Less is Enough: On Architecture and Asceticism

the most blatant was a piece written by the then architecture critic for the New York Times, Nicolai Ourousoff, significantly titled ‘It Was Fun Till the Money Ran Out’.

Rather than owning a robe, a house or a book, they would use these things. Here use was understood not as a value but as the act of sharing things, as the supreme form of living in common.

There is an increasing interest in more socially oriented ways of living such as co-housing or sharing domestic space beyond the compound of the family apartment. But what is seldom discussed is that this way of life requires some effort. To live together requires less individual freedom, although that may be no bad thing.

However this less should not be transformed into an ideology: less is not more, less is just less.

Within industrialisation, distraction in the form of idle talk, lack of focus, daydreaming, was a way in which subjects would be able to disconnect themselves from production and stay within themselves. But in a cognitive production in which every fraction of our life is put to work, distraction becomes a form of production, because it pushes people to do many things at the same time.

is the photograph that portrays Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple, in the living room of his house in Los Gatos, California. Taken by Diana Walker in 1983, when Jobs was already a successful multi-millionaire entrepreneur, it shows him with a cup of tea in one hand, sitting on the floor in the middle of a conspicuously empty room furnished only with a lamp and a record player. There is a certain beauty about the photograph precisely because it does not look constructed, but conveys a sense of everyday life.

Living in a context of constant cognitive stimulation, what we experience is no longer effectively communicable

The idea of a structure where individual and collective life are juxtaposed without being merged is also evident in Carthusian monasticism, which attempted to combine eremitic and cenobitic life in the same place.

Barthes was fascinated by this way of living, and noted that precisely this form of monasticism was the seedbed for what would later become a fundamental typology of the modern world: the single cell or single room.

From the outset, monasticism manifested itself as an inevitable and radical critique of power, not by fighting against it, but by leaving it: