Mies van der Rohe define Architecture: aphorism, 1923. Considerations on the meaning of the precept and its translation.

Abstract

The present article deals with the translation into Portuguese of a text published in Berlin, 1923 by Mies van der Rohe at the avant-garde magazine “G”. The text is a “aphorism,” ie, a brief sentence that expresses a doctrine, a fundamental principle that must be accepted in order to understand the topic from which it comes, in this case, it was Architecture. The importance of that short document was that in it we found the first time that Mies van der Rohe, not an important architect at the time, defined what he thought Architecture was, and made it consistently with their way of doing architecture, ie, using the minimum possible average. A short statement but loaded with meaning.