“LESS IS MORE” ETERNAL TRUTH, ETERNAL GOOD AND ETERNAL BEAUTIFUL Design has undergone substantial changes over the last few years, the new technologies, the new ways of making architecture have distanced the thought of designing from its graphic representation: thought and image have not always coincided. Design’s role, its sense has lost credibility, it has been emptied of meaning, it is no longer representative of itself; the relationship which once existed between idea and knowledge has altered its connotation: the idea is no longer the mind’s design but the design of avant-garde technology, of the exploration of the virtual. As Platone posited, ideas are the cause which allows the world to be thought of, they therefore form the premise of knowledge. The Idea, which is more properly translatable with «shape», is subsequently the real object of the knowledge: but it is not only the epistemology of reality, i.e. the cause which allows us to contemplate the world, the cities, but rather it constitutes the ontological foundation as well, being the reason that causes the world to be, that makes cities exist. Ideas represent the eternal Truth, the eternal Good, the eternal Beauty, to which the vain and transitory dimension of sensory phenomena, of transformations of reality are juxtaposed. Today’s cities are mirrors of contemporaneity, it is as a matter of fact that the sensory phenomena which trigger the becoming of the images, homologated cities, virtual cities, mutating cities become blurred: it is no longer possible to distinguish reality from imagination. The images and their becoming overlap making “Reality” increasingly more unfathomable and there is no instrument that can export the concreteness of such transformations into time. However all of this complexity, all of this expressive and architectural opulence, renders that which is “intelligible”, indecipherable. In a process of eliminating the superfluous, of purification, summing up in Mies van der Rohe’s formula “less is more”, one gets the urge to perform a process of exclusion: to cut, eliminate, exclude, trim down, take away, simplify, lighten, reduce the architectural reality. The architecture’s beauty can therefore recover, its finest expression.