In architecture, this kind of theory dates from at least the Austrian modernist Adolf Loos and his 1908 essay “Ornament and Crime,” in which he didn’t exactly say that the former was the latter, but did observe that, “If I want to eat a piece of gingerbread I will choose one that is completely plain.” To him, “it tastes better this way.”

When the plain architecture advanced by Loos had become an increasingly mainstream taste, this aesthetic austerity was easy to conflate with the no-nonsense mood of emerging economic and political crises — prompting the editors of The Architect and Building News to comment in 1931 that “this phase of austerity is sure to pass eventually,” but “something of the impress of this sensation of aesthetic restraint will remain, because it is sympathetic to any age preoccupied, as is the present one, with very serious problems requiring strong sobriety of thought and action.”

Such austerity, though, is as much glamorous as solemn. As an aesthetic category, it’s strangely aspirational. It can become a mode of luxury, even excess. The difference between a minimalist room and an under-furnished room is freedom of choice.

Today’s minimalism conjures a life of such intangible ease that the mere creature comforts of visibly abundant stuff are transcended. It makes a near ethical virtue out of an aesthetic practice of refusal (perhaps extending, disconcertingly, to notions of physical aesthetics in which obesity is associated with poverty and to be too rich is to be too thin). While Mies and his contemporaries introduced their skinny-framed, flat-roofed, white-walled architecture in the context of prototype public housing, they perfected it in deluxe retreats like the Farnsworth House.

Today’s most celebrated Minimalist architect, John Pawson, counts among his clients both poverty-sworn monks and the fashion designer Calvin Klein, whose own designs specialize in enabling you to pay much more for the right much less. Pawson’s work happens to be beautiful and kind; its proportions are the natural ratios that you find in shells and flowers. It gives you room to breathe. And yet it’s subject to elegant deceits.

A building of few details would seem to be a building of few secrets. But austerity in architecture connotes a visual and functional transparency that it completely fails to provide. Any seamless-seeming building is full of complex joints and junctions, fixes and fudges that make a thousand parts look like a single monolithic, sculptural whole. To look as if you left everything out, you have to sneak everything in. What seems spartan is usually, invisibly, baroque.

In today’s architecture, in which labor is generally expensive and materials cheap, there is a tendency to slap stuff over stuff until it all lines up or looks finished — whether the resulting form amounts to something you’d call minimal or colonial or anything in between.