly commercial minimalism. It amounts to the creation of an intentional class difference, relying on the notions of purity, simplicity and cleanliness. The modernist versions of these ideas are expressed in a studiously sterile architectural language that only breathes one message: we are more sophisticated than you are, so walk softly. If you can’t appreciate this sterility, you don’t belong here, as you are clearly not cultivated enough. Do you like ornamentation that is not overtly ironic and postmodern? This is a transgression against the sensibility of the age! To be cultivated is to shun the superfluous and prefer the essence. Not unlike Loos’s main thesis in Ornament and Crime, those preferring non-minimalism are regarded as lacking in cultural finesse. Loos went further and suggested that only a criminal and uncouth mind could come up with base ornamentation and superfluous Schmuck.

But not all minimalism is of the sleek, upper-class, marketable variety. We should take note of the fact that modern minimalism took its cues from the early modern version of a clean, sanitized world, co-opting the early modernists’ particular versions of simplicity, material honesty, and clean walls. One idea in particular is quite damaging in modern minimalism: the notion that through extreme reduction, a kind of new architectural essence emerges that only the well-cultivated can grasp. It is for this reason that the modern movement glorified the idea of an avant-garde, a vanguard of excellence, not unlike the party cadre in Bolshevism, Ivy League universities, or even “cutting-edge research institutes” in the contemporary professional academy. Nevertheless, there are other types of minimalism that took broadly “aesthetically minimal” ideas in a different direction, well before modern minimalism even came along.

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