Who strive - you don't know how the others strive
To paint a little thing like that you smeared
Carelessly passing with your robes afloat,-
Yet do much less, so much less, Someone says,
(I know his name, no matter) - so much less!
Well, less is more, Lucrezia.
Andrea del Sarto, Robert Browning
One would not have thought Mies van der Rohe read much Browning, but maybe, as James Thurber indicated, quotations from nineteenth-century English poetry were, for some, common currency in Central Park (‘The hounds of Spring are on Winter’s traces.’)
But certainly Mies put the word play into fashion. As Le Corbusier famously explained to the woman who complained about the lack of dado rails and fluffy pelmets in La Maison du Fada, 'Your less is my gain', although he later claimed, shortly before he died of a surfeit of seawater at the age of 77, that he had meant to say the opposite: 'My less is your pain.' Modern historians agree that he was by this time suffering from Terminal Confusion (a condition common in famous architects desirous of building airports and railway stations). Possibly he was unsettled by his apprehension of a breach of copyright suit from that young whipper-snapper ('ce jeune petit malin') Mies van der Rohe. Or it may have been his enduring bitterness at the failure of his attempt to be appointed chief urban planner to the Vichy government, thus enabling the implementation of his earlier plan to demolish central Paris north of the Seine. Or perhaps he was just troubled by his growing realisation that, after he had proclaimed 'Chairs are architecture; sofas are bourgeois', every chair he subsequently designed (not to mention his sofas) bore an uncanny resemblance to a sofa.
Meanwhile more is indeed less in modern London: the Guardian reports that a penthouse at One Hyde Park has sold, via Ukrainian lawyers, for £136 million, with a further £50 million spent on fitting out (there is no information on the furniture chosen or budgeted for). The £136 million, as is also reported, would buy 1564 houses in Burnley, Lancashire, once a thriving hub of Victorian industry.
