While a decade ago architecture enjoyed critical and even popular acclaim, since the beginning of the recession in 2007, things have changed. Architecture’s spectacle is increasingly viewed with suspicion and even contempt by critics, the public, and especially by a younger generation of socially engaged architects. Against architectural hubris and its connection with financial speculation, Mies’s famous dictum, ‘less is more’, has become popular again. While for Mies ‘less is more’ was an aesthetic principle, critics and architects have reclaimed its relevance in a slightly moralistic tone. In this way, ‘less is more’ resonates with the politics of austerity that capital has imposed all over Europe and beyond...