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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2. Monastic Minimalism: Six Defining Features
I shall give the alternative minimalism a different name, namely monastic minimalism, because we experience and witness its application and characteristics most closely in monasteries and generally in traditional religious buildings. This does not mean that such minimalism can be found only in a monastic or broader religious context. Instead, it means that in such settings, we can most clearly discern its characteristics in a setting that intends authentically to convey the feeling of the numinous in the broad sense.
1. First, let’s start with the utterly pernicious idea that a reduction of visual variety or ornament leads to the emergence of an otherwise hidden or obfuscated architectural essence. Let’s also immediately draw attention to a contrary idea: over against the gesture of studious minimalist reduction, let’s posit the idea of simplicity. Confusing the notions of reduction and simplicity easily happens, but it is a grave mistake. Reduction as an aesthetic strategy is a method for arriving at an aesthetic language of cultured restraint. However, this restraint is skin deep, since it still relies on the utilization of luxurious and costly materials—and fully in tune with the modernist love of vanguards—cutting-edge technology as well as costly detailing. There is in principle nothing against pushing the technology to the limits of its capability, but to do so in a self-conscious mannerism in which technology and technocratic progress are glorified as the ultimate form of architectural essence is just intellectual posing.
In particular, it reduces the idea of architectural essence to something that can only be achieved by the most expensive means. But what is the notion of essence if not the notion of something fundamental? If it can be achieved only by the most advanced procedures of material processing and by heavy reliance on technological progress, I doubt that we are talking about architectural essences at all. Instead, we are talking about a deliberately touched-up image of carefully showcased simplicity that is in reality no simplicity at all: on the contrary, it is simply haughtiness displayed as cultural refinement.
Figure 5: Length-wise view down a corridor lining the central garden in Val-Dieu Abbey, Aubel, Belgium. Photograph by author.
Before delving into the aesthetic characteristics of monastic minimalism, it should be noted that both types of minimalism sometimes peculiarly clash. In a particularly strange case, a Cistercian abbot who viewed images of John Pawson’s Calvin Klein retail store in retail store in New York City was so smitten by the futuristic, minimalist aesthetic that he proposed that Pawson should redesign a part of his order’s monastery in Novy Dvur, Czech Republic. Pawson accepted the commission in 1999 and realized a redesign in collaboration with the Czech Atelier Soukup. In doing so, high modern minimalism touched monastic simplicity, yet the result is something rather strange. The intention is clear: a monastic setting devoid of any superfluousness. Yet, the result is an inappropriately fashionable religious expression that aims to be timeless, but through its self-conscious posing achieves the exact opposite. In an astute critical commentary on this case, architectural theorist Pier Vittorio Aureli notes:
Here we see how easy it is to turn asceticism into a disingenuous caricature. Ascetic restraint is easily interchangeable with marketing, especially in times of recession, when there is a rush to embrace the rhetoric of anti-consumerism and the return to core values. (Aureli, 2010: p. 43)
Not only does it become an architectural icon that drifts effortlessly along on the high modern and ultimately materialist currents, but it adopts also a spatial strategy of visual reduction. This strategy is executed in such a way that a new, strangely luxurious image ensues. The detailing would not have been out of place in a luxury resort or a cosmopolitan fashion boutique, exactly because it betrays a sleekness and finishing that defies the very simplicity it intends to convey.
Still, the monastery’s spaces have been laid out and designed tastefully. That cannot be disputed. However, the reduced aesthetic suffusing them is precisely not that of a monastic minimalism, but once again of a kind of easy-going retail variety. This peculiar borderline case serves as point of our analysis, if only to showcase how easy reduction is mistaken for simplicity, and how a truly simple aesthetic cannot be achieved without a structuring context.
2. Second, monastic minimalism—in contrast to its modern minimalist counterpart—thrives on frugality. The limitations on material use, building layout, and ornamentation came naturally as part of the monastic typology. After all, many of these places started as communal spaces for contemplation and a simple life. In such circumstances, one must “make do” with what one has. And even if there are sufficient funds, the religious values that underlie the entire monastic lifestyle forbid or at least inhibit tendencies to indulge in extravagant ornamentation or superfluousness. In a particularly striking example, the Russian monk Nil Sorsky ordered a number of his fellow monks to twist and contort the columns of their newly-built abbey, because he deemed them too beautiful and therefore immoderate and impious. We don’t need to follow Sorsky’s example with similar rigor, but it shows something of the mentality that colors the monastic mindset.
This frugality appears in everything: in simple details, repetitive elements, a limited palette of materials, simple geometric structure, a rational, optimized layout, and an absence of anything than one could deem luxurious. Moreover, the entire physical monastic template is oriented towards a highly structured lifestyle. The sung masses, dedicated religious services, hours and spaces for personal study, and hours and spaces for simple manual labor, all impose requirements for accessibility, for the organization of both solitude and communality, and for the presence of symbols, and jointly constitute a general reflection of the community’s hierarchy and underlying aims and values.
All this provides a kind of inner, spatial coherence that suffuses the entire building, from the entire orientation to the floor tiling, functional layout, and the details, and in particular, the ornamentation and presence of symbols like crosses, statues, altars, candles, and so-on. The higher goal or purpose of the monastery as a social institution can be derived from each item, each choice, and each configuration and distribution of spaces.
The ornamentation is such that it fulfils the classical role that it had in architecture: to highlight the proportions and tectonics of the spatial configuration, as well as underlining its hierarchical layout and the logic of its structure. Here, we encounter a second mistake: the idea that ornamentation is an impurity in the architectonic space. If anything, it makes far more sense to think of ornamentation as punctuation in a text. We don’t regard signs that are not letters as “not contributing to the text.” Indeed, it is through the interplay of words, sentences, and punctuation that meaning emerges and can be directed and emphasized. For anyone who doubts this, try to read a text in majuscule script to see what punctuation adds.
3. Third, we can make a similar point about ornamentation. The combination of structure and ornamentation adds to the precise articulation of an idea. It adds accents, directs the attention, determines the rhythm with which one moves through a building, and guides the eye and the mind alike. Moreover, in its articulation, it makes an aesthetic order visible: an aesthetic order, that is, which is intrinsic to the logic of the building, but which is also simultaneously externally expressed. The external order embeds the building in a larger, encompassing cultural logic or worldview, whether philosophical, religious, or economic. The interplay between structure and ornamentation adds a spatial punctuation that makes this order perceptible—indeed, readable—and also architecturally conveys a spatially expressed logic.
The idea of a logic that is spatially expressed can maybe be found in its purest and most tangible form in the work of Benedictine monk and architect Dom. Hans van der Laan (1904–1991). Van der Laan developed a metric system centred on the plastic number, which he used for the design of the St. Benedictusberg Abbey in Mamelis, the theory of which he worked out in his treatise Architectonic Space (Van Der Laan, 1983). For Van Der Laan, the metric underpinning was not just a means to achieve for the ideal shape, but a generative method for reaching a spatial consistency between the largest and the smallest elements that constitute a building. Walking through the building, this consistency pre-reflectively makes itself felt pervasively. All spaces are curiously harmonious, although the material use is extremely simple. Ornamentation highlights some spaces, but more often, it is the consistency of the composition that translates a hidden order into stone, making for a peaceful and tranquil architectural setting.
Figure 6: Chapel of the St. Benedictusberg Abbey in Mamelis, Dutch Limburg. Photograph by author.
The logic that is expressed spatially punctuates life, adding details without necessarily being classifiable as ornamentation. At the same time, edges, steps, construction beams, and pillars create a truly artificial order that is as simple as possible, yet without becoming either bland, stylish, or marketable. The details of a few steps meeting a corner and a column show how much consistency can be achieved with so little (see figure 7 below).
4. Fourth, we can extend this line of thinking towards the intrinsic order of the building: it is a logic that is implied and allusively articulated rather than expressed propositionally. Just in the same way that the meaning of a text has to be read “between the lines,, the implied logic that governs monastic minimalism is one in which a seamless bridge is built between the values of a worldview and its coherent application in the cultural products of those values. We cannot think about the phenomenon of monasticism without simultaneously incorporating the material aspects of its ascetic, rigorous, and simple lifestyle. So, everything in a monastery points to the devotion, seriousness, severity with which that lifestyle is practiced. There is virtually no gap between the community’s values and the way of embodying these values in the manifestly real world.[i]
Figure 7: Detailing of the corner, column and steps. Photograph by author.
It is on this point that I diverge from Aureli’s otherwise compelling critical analysis of asceticism in modern design. In discussing the lay-out of monasteries, he has the following to say:
The cenobitic monastery provides us with the first instance of the management of time through strict scheduling. Bells give the hours a specific sound … which regulates the sequence of activities with the same precision as the Taylorist factory. The body of the monk is also strictly regulated. The very idea of the habit, which describes both a personal attitude and a collective ethos, becomes within monasticism a specific object, the habitus, the clothing worn by monks and prelates. (Aureli, 2010: p. 22).
That the monastic rule orders and structures life is a given. In some cases, monastic discipline is even taken as the very paradigm of daily discipline and routine. But to confuse the rhythm of a monastery with a factory is to miss a very crucial point about such practices: they are not aimed at soulless repetition and mechanic rhythm, but the subtly vary, modulate and morph through the religious year. Besides that, the time not spent participating in religious activities is devoted to personal cultivation – exactly the feature that is lacking in mechanized, Fordist production. The toll of the bell announcing a mass is not a sign to start producing again: on the contrary, it is the demarcation of a spiritual exercise that has no instrumental value as such. A little further on in the text, Aureli appears to touch on a similar point:
Rather than a generic container or a symbolic monument, the architecture of the monastery is an apparatus that obsessively frames and identifies living activities. It is not by chance that the first architectural drawing is the famous plan most probably drafted as a blueprint for an ‘ideal’ Benedictine monastery, preserved in the library of the Monastery of St. Gallen. (Aureli, 2010: p. 23)
The strict organisation of the monastery was not meant to replace life with a rule, but to make the rule so consistent with the form of life chosen by the monks that the rule as such would almost disappear. This aspect of monastic life is made evident in the simplest monastic rule ever presented, which is the one drafted by Augustine: dilige et quod vis face – love and do what you want. Unlike the logic of disciplinary institutions, the ends here do not justify the means; rather, means and ends perfectly coincide. (Aureli, 2010: p. 24)
The Augustinian rule is the diametric opposite of the Taylorist factory. It is an encouragement to discipline, because through practice, freedom ensues. It takes hard work to remove oneself from an instrumental rationality mindset and open oneself up to the formidable task of making means and ends coincide. In effect, this means to put Kant’s Categorical Imperative fully into action. In a time of ecological degradation, this demand is more necessary than ever, as is a radical departure from the Taylorist paradigm towards forms of personal and collective cultivation (Hanna and Paans 2022; Paans 2023c).
We should also pay attention to the notion of habitus as Aureli introduces it. The habit is the clothing worn by minks, and it determines their appearance as people engaged in personal cultivation. But likewise, the range of possibilities is limited by donning it: to become a monk is voluntarily to forego some of the possibilities that life has to offer. This choice engenders a new set of habits structured by the monastic rule. In turn, taking these up thought-shapes and mind-shapes the practicing subject (Hanna and Paans, 2021). But over time, those habits become an integral part of oneself. One has acquired literally a new habitus—literally the natural shape into which a tree or shrubs grows if it is left to the elements. Likewise, through discipline and (creative) piety, the mind acquires a new habitus.
The personal aspect in all this is enormously important, as this allows each individual to instantiate and embody their communal values in ways that they are best equipped to do. Roland Barthes describes this as idiorrhytmy—from idios or “particular,” similarly to idiosyncrasy (Barthes, 2013: p. 8). Everyone must be able to retain some penchant of individuality in order to serve to a collective goal optimally. Correspondingly, he also notes how institutions like the prison or the mental health wards are set up in diametric opposition to this tendency.
If we compare the material expression of modern, reductionist minimalism with the values it is supposed to represent, we encounter a conflict that is deeply ethical. The very spatial language of simplicity is use as a means to express the highest cultural refinement. However, it is not merely refinement that is expressed, but cultural achievement as well. To be cultured is to have achieved a level of aesthetical acumen for which all cluttering, all ornamentation is but a vulgar distraction. Only the pure inhabit the minimalist heaven. The underlaying value is arrogance and disdain. Especially disdain for Life itself – it is as if the modern mind cannot deal with the world as it is.
To be sure, there are places on the Earth that the modern, Western person cannot deal with, ranging from the squalid living conditions of the 19th-century city, to contemporary refugee camps in war-torn areas, to slums. But to retreat into a world of cultured reduction so as to keep the clutter out, is a form of escapism fuelled by contempt. This statement might come across as brazen or needlessly hyperbolic, but I believe that it is fully implicit in the modern idea of the avant-garde.
The avant-garde is an elite of (artistic) pioneers who chart the course of (material) progress for the masses to follow. This very image already divides society in those who chart the course, those who follow it, and those who refuse to go along with it (i.e. conservatives). The problem with the avant-garde is not that there are pioneering spirits who try out new modes of expression or design. Such individuals have always existed, and a great deal of progress is owed to them, even to the point that the figure of the Bohemian became almost synonymous with artistic capability during the 19th century. The problem with the avant-garde is the fact that a self-conscious, self-appointed elite claims to lay out the course of progress for the great (and ignorant) mass to follow and obey. The avant-garde presents itself to itself as the producer of the culture. This self-presentation comes, however, with a demand: it requires a kind of aesthetic and cognitive acculturation that sets the members of the elite apart from the rabble. There is something curious proto-authoritarian and even rabidly elitist about this conception. It draws dividing lines between those who are “in” on the demands of avant-garde cultural refinement, and those who are “out” and can never hope to aspire to it.[ii]
Yet, the cosmos is our home. But, as opposed to what Anthony Vidler has so aptly called the “modern unhomely,” a sense of disorientation, displacement, and unease has always accompanied the modernist project (Vidler, 1992). This is readily understandable if we take into account the fact that the Industrial Revolution encompassed the introduction of machine-working, factories, the emergence of the modern polis, and new blights like environmental pollution and subjective alienation on a massive scale. But the very fact that we are fundamentally at home in the cosmos is what fuels our fundamental hunger for meaning, and also our fundamental need for beauty. Like ornament, beauty is not something inessential that is added later on for decorative purposes. It is the very foundation upon which our entire interaction with the physical environment rests. The mechanistic landscapes of advanced or late capitalism, the widespread destruction, and the art that is all about the “concept,” represent just an empty husk, devoid of anchorage and footing. To “orient oneself in thinking” as Kant wrote, can only succeed by having a “ground of subjective differentiation” (Kant, 1786/1996: p. 9). We may understand this as the pre-reflective, essentially embodied insight that one reasons from a certain point of departure, a base, so to speak, from which the wider environment is encountered.
5. Fifth, and now returning to the characteristics of monastic minimalism, we can see that the very idea of functionality is worked out along different lines than the functionality that came to determine architecture, industrial design and urbanism during the 20th century. To have a function is to serve a purpose. The monastic building serves those inhabiting it, those staying in it, those who seek refuge, those who rely on its religious character. As a social institution, the monastery (and by extension, the order) serves the world or at least their direct environment. We can extend this thought and see how the entire monastic building and its organization is set up once again in full agreement with the underlying values, which are intended to serve the Church or the divine more generally. All this puts the idea of functionality in a new light: it has no longer to do with determining the dimensions of spaces based on the activities taking place in them, but it demands (i) that only material necessities should be included, and (ii) that these are determined by a sophisticated picture of human life, theologically expressed the core values of the monastic order.
There is an enormous difference between including only material necessities and the reductionist form-language of modernist minimalism, although the latter claims to accomplish the former. In reality, these two things are not at all alike. The material necessities that we find in a monastery distil the very essence of a lifestyle, bring it all back to its very core. The items, objects, and tools one finds in a monastery reflect the choices of its inhabitants. But simultaneously, against this background of austerity, there are small indications of life itself, small excesses that show that the sacred space is inhabited by human beings who brings some of the affirmations of Life into the strict monastic structure. This can be seen in the adjacent workshops or personal items in the monk’s cells. Life cannot be aesthetically reduced: it affirms itself against such dogmatic puritanism. Compare this to the touched-up image of the modern minimalist home. One would be afraid to put even a book on the table. If anything, the modern minimalist world promises a generic eternal in which life, cultural customs, and personality don’t have a place (Paans, 2019).
Figure 8: What are we looking at? Conceptual art and sterile white exhibition space in the Antwerp Museum of the Arts. Photograph by author.
The form-language of modern minimalism is indeed thoroughly reductionist, not merely in the sense of favouring geometric simplicity, but in enforcing an aestheticized way of life that strips the fullness of human being in favour of a soulless, aestheticized caricature of it.
Paradoxically then, it is over against the imposed (religious) strictures of monastic minimalism that life itself comes to the fore all the more forcefully. It appears all the more vividly because the social-institutional structure of the monastic setting is inherently sensitive to the fact the world is imperfect. This translates into the feature that the very imperfection of human life is accepted as an integral part of its structure. This point cannot be emphasized enough. If one sets up social institutions with a perfect human subject in mind, the result will always be a series of attempts to chop down, maim, or reduce the subject in order to conform to whatever ideal the social institution projects. In short, the social institution is regarded as an instrument for producing perfect, uniform subjects in large quantities, be it the perfect productive subject, the perfect cultural subject, or the ideal subject for manipulation.
The idea of the “cultural elite” is just such a destructive, deforming social institution, as is its enforced language of formal purity, its aestheticized reductionism, its obsessive whiteness, its cleanliness, and its merciless order. This artificial order breathes the spirit of purification and elitism. It claims to be simple only to turn out to be arrogant; it claims to be pure only to turn out to elitist. Once again, this is a world away from many of the ideals of the early modernistic architects and planners who—often with good intentions—imagined a clean and hygienic world where epidemics, poor living conditions, filthy air and streets, and pollution would all be remedied by technology and engineering.
6. The sixth and concluding element is emergent, in the sense that if conditions 1-5 are all satisfied, the spatial configuration almost of its own breathes and radiates a kind of spatial stillness. As I have argued elsewhere, stillness is a quality that one can individually develop, and that makes one fully aware of one’s existential agency (Paans, 2023b). Stillness has nothing to do with passivity, but instead everything to do with attentive and tranquil focus, the quality that in Zen Buddhism is often referred to as “an empty mind.” Our world seems focused on driving out stillness. And, in the wake of this cultural tendency, there is little room for stillness in the modern minimalist spaces. At best, they aim at relaxation, but always there is a carefully aestheticized element that disturbs inner peace. The devil is once again in the details: to inhabit a modern minimalist space is to be involuntarily dragged into an aesthetic performance, a set of cultural expectations that is suggested with a subliminal force which disturbs true stillness.
I should stress that any space that is designed with simplicity in mind can be conducive of fostering stillness, even the most everyday backyard or living room. The sublime, after all, can be experienced in many ways. However, I singled out monastic spaces because the qualities of true simplicity are often so clearly on display in such settings.
NOTES
[i] Of course, in some cases, such a gap does exist. The very opulence of Renaissance and Baroque cathedrals introduces an enormous gap between that the modesty which is supposed to be expressed religiously, and its exuberant material expression. To be sure, an advocate of such artistic expression might invoke the argument that humanity has received its creativity and material abundance from God in ordert to express divine glory in the most complete manner.
[ii] In a curious dialectical reversal, it is the cultural elite itself that promotes the notion that art and design ought to be democratized—and carefully curated, of course—so that everyone can have their Warholian fifteen minutes of world fame. This has led to a strange paradox that those in charge of cultural institutions profess allegiance to a cultural climate which approvingly nods while the masses are allowed play in the artistic sandbox. Not surprisingly, this exploitation of the everyday in modern art has made any informative discussion on good taste and the value of the classical arts impossible, because here as elsewhere, a deadly cultural relativism has cast its pall over everything.
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