The debate between minimalism and maximalism started in the late 19th and early 20th centuries when industrialization was accelerating. Two sensibilities emerged: reductive purity and ornamental vitality.

In 1908, Adolf Loos delivered his incendiary essay Ornament and Crime to argue that ornament was a sign of cultural degeneracy. Eliminating it from functional objects was necessary for progress, marking the foundational text for architectural minimalism.

The 1910s-1930s saw minimalism institutionalized through avant-garde movements. De Stijl, led by Theo van Doesburg, Piet Mondrian, and Gerrit Rietveld, reduced design to primary colors, black grids, and right angles. At the same time, the Bauhaus championed functionalism, geometric purity, and the unity of art and technology.

The phrase “less is more,” coined by Mies van der Rohe in the 1920s, became the mantra of modernist minimalism.

In contemporary architecture, minimalism has endured. Hiren Patel, founder of Hiren Patel Architects (HPA), talks about how minimalism doesn’t necessarily mean stripping a space of detail. Instead, it can mean reducing the visual field to create focus, directing attention towards light, movement, material or a particular experience.

Patel frames this filtering as something closer to discipline than restriction. "You are able to filter when you work with maximalism," he says. "As a beginner, it’s like you’re a child with 36 sketch pens to make a painting. You will use all of them to make it colourful. Slowly, you get mature, and you pick your colours." The maturity he describes isn't a rejection of abundance so much as an earned exit from it.

That learning is central to how Patel reads minimalist architecture, even the work of architects he admires most. Recalling Charles Correa's later buildings, stripped almost entirely of ornament, he says, "To get this simplicity, you have to become a master of an art. He has done so much, that's why he chose to make it as simple as possible." Simplicity, in this account, is what remains after everything unnecessary has already been tried and discarded.

Patel is also careful not to universalize the aesthetic itself, only the instinct behind it. "Minimal is a universal idea," he says, "but every culture has its own way of taking it forward." Minimalism, in other words, travels as a principle, not a style, which is precisely why it looks different in Kyoto, Copenhagen, and Ahmedabad without stopping being minimalism.

By the 1960s, a counter-movement emerged. Robert Venturi published Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, which served as a gentle manifesto to reject modernist purism. He declared “less is a bore,” arguing for hybridity, ambiguity, and “messy vitality over obvious unity.” This became the intellectual foundation of postmodernism and architectural maximalism.

The argument for minimalism today

After this, maximalism flourished. Charles Jencks’s The Language of Post-Modern Architecture codified the movement, celebrating double-coding and symbolism. The Memphis Group exploded onto the scene with gaudy colours, clashing patterns, and anti-functional form.

The design ideology drew from historical precedents such as the Baroque and Rococo periods, Victorian eclecticism, and even vernacular traditions that layered pattern and meaning. Unlike minimalism’s universalization impulse, maximalism celebrated context and cultural specificity.

Pavitra Rajaram, the founder and creative director of Pavitra Rajaram Design (PRD), resists the minimal framing before the debate even starts. "I don't subscribe to minimal," she says. "I subscribe to essential. I think Indian culture exists on an axis between essential and maximal." That axis, rather than a binary, is how she accounts for a design tradition that has always held restraint and abundance in the same room. "The beauty of India is that we don't live in binaries," she says. "The beauty of our culture is that we exist in a very layered and storied world."

For Rajaram, whether a space reads as minimal or maximal often has less to do with the design itself than with who is standing in it. When talking about her recent project for Aditi Rao Hydari and Siddharth’s Chennai home, she says, "Aditi's bedroom can be seen as maximal because there is pattern on pattern, or minimal because it is white on white. "It's perspective and how one experiences a space." That shift, from object to occupant, is what keeps her version of maximalism from tipping into excess for its own sake. "The most important part of the brief is what a person in that space wants to experience," she says. "So if you're led by human experience, then you will always stop short of chaos."

Neither architect argues from a fixed position. Patel's minimalism is something earned through filtering, not an absence of decisions but the result of them. Rajaram refuses the binary outright, placing Indian design on an axis between essential and maximal rather than a choice between two camps.

Asked to name where that balance actually lives, Patel points to the designer Rajiv Saini, calling him "a composer" who works with material fearlessly, in a maximalist way, while still holding onto the essence of minimalism. Rajaram's own middle ground needs no such example. She describes it simply as "considered, thoughtful, authentic, experiential," a space's worth measured by what the person standing in it needs to feel, not by how much or how little surrounds them.

That's where a century of theory, from Loos to Venturi to the Memphis Group, actually settles.