Pier Vittorio Aureli: Less Is
Enough: On Architecture and
Asceticism
Release date: 30 August, 2013
Published by Strelka Press
Available as an ebook from Amazon and iTunes
Digital publishing house Strelka Press announces the latest in its series of essays, Less Is Enough: On Architecture and Asceticism by architect and theorist Pier Vittorio Aureli.
“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? 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.
Excerpt: As Walter Benjamin put it, we can no longer trust the depth and richness of human experience. Living in a context of constant cognitive stimulation, what we experience is no longer effectively communicable. It is for this reason that the only acceptable way of life for Benjamin is to be a modern “barbarian” who is able to start from nothing and make “a little go a long way; to begin from little and build up further, looking neither left, nor right”… Being himself a “precarious” freelance intellectual worker with no stable income, Benjamin knew all too well that to live within a minimally furnished room was more a necessity than a choice. And yet for Benjamin the more this condition was made explicit in the architecture of the interior, the more it would offer the ground for a radical way of living.
Pier Vittorio Aureli is an architect and writer. He currently teaches at the Architectural Association 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).
Strelka Press is a digital-first publishing house for new writing on architecture, design and the city. Publishing essays as ebooks, our mission is to be a crossroads for critical thinking from around the world. Based in Moscow and London, we believe that by providing a platform for international debate we can be a tool for change in Russia.
Strelka Press is the publishing arm of the Strelka Institute for Media, Architecture and Design in Moscow. We publish in English and Russian.
