Form-follows-function anthology

THE QUOTATIONS

and comments

# marks comments on direct mistakes

1841 EMERSON

Ralph Waldo Emerson: THE NECESSARY

"Arising out of eternal reason, one and perfect, whatever is beautiful rests on the foundation of the necessary. Nothing is arbitrary, nothing is insulated in beauty. It depends forever on the necessary and the useful. The plumage of the bird, the mimic plumage of the insect, has a reason for its rich colors in the constitution of the animal. Fitness is so inseparable an accompaniment of beauty that it has been taken for it. The most perfect form to answer an end is so far beautiful. In the mind of the artist, could we enter there, we should see the sufficient reason for the last flourish and tendril of hi work, just as every tint and spine in the seashell preexists in the secreting organs of the fish. We feel, in seeing a noble building, which rhymes well, as we do in hearing a perfect song, that it is spiritually organic, that is, had a necessity in nature for being, was one of the possible forms in the Divine mind, and is now only discovered and executed by the artist, not arbitrarily composed by him. (...) We see how each work of art sprang irresistibly from necessity, and, moreover, took its form from the broad hint of Nature." (106-107)

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “Thoughts on Art.” In The Literature of Architecture: The Evolution of Architectural Theory and Practice in Nineteenth-Century America, ed. Don Gifford. 98-119. New York: Dutton, 1966.

COMMENTS TO 1841 EMERSON

c1: A functional theory of aesthetic value. Emerson ought to be mentioned in connection with the FFF-formula because he, together with Horatio Greenough represents a position which, some half a century before Sullivan, contains all the central thoughts launched by Sullivan, and summarized in his FFF-dictum. The above quotation, published in 1841, outlines a functional theory of aesthetic value which could have been written by Sullivan – had he been able to write as matter-of-factly as Emerson.

c2: The necessary. Emerson‘s observations about the necessary in art feel to be very right, perhaps thanks to his masterly language. But the theme of the necessary which he helped to introduce, can be said to have started an epoch of radical confusion by feeding unrealistic visions of objective design. Architects and designers embraced the notion of necessity as a pretext for redefining their heteronomous profession, the applied art of architecture and design, into an autonomous, fine art.

c3: Mimicry. Emerson’s matter-of-factly mention of “mimic plumage of the insect” side by side with “the necessary and ... the useful” appears to create a logical problem. If mimicry, as the resemblance of one animal to another, evolved as a means of protection came to be called since 1860s (cf. *Bates 1863, Martin 1996), is defined as an expression of necessity, that is as something natural, why should not the historicist and eclecticist architecture of the last century, which gave modern buildings resemblance of Greek temples or Gothic town-halls, be on the same logic considered unnatural and arbitrary? -- Also Sullivan bumped into the phenomenon of mimicry in nature (without calling it so) but he argued, typically, that the phenomenon was an exception to the rule, the rule being that in nature everything visually reveals rather than conceals its own intrinsic essence. In his Kindergarten Chats ch.XII Sullivan wrote: “Now, it stands to reason that a thing looks like what it is, and, vice versa, it is what it looks like. I will stop here and make exception of certain little straight, brown canker-worms that I have picked from rose-bushes. They look like little brown, dead twigs at first. But speaking generally, outward appearances resemble inner purposes” (cf. Sullivan 1965: 43). By asserting that mimicry was an exception to the rule Sullivan avoided Emerson’s logical catch. But in contrast to Emerson, Sullivan wrote his text some 40 years after Darwin’s theory of natural selection was launched; far from seeing it as an exception, Darwin considered mimicry a wonderful illustration of the working of natural selection (cf. Darwin 1929, ch. 14). Sullivan who mentions Darwin as one of the authors in which he “found much food” (cf. Sullivan 1956) was either not familiar with Darwin’s view of mimicry, or he , together with the majority of the biologist in the decades around 1900, had considered Darwin’s doctrine of natural selection a more or less refuted theory (cf. Rádl 1930; Gould 1982; Bowler 1983). Besides, the American Darwinism was of a special brand; the most important American Darwinian and Darwin’s contemporary, Asa Grey, remained within a religious framework, being “a theistic Darwinian”, i.e. a believer in natural theology (cf. Dupree 1959). This may throw some light on why Sullivan considered mimicry an exception. -- As to the semantic implication of Sullivan’s sentence “Now, it stands to reason that a thing looks like what it is, and, vice versa, it is what it looks like.”, see my comments on what I propose to call ‘semantic automatism’, in c1 to 1966 NORBERG-SCHULZ; see also 1938 ULRICH: c3; 1954 VAN DOREN: c1; 1984 FRIEDLANDER; 1990 KRIPPENDORF •

1843 and later GREENOUGH

Horatio GREENOUGH

1843 ... GREENOUGH (1) “The aim of the artists ... should be first to seek the essential; when the essential hath been found, then, if ever, will be the time to commence the embellishment. I will venture to predict that the essential, when found, will be complete. I will venture to predict that completeness will instantly throw off all that is not itself, and will thus command: ‘Though shalt have no other gods beside me.’ In a word, completeness is the absolute utterance of the Godhead ...” (81)

1843 ... GREENOUGH (2) “I base my opinion of embellishment upon the hypothesis that there is not one truth in religion, another in mathematics, and a third in physics and in art; but that there is one truth, even as one God.” (74)

1843 GREENOUGH (3): “I know full well that, without dress and ornament, there are places whence one is expelled. I am too proud to seek admittance in disguise. I had rather remain in the street than get in by virtue of a borrowed coat.” (71)

1843 ... GREENOUGH (4) “There is no arbitrary law of proportion, no unbending model of form. There is scarce a part of the animal organization which we do not find elongated or shortened, increased, diminished, or suppressed, as the wants of the genus or species dictate, as their exposure or their work may require. The neck of the swan and that of the eagle, however different in character and proportion, equally charm the eye and satisfy the reason. (...) The law of adaptation is the fundamental law of nature in all structures.”

1843 ... GREENOUGH (5) “If I be told that such a system as mine would produce nakedness, I accept the omen. In nakedness I behold the majesty of the essential instead of the trappings of pretension.” (75)

1843 ... GREENOUGH (6) “When I define Beauty as the promise of Function; Action as the presence of Function; Character as the record of Function, I arbitrarily divide that which is essentially one.” (Greenough 1962:71; Relative and independent Beauty)

1843 ... GREENOUGH (7) “If we trace architecture from its perfection in the days of Pericles to its manifest decay in the reign of Constantine, we shall find that one of the surest symptoms of decline was the adoption of admired forms and models for purposes not contemplated in their invention. The forum became a temple; the theatre was turned into a church; nay, the column, that organized member, that subordinate part, set up for itself, usurped unity, and was a monument! The great principles of architecture being once abandoned, correctness gave way to novelty, economy and vainglory associated produced meanness and pretension.” (54-5)

1843 ... GREENOUGH (8) “I maintain that the first downward step was the introduction of the first inorganic, nonfunctional element, whether of shape or of color.” (75)

1843 ... GREENOUGH (9): “Could we carry into our civil architecture the responsibilities that weigh upon our shipbuilding, we should ere long have edifices as superior to the Parthenon, for the purposes that we require, as the Constitution or Pennsylvania is to the galley of the Argonauts. Could our blunders on terra firma be put to the same dread test that those shipbuilders are, little would be now left to say on this subject.” (61)

1843 ... GREENOUGH (10) “Instead of forcing the functions of every sort of building [sic] into one general form, adopting an outward shape for the sake of the eye or association, without reference to the inner distribution, let us begin from the heart as the nucleus, and work outward.” [Such] “unflinching adaptation of a building to its position and use gives, as a sure product of that adaptation, character and expression.” ()

1843 ... GREENOUGH (11) “As its first result, the bank would have the physiognomy of a bank, the church would be recognized as such, nor would the billiard room and the chapel wear the same uniform of columns and pediments.” (63)

Greenough, Horatio. 1962. Form and Function: Remarks on Art, Design, and Architecture by Horatio Greenough. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

COMMENTS TO 1843 ... GREENOUGH (1-11)

(1-11) c1: Greenough himself. Horatio Greenough was an American Neo-Classicist sculptor (cf. Wright 1963) who spent most of his adult life in Florence in Italy. He develop a consuming interest in architectural theory, and in 1830-1840s wrote a number of articles which in their attitudes and proposals were strikingly similar to Sullivan’s own and to those of later functionalists; see (5)c1. above.

(1-11) c2: How did Greenough become a part of the modernist pedigree? Greenough’s name seems to have been imported to Europe with the British 1938 edition of Walter Curt Behrendt’s US-published book Modern Building: Its Nature, Problems and Forms where Greenough was presented and discussed as a precursor of Sullivan. It seems that Greenough got for the first time rather full treatment here (though I am not familiar enough with the American material to be reasonably sure about it). The man who published some of Greenough’s texts prior to Harold A. Small’s best known Greenough anthology (Small 1962) appears to be Van Wyck Brooks; he was mentioned by Behrendt 1937: 116 and Mumford 1952: 116. I know nothing about him or his books as yet. It seems that Greenough’s name was not mentioned in connection with Sullivan before 1930s. One explanation may be that Greenough’s writings were too little known, another explanation may be that to bring up Greenough as an ideological predecessor of Sullivan was felt to be detracting from Sullivan’s own greatness. Greenough is not mention in the index of Mumford’s Brown Decades, and neither in (the index to) Hitchcock’s Modern Architecture: Romanticism and Reintegration.(1929). Neither is he mentioned in the index of Morrison’s Louis Sullivan: Prophet of Modern Architecture of 1935, or in Pevsner’s Pioneers of the Modern Movement from William Morris to Walter Gropius published in 1936. Behrens seems to be the first to give him a place of honor in the pedigree of modern architecture Behrendt 1937; *Wynne and Newhall 1939.

(1-11) c3: Pre-darwinian. Greenough died eight years before Charles Darwin launched his theory of natural selection. Mumford (see 1952 MUMFORD) claimed that Greenough had taken over the idea about function determining form from Lamarck. •

COMMENTS TO 1843 ... GREENOUGH (2)

(2) c1: Here Greenough supports his anti-ornamental doctrine by appealing to what he considered the highest possible authority: Greenough suggests that his view of embellishment is right because it agrees with that of God himself. Later functionalists used a modernized version of the same of argument: they appealed not to God but either to Nature or History, claiming that they do things the way Nature or History would do them. On the suggestion that these three authorities are interchangeable, cf. Popper 1969.

COMMENTS TO 1843 ... GREENOUGH (4)

(4) c1: Are Greenough’s formulations such as ‘...wants of genus or specie dictate...’ or the notion of ‘the law of adaptation’ to be characterized as Lamarckian, or simply (and loosely) as Pre-Darwinian?

COMMENTS TO 1843 ... GREENOUGH (5)

(5) c1: Formalist nature of functionalism. In this quotation Greenough seems to come closest to Sullivan’s FFF-formula. The statement also discloses the essentially formalist nature of the functionalist design philosophy: if beauty is seen as a ‘promise’ of utility, then it is logical to believe that the more beautiful (the more formally perfect) an object is designed, the more useful it is; cf. Tzonis 1972: 85 in 1982 CAPLAN (2): c2 quoted on the formalist nature of the modern movement. From the commonsense point of view it is of course a plain nonsense to believe in the rule ‘the more beautiful the more useful’. But it makes a lot of sense for the believers in the metaphysical theory of design, which postulated intrinsic, inherent solutions to problems, and where the designer is expected to tap this world of essences. •

COMMENTS TO 1843 ... GREENOUGH (11)

(11) c1: [the idea of ‘semantic automatism’]

1896 SULLIVAN

Louis Sullivan: THE LAW

1896 SULLIVAN (1) “... let me now state ... a final comprehensive formula. –– All things in nature have a shape, that is to say, a form, an outward semblance, that tells us what they are, that distinguishes them from ourselves and from each other. –– Unfailingly in nature these shapes express the inner life, the native quality, of the animal, tree, bird, fish, that they present to us; they are so characteristic, so recognizable, that we say, simply, it is ‘natural’ it should be so. (...) Unceasingly the essence of things is taking shape in the matter of things, and this unspeakable process we call birth and growth. (...) the heart is ever gladdened by the beauty, the exquisite spontaneity, with which life seeks and takes on its forms in an accord perfectly responsive to its needs. It seems ever as though the life and the form were absolutely one and inseparable, so adequate is the sense of fulfillment. –– Whether it be the sweeping eagle in his flight or the open apple-blossom, the toiling work-horse, the blithe swan, the branching oak, the winding stream at its base, the drifting clouds, over all the coursing sun, form ever follows function, and this is the law. Where function does not change form does not change. The granite rocks, the ever-brooding hills, remain for ages; the lightning lives, comes into shape, and dies in a twinkling. –– It is the pervading law of all things organic and inorganic, of all things physical and metaphysical, of all things human and all things superhuman, of all true manifestations of the head, of the heart, of the soul, that life is recognizable in its expression, that form ever follows function. This is the law. –– Shall we, then, daily violate this law in our art? Are we so decadent, so imbecile, so utterly weak of eyesight, that we cannot perceive this truth so simple, so very simple? Is it indeed a truth so transparent that we see through it but not see it? Is it really then, a very marvelous thing, or is it rather so commonplace, so everyday, so near a thing to us, that we cannot perceive that the shape, form, outward expression, design or whatever we may choose, of the tall office building should in the very nature of things follow the functions of the building, and that where function does not change, the form is not to change? ” (207-8)

1896 SULLIVAN (2) “And thus, when the native instinct and sensibility shall govern the exercise of our beloved art; when the known law, the respected law, shall be that form ever follows function; when our architects shall cease struggling and prattling handcuffed and vainglorious in the asylum of foreign school; when it is truly felt, cheerfully accepted, that this law opens up the airy sunshine of green fields, and gives to us a freedom that the very beauty and sumptuousness of the outworking of the law itself as exhibited in nature will deter any sane, any sensitive man from changing into licence, when it becomes evident that we are merely speaking a foreign language with a noticeable American accent, whereas each and every architect in the land might, under the benign influence of this law, express in the simplest, most modest, most natural way that which it is in him to say; that he might really and would surely develop his own characteristic individuality, and that the architectural art with him would certainly become a living form of speech, a natural form of utterance, giving surcease to him and adding treasures small and great to the growing art of his land; when we know and feel that Nature is our friend, not our implacable enemy – that an afternoon in the country, an hour by the sea, a full open view of one single day, through dawn, high noon, and twilight, will suggest to us so much that is rhythmical, deep, and eternal in the vast art of architecture, something so deep, so true, that all the narrow formalities, hard-and-fast rules, and strangling bonds of the schools cannot stifle it in us – then it may be proclaimed that we are on the high-road to a natural and satisfying art, an architecture that will soon became a fine art in the true, the best sense of the word, an art that will live because it will be of the people, for the people, and by the people.” (208-213)

Sullivan, Louis. “The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered (1896).” In Kindergarten Chats (revised 1918) and Other Writings, ed. Isabella Athey. 202-13. New York: George Wittenborn, 1947.

COMMENTS TO 1896 SULLIVAN (1-2)

c1: Sullivan’s theory not new. There is no doubt that ideas which Sullivan summarized in his formula were far from new at Sullivan’s time. In the 1890s they were something of buzz-ideas (cf. Charernbhak 1981), and the design philosophy which they represented goes all the way back to Ralph Waldo Emerson and Horatio Greenough (see above).

c2: The FFF-formula brand new. Nevertheless, as far as we know it was in Sullivan’s article quoted above that the dictum ’’form follows function’ (or rather ‘form ever follows function’) was launched for the first time. It was Sullivan’s former partner Adler who, in a polemical comment several months later the same year, cut the four-word dictum down to the three words (see 1896 DANKMAR ADLER). Sullivan used in his later articles and texts mostly the three-words-version; cf. Sullivan 1965a and Sullivan 1956.

c3: Sullivan or Greenough? Since 1950s Sullivan’s authorship of the dictum has been repeatedly contested. Quite some authors have been suggesting that the FFF-formula comes from Greenough rather than Sullivan. This idea seems to have been advanced first by 1951 NOWICKI, and afterwards by 1952 MUMFORD; 1954 NEUTRA; 1964 CHERMAYEFF; 1976 RYKWERT; 1977 BLAKE; 1981 WILLIAMS; 1985 RUDD; 1990 PILE; 1993 OWEN: and 1993 PALLASMAA. The Greenough authorship of the formula, however, has never confirmed – neither by the authors who suggested it (none of them ever came with a direct quotation from Greenough, proving the case), nor by recent Sullivan researchers such as Menocal 1981, Andrews 1985 or O’Gorman 1991. The suggestions that Greenough and not Sullivan is the author of the formula are as a rule only vaguely formulated; it is usually not clear whether the authors mean that the ideas the FFF-formula summarizes are found in Greenough’s writing, or whether the FFF-formula itself was coined by Greenough. The similarity between Greenough’s and Sullivan’s ‘philosophy’ of architecture is, however, obvious. Mumford (see 1952 MUMFORD) suggests that Sullivan must have known Greenough’s writing. We can add that one thing which hints that Sullivan probably did is that he never mentioned Greenough’s name. But then, was Greenough as a theorist of architecture known among the Chicago school architects?

c4: The ‘formula’. Sullivan himself calls FFF a ‘formula’, in keeping with the terminology used in natural sciences such as chemistry or mathematics, apparently in order to convey the message that FFF was a natural law producing forms which are natural and objective, i.e. non-arbitrary and not based on the designer’s own aesthetic preferences.

c5: Sullivan’s FFF-examples come almost exclusively from nature. It is interesting to note that in this article the majority of Sullivan’s examples explicitly illustrating this purported law are taken from the realm of nature – rather than culture. Besides, Sullivan’s illustrations of the purported law include not only organic objects (eagle, tree) but also inorganic objects (granite rocks) and natural events and phenomena such as streams, clouds or lightning (see 1901-1902 SULLIVAN: c3. Sullivan does mention artefacts too: in Kindergarten Chats he mentions a department store as an instance of forms following functions, but this seems to be about the only example of forms following functions in an artefact; see 1901-1902 SULLIVAN (1) &c2.

c6: Sullivan’s own design solutions allegedly not result of his choice. As Sullivan mentions himself, the tripartite division of the tall office building which he proposes in his article was suggested earlier by others, who had divisions of the classical column as a model. Sullivan claimed, however, that his division did not refer to columnal division at all but was a solution suggested by the problem itself. From design theory point of view the really new and original element in Sullivan’s tripartite solution was his insistence that he neither chose it or invented it – because that it was inherent in the problem, or, to put it differently (and in the now familiar mode) that the form followed the function (cf. O’Gorman 1991: 98).

c7: Natural art? Sullivan claims in the long concluding paragraph quoted as a whole under 1896 SULLIVAN (2) above, that “when the known law, the respected law, shall be that form ever follows function ... then it may be proclaimed that we are on the high-road to a natural and satisfying art...” Since he considers FFF to be a law of nature, it is only to be expected that results of applying this law would somehow be ‘natural’, and that it will produce ‘natural’ art. Although it seems unobjectionable to refer to art objects as more ‘natural’ or less ‘natural’ in the contexts of polemics or criticism – one artefact may be perceived, and praised, to be more ‘natural’ than the other one – the notion of natural art in absolute terms (in which Sullivan and functionalists seem to embrace it) appears to be a contradiction in terms. Art is by definition artificial and therefore the very opposite of anything natural. To aim at producing ‘natural art’ seems to be as paradoxical as the aim of producing ‘square circles made of wooden iron’ (Musil 1980: book I, ch. 15), or, for that matter, a three-dimensional model of Escherian ‘impossible figures’ (Kulpa 1983) which can be drawn but not constructed in three dimensions. Also the vision of ‘organic architecture’ or ‘organic design’ belongs, strictly speaking to this category of impossible figures, since ‘organic’ usually serves as a synonym for the term ‘natural’. But it is to be admitted that all these strictures apply only to thinking within our common sense world. That is why this criticism does not really hit the functionalist vision, since this vision is not based on a common sense kind of thinking but on a kind of design metaphysics; see 1843 ... GREENOUGH (5): c1.; cf. McClung 1983; Michl 1995.

c8: Analogy with the marxist doctrine of dialectical and historical materialism. There is a striking analogy between Sullivan’s claim in the above article that " ... it is of the very essence of every problem that it contains and suggests its own solution." (203) (which can be read as meaning that it is of the essence of every FUNCTION that it contains and suggests its own FORM) and Friedrich Engels’ claim some 15 years earlier, in 1882, that "Die erwachende Einsicht, dass die bestehenden gesellschaftlichen Einrichtungen unvernünftig und ungerecht sind ... ist nur ein Enzeichen davon, dass in der Produktionsmethoden und Austauschformen in aller Stille Veränderungen vor sich gegangen sind, zu denen die auf frühere ökonomische Bedingungen zugeschnitte gesellschaftliche Ordnung nicht mehr stimmt. Damit ist zugleich gesagt, dass die Mittel zur Beseitigung der entdeckten Misstände ebenfalls in den veränderten Produktionsverhältnissen selbst - mehr oder minder entwickelt - vorhanden sein müssen. Diese Mittel sind nich etwa aus dem Kopfe zu @erfinden@, sondern vermittelst des Kopfes in den vorliegenden materiellen Tatsachen der produktion zu @entdecken@." (455)

Engels, Friedrich. “Die Entwicklung des Socialismus von der Utopie zur Wissenschaft [1880].” In Karl Marx - Friedrich Engels: Ausgevählte Werke in sechs Bänden. Band V, edited by Richard Sperl and Hanni Wettengel, 401-477. Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1982.

Also: PREFORMISM

•

1896 ADLER

Dankmar Adler: FORM FOLLOWS BOTH FUNCTION AND ENVIRONMENT

“The writer of an article recently published in Lippincott's Magazine, summarizes the law of architectural design in the sentence ‘form follows function,’ and endeavors to condense into three words what others have vainly tried to enunciate in numerous treatises and in bulky volumes on the Philosophy of Art. If it was necessary to state in a three-worded aphorism the entire law of architectural design and composition, nothing could have better suited the purpose than the words quoted above from the pen of that clear thinker and brilliant writer, Louis H. Sullivan. (...) [Nevertheless,] before accepting Mr. Sullivan's statement of the underlying law upon which all good architectural design and all true architectural style is founded, it may be well to amend it, and say: ‘function and environment determine form,’ using the words environment and form in their broadest sense.” (243, 244)

Adler, Dankmar. “Function and Environment.” In Roots of Contemporary American Architecture: A Series of Thirty-Seven Essays dating from the Mid-Nineteenth Century to the Present, ed. Lewis Mumford. 243-250. New York: Dover, 1972 (1952).

COMMENTS TO 1896 ADLER

c1: Adler’s version of Sullivan’s formula. It was in fact Adler himself who shortened Sullivan’s original wording of his formula ‘form ever follows function’ into three words, by omitting the word ‘ever’.

c2: ‘Vulgar’ functionalism criticized already in 1896? Adler questioned the wisdom and value of Sullivan's aphorism and prophetically visualized, as a result of accepting Sullivan’s formula, "an architecture somewhat more scientific and vastly more practical, but as trite and as devoid of the interest imparted by the creative impulse, as is the architecture founded upon the principle, Form follows historic precedent, which stamps as barbaric every structure for which the architect has failed to provide an academically and historically correct mask and costume, and which treats as heresy an attempt to do, not as the Romans did in the year 1, but to do as one thinks the Romans might have done in the year 1896." (243-4) Adler 1896 Adler seemed to have a suspicion, already at the time of its inception that the formula would lead to kinds of functionalism that were later variously described as ‘pure’ (Morrison 1971), ‘absolute’ (Richards 1965), ‘utilitarian’ (Hitchcock 1948), ‘literal’ (Blake 1963a),‘narrow’ (Adams 1989) or ‘vulgar’ (Norberg-Schulz 1986), that is a non-artistic kind of architecture. It seems, however, that this understanding – represented both by Adler and later writers – was a misinterpretation of the nature of the philosophy of design which Sullivan proposed, a misinterpretation which has kept re-emerging throughout the past hundred years. I would argue that functionalism of modernist architects, whether of a Miesian or of a Meyerian sort, was in both cases a profoundly formalist philosophy of design, and that FFF came to fascinate architects exactly because it legitimized, in the minds of those who embraced it, a mental attitude of an autonomous artist. This mental attitude which considered architecture to be an autonomous rather than applied art, came to be the glory , and undoing of the functionalist period in architecture.

c3: In the quote in c2. Adler provides a scathing description of what he saw as principle of contemporary historicism (“ the principle, Form follows historic precedent ... stamps as barbaric every structure for which the architect has failed to provide an academically and historically correct mask and costume, and which treats as heresy an attempt to do, not as the Romans did in the year 1, but to do as one thinks the Romans might have done in the year 1896.”) This helps us to understand the immense pressure which the norms of academic architecture exercised in the 19th century. Adler’s description gives us a glimpse of the enthusiasm, and relief, which the slow emergence of the new non-historic style apparently caused among younger architects.

c4: Adler’s critique of FFF seems to have distressed Sullivan, judging from the fact that he did not use the FFF-phrase again (as far as I was able to find out) until five years later, in his “Kindergarten Chats”. But even here the dictum is used in a very subdued manner, and only in one instance it is proclaimed to be ‘the law’ and ‘a universal truth’; see 1901-1902 SULLIVAN (5) & c1. At the very end of his life, in his Autobiography... of 1924, Sullivan presented the three-worded aphorism as a summary of his whole philosophy of architecture, but even there it is no more than fleetingly mentioned. •

1901-1902 SULLIVAN

Louis Sullivan: A UNIVERSAL TRUTH

1901-1902 SULLIVAN (1) “... we are looking at a department store. No one can mistake it for a hotel, an office building, a railway station, or a bank – and yet it is not trigged out in the guise of a Roman temple. Its purpose is clearly set forth in its general aspect and the form follows the function in a simple, straightforward way. The structure is a logical, though somewhat bald, statement of its purpose, and an unmistakable though not wholly gratifying index of the business conducted within its walls.” (40, ch. XI. A Department Store)

1901-1902 SULLIVAN (2) "I like weeds: they have so much 'style' to them; and when I find them where they have grown free they seem most interesting and suggestive to me. (...) And then there are so many of them, and they differ so much in shape, color and arrangement; the form follows the function so beautifully ... ” (86, ch. XXV: A Letter [from the ‘student’]

1901-1902 SULLIVAN (3) “... I'm ... learning something every day. I can now tell the difference between a cow and a horse, between a pine-tree and an oak-tree. But when a farmer told me the other day that there were ten different kinds of oaks, four different kinds of pines, and thirty or forty different kinds of other trees hereabout, it gave me a shock, a shock of dread, least you might suddenly bob up and say that each one of these blooming trees has a function and the form of each follows that function with absolute fidelity, and you would expect me to observe them and give strict attention to the differences – when they all look alike to me now, and worse than that you would probably tell me there are here some three or four hundred different kinds of plants, several hundred kinds of insects, and dozens of kinds of birds, and that each has its complete correspondence of function and form, and, worse than all, you would tell me that the ability to note such correspondences constitute the ABC of architectural knowledge.” (88 ch. XXV: A Letter [from the 'student'])

1901-1902 SULLIVAN (4) “In view of what I have said concerning function and form, it must be fairly clear to you that the spirit of democracy is a function seeking expression in organized social form. I have stated also that every function is a subdivision or phase of that energy which we have called the Infinite Creative Spirit and which we may now call the Function of all functions. In just this sense the metaphysical basis of our philosophy is gradually establishing its definition, is elaborating its inner structure and outer form." (99; ch. XXX: Education)

1901-1902 SULLIVAN (5) “So remember, and bear ever in mind in your thinking and your doings, that FORM EVER FOLLOWS FUNCTION, that this is the law – a universal truth. That the main function, so far as you will be concerned, will focus in the specific needs of those who wish to build, and that such needs are quite apt to be emotional as well as what is so generally called practical. That your share will be to investigate and assimilate these needs with the utmost care, to find in the problem, which in the aggregate they form, a true solution, and then to express in truthful terms, in satisfying beautiful forms, a creative impulse which shall conserve and not suppress." (170; penultimate chapter LI. Optimism)

Sullivan, Louis H. Kindergarten Chats (revised 1918) and other writings (Ch. XI. A Department Store) New York: George Wittenborn, 1965.

COMMENTS TO 1901-1902 SULLIVAN (1-5)

c1: What became of the FFF-formula? The curious thing about Sullivan’s use of the formula FFF in Kindergarten Chats (according to the 1918 revision) is that it is strikingly downplayed. In chapters XII. and XIII. called “Function and Form (1)” and “Function and Form (2)” where it would be reasonable to expect this formula presented, discussed and defended, after Sullivan had elevated it to the highest principle of architectural design (see 1896 SULLIVAN (1)), the FFF-dictum is not mentioned at all. Only in the penultimate chapter of Kindergarten Chats – see quote (5) above – is the FFF-dictum presented as as “the law”, and “a universal truth”. The few other examples where FFF is explicitly referred to in these essays, seem to describe a particular case rather than a general law, as the use of definite articles before both ‘form’ and ‘function’ suggests; see 1901-1902 SULLIVAN (1-2), and (3) above.

c2: How can a form following function be described as ‘somewhat bald’? In only one of these FFF-related quotes (1), there is a reference to an artefact – a department store building – rather than to a natural object. But much to the reader’s chagrin, Sullivan, while describing its form as following the function suggests at the same time that this building is ‘somewhat bald’ and claims that it present ’an unmistakable though not wholly gratifying index of the business conducted within its walls.’ The reader must naturally ask how it is possible for Sullivan to claim that a form of an object follows function, and, at the same time, describe that form as somewhat bald and not wholly gratifying. Sullivan provides no clue. Shall we understand his censure so that the department store in question was not a true example of the FFF-principle , as true as in the case of weeds (quote 2) or blossoming trees (quote 3) ? Or was Sullivan perhaps suggesting that following that law does not of necessity guarantee a natural, fault-free, completely satisfactory architecture? Or was he perhaps suggesting that only he himself was really able to produce buildings where forms following functions would not result in somewhat bald buildings and where the structure would provide a wholly gratifying index of the business conducted within its walls? Sullivan claimed previously that if FFF becomes the respected law we would be on the high way to a natural and satisfactory architecture; he did not say that respecting that law would guarantee such architecture. Than no criterion was ever provided for what constitutes the artefact where form truly follows function, seems to have been a great advantage rather than a drawback of the functionalist design philosophy in its pre-victorious period. It seems that the real attraction of this philosophy was that, far from binding the designer and architect to a utilitarian philosophy of design, it provided him exactly the opposite: with the mental freedom of an autonomous artist. See also 1918 BRAGDON & c1.

c3: A quarry of synonymic formulations. Still, Kindergarten Chats and especially the chapters XII and XIII can be read as a quarry of comments on what Sullivan meant by the FFF-formula, as well as by the notion of function. Although Sullivan does not mention his formula in these two chapters at all, he uses a great number of terms which can be seen as synonyms for his notions of ‘form’ and ‘function’, as well as for the verb ‘follows’. His synonymous notions for FORM are: shape, outward expression, and design. For the verb ‘FOLLOWS’ Sullivan uses these synonyms: resembles, expresses, indicates, means, looks like, speaks for, stands for, makes us aware of, is the logical output of, and is the tangible evidence of. The notion of FUNCTION appears to be interchangeable with: purpose, reason, nature, essence,or inner purpose. This plethora of synonyms suggests that the three words making up the FFF-formula could be replaced with a combination of any three synonyms standing for those three main words. In this way we can obtain a great number of sentences which, I believe, have the same meaning as the FFF-formula itself, such as: shape speaks for purpose, or outward expression makes us aware of essence, or design is the tangible evidence of reason. This I take to suggest that there is no point in quarreling about the FFF-formula itself, and especially not about the word ‘follows’. What seems, however, to be the key word in the three word formula, is the notion of function – and its equivalent terms purpose, essence, reason and inner purpose. On the meanings of the notion of function, cf. Michl 1995.

c4: Designer as midwife. In the chapter L. “The Creative Impulse”, (which according to the editor represents an entirely new chapter, written in 1918) Sullivan expanded upon the following striking formulation from "The Tall Office Building..." (1896) where he wrote: "It is my belief that it is of the very essence of every problem that it contains and suggests its own solution. This I believe to be natural law. Let us examine, then, carefully the elements, let us search out this contained suggestion, this essence of the problem." (203). He returns to this thesis again in Kindergarten Chats at the end of ch. XLIX. “The Art of Expression” where he writes: "... inasmuch as you will have problems to meet and solve, let me give you this pointer: Every problem contains and suggests its own solution. Don't waste time looking anywhere else for it. In this mental attitude, in this mood of understanding, lies the technical beginning of the art of expression." (164, ch. XLIX. “The Art of Expression”) – Sullivan never explicitly articulated the implications of his design metaphysics (as it may be called; see 1843...GREENOUGH (5): c1; 1896 SULLIVAN: c7), or his slogan form follows function for the designer. These implications were strikingly formulated by the modernist US industrial designer Walter Dorwin Teague in 1940 (1949): in his view designer was bound to become a kind of midwife: “There is no longer any justification for looking beyond our horizons, or back into history, to discover a form for the thing we are making: we feel a compulsion to look within the thing itself for the form it should have, and we are the midwives of what we find there.” (Teague 1949:216) •

1916 REBORI

A. N. Rebori: WITH NO PROBLEMS ALIKE, NO TWO BUILDINGS ARE GIVEN THE SAME EXPRESSION

“That there is a formula to which Sullivan adheres in the development of his work is quite apparent; but of one thing we can rest assured, it is not one of duplication, for, with no problems alike, no two buildings are given the same expression. It is an architecture of pure intent, with form following function as its basic principle. To understand function requires an intimate knowledge of practical requirements; to express form demands artistic skill combined with an intimate knowledge of structural material. (437)

Rebori, A. N. “An Architecture of Democracy: Three Recent Examples from the Works of Lovis [sic] H. Sullivan.” The Architectural Record XXXIX (May, 1916): 437-65.

COMMENTS TO 1916 REBORI

c1: Rebori uses the notion of function in the Greenoughian, Sullivanian, and functionalist, sense: function is both a word for what an object does, and what what it is supposed to do. (On the functionalist notion of function as a amalgam of two different meanings, see Introduction, above part 4). Compare the matter-of-factly and much more precise and realistic use of the notion of function by human factor engineers of today: “Functional analysis refers to determining the specific functions and tasks that are to be performed by the user and product. Function in this context refers to several related units of work that have some common purpose. The individual units are usually referred to as tasks. Functional analysis should be performed jointly by design engineers and human factor specialists. (...) Assignment of most of functions and tasks to either the user or product, along with consideration of the methods and technological solutions for function implementation, should be deferred to the design phase.” (22-23) Cushman and Rosenberg 1991 •

1917 BRAGDON

Claude Bragdon: THE SPIRIT BUILT THE HOUSE

“It is necessary only to remember that the real point of cleavage between organic and arranged architecture is the one first dwelt upon. In order to determine to which hemisphere of expression a given building belongs, it is necessary only to apply the acid test of Mr. Sullivan’s formula and ask, ‘Does the form follow function, or is the function made subservient to form? Did the spirit build the house, or does the house confine the spirit?’ If the first, it is organic; if the second, it is arranged.” (362-63)

Bragdon, Claude. “The Language of Form.” In Roots of Contemporary American Architecture: A Series of Thirty-Seven Essays dating From the Mid-Nineteenth Century to the Present, ed. Lewis Mumford. 358-68. New York: Dover, 1972.

COMMENTS TO 1917 BRAGDON

c1: ‘Organic architecture’: question of principle or degree? Is the difference between the postulated ‘organic architecture’ and the ‘arranged architecture’ a question of principle or that of a degree? In case it is a matter of degree, it seems to be a legitimate and useful term for critical and polemical distinction. But Sullivan’s insistence on FFF as the law, as a universal truth, suggests that he referred to organic architecture (i.e. one where form was result of ‘function’) as an architecture in its very principle different from the previous one. Even in that case it is not clear though, whether one could legitimately speak about something like approximation to such organic architecture, and whether such approximation, although not a full-blown organic architecture, was more valuable that the arranged sorts of architecture. After all, even Plato himself was unwilling to see both carpenters and painters as equally removed from truth: he considered painters to be worse than carpenters because they imitated the carpenter’s imitations of Ideas. Bragdon, though, speaks of hemispheres of expression, suggesting that organic and arranged kind of architecture inhabit two different worlds, and are different from each other in principle rather than in degree.

c2: Popularizer of the FFF-formula? It may have been Bragdon who started the popularization of FFF-dictum. Bragdon, by the way, prepared later, in 1934, the book edition of Kindergarten Chats, based on Sullivan’s 1918- editing of the material (cf. Athey 1947, p. 251).

c3: FFF-formula as evaluation principle. 1938 BARNES & REINECKE in a incisive comment flatly reject the idea of using the FFF-formula for the evaluation of design. Admittedly, their rejection refers to the commercial nature of industrial design of which they are practitioners, while architecture is not typically a commercial object; still their argument is powerful and in my view has a principal bearing on the practice of architecture as well.

c4: De Zurko De Zurko 1957 comments on the notions of organic and arranged architecture in his first chapter. •

1918 BRAGDON

Claude Bragdon: FACE - NOT MASK

“Broadly speaking, there are not five orders of architecture – nor fifty – but only two: Arranged and Organic. These correspond to the two terms of that ‘inevitable duality’ which bisects life. Talent and genius, reason and intuition, bromide and sulphite [sic] and some of the names we know them by. –– Arranged architecture is reasoned and artificial; produced by talent, governed by taste. Organic architecture, on the other hand, is the product of some obscure inner necessity for self-expression which is subconscious. It is as though Nature herself, through some human organ of her activity, had addressed herself to the service of the sons and daughters of men. –– Arranged architecture in its finest manifestations is the product of a pride, a knowledge, a competence, a confidence staggering to behold. (...) For the subtlety of Nature’s geometry, and for her infinite variety and unexpectedness, Arranged architecture substitutes a Euclidean system of straight lines and (for the most part) circular curves, assembled and arranged according to a definite logic of its own. It is created but not creative; it is imagined but not imaginative. Organic architecture is both creative and imaginative. It is non-Euclidean in the sense that it is higher-dimensional – that is, it suggests extension in directions and into regions where the spirit finds itself at home, but of which the senses give no report to the brain. –– To make the whole thing clearer it may be said that Arranged and Organic architecture bear much the same relation to one another that a piano bears to a violin. A piano is an instrument that does not give forth discords if one follows the rules. A violin requires absolutely an ear – an inner rectitude. It has a way of betraying the man of talent and glorifying the genius, becoming one with his body and his soul. –– (...) ... there is one sure way by which each [order of architecture] may be recognized and known. If the function appears to have created the form and if everywhere the form follows the function, changing as that changes, the building is Organic; if on the contrary ‘the house confines the spirit,’ if the building presents not a face but however beautiful a mask, it is an example of Arranged architecture.” (51-55)

Bragdon, Claude. Architecture and Democracy. New York: Knopf, 1918.

COMMENTS TO 1918 BRAGDON

c1: The idea of self-expression and the FFF-formula. It sounds like a self-contradiction when Bragdon claims that organic architecture is a result of forms following functions, and at the same time argues that it is a product of an ”inner necessity for self-expression which is subconscious.” The FFF-dictum, it would appear, leaves no room for self-expression – meaning the designer’s self-expression – at all.This ‘self-expressive’ interpretation of organic architecture has possibly to do with Bragdon’s theosophist orientation (cf. Mumford 1972:368), though a very similar reference appears in Sullivan’s key article” Tall Office Building...” of 1896 where he writes in the concluding paragraph: “... each and every architect in the land might, under the benign influence of this law[i.e. the FFF-formula], express in the simplest, most modest, most natural way that which it is in him to say...”(see 1896 SULLIVAN (2). There seems to be little evidence to support Teague’s and Mumford’s suggestion that Bragdon somehow spoiled the Sullivanian heritage by his explicit embracement of theosophy (cf. Teague 1949: 275; Mumford 1972: 422). It seems, on the contrary, that both Sullivan and Bragdon agreed that ‘the inner necessity for self-expression’, when given free passage, somehow tapped the essence of ‘Nature’ (whatever that means) and brought the organic, function-generated form, forth. This nexus between self-expression and functionalism seems to be the link which explains why functionalism in no time turned into a formalist architecture: it happened probably because functionalism was a theory of artistic expression. This close connection between the idea of self-expression and that of functionalism suggests in addition that the differences (in the 1930s to 1960s) between defenders of functionalism and those of International Style were internal skirmishes within one ‘religion’, since both denominations had essentially artistic, formalist aims. (On the question of the two modernist doctrines, cf. Michl 1996; on the notion of function seen as a carte blanche and therefore an empty notion, cf. Michl 1995)

c2: Mask. ‘Mask’ and ‘masquerade’ were frequent expressions used by modernists it their critique of historicist and eclecticist architecture. The notion of mask and masquerade makes sense only as a pendant to the belief in what modernists called natural, authentic, truthful architecture, or whar Bragdon termed ‘organic’ architecture. •

1924 SULLIVAN

Louis Sullivan: ALL PRACTICAL DEMANDS OF UTILITY SHOULD BE PARAMOUNT

“Now Louis felt that he had arrived at a point where he had a foothold, where he could make a beginning in the open world. Having come into its responsibilities, he would face it boldly. He could now, undisturbed, start on the course of practical experimentation he long had in mind, which was to make an architecture that fitted its functions – a realistic architecture based on well defined utilitarian needs – that all practical demands of utility should be paramount as a basis of planning and design; that no architectural dictum, or tradition, or superstition, or habit, should stand in the way. He would brush them all aside, regardless of commentators. For his view, his conviction was this: That the architectural art to be of contemporary immediate value must be plastic; all senseless conventional rigidity must be taken out of it; it must intelligently serve – it must not suppress. In this wise the forms under his hand would grow naturally out of the needs and express them frankly, and freshly. This meant in his courageous mind that he would put to the test a formula he had evolved, through long contemplation of living things, namely that form follows function, which would mean, in practice, that architecture might again become a living art, if this formula were but adhered to.” (257-8)

Sullivan, Louis. The Autobiography of an Idea (1924). New York: Dover, 1956.

COMMENTS TO 1924 SULLIVAN

c1: The ‘misunderstandist’ school. Now in 1924, almost thirty years after he coined the FFF-formula, Sullivan explains its meaning in much more utilitarian terms than ever before. The probable reason for that may have been that he wanted it to profile himself as the theoretical precursor of the then contemporary functionalist trend in European architecture. All the same it is a fact that Sullivan’s argumentation in this ‘testament’ of his, is very utilitarian and need-based. This fact conflicts with claims of those commentators who claim that the utilitarian interpretation of the FFF-formula was based on misunderstanding its true meaning. Here such FFF-commentators will be referred to collectively as the ‘misunderstandist’ school; on the misunderstandists, see also 1935 MORRISON/(2)c1. (Cf. also Adams 1989; Friedlaender 1984; Heskett 1980; Huxtable 1984; Jordy 1972; Lampugnani 1980; Morrison 1971; Smith 1966; von Seidlein 1986; Weidenhoeft 1992). Our position on this question is this: since it can be documented that Sullivan himself came with different but always exceedingly vague suggestions about what this formula is to mean for the practicing architect and his day-to-day design process, it is presumptuous to describe the utilitarian understanding of it as a misunderstanding. Such statements obviously suggest not only that the ‘misunderstandist’ commentators know the true meaning of the formula. They seem to suggest, in addition, that the formula, in its not-misunderstood state, has been in fact practically feasible. Typically, however, the commentators fail to divulge this true meaning of the formula, as well as suggestions for practical use of the formula; if they do attempt, the meaning tends to be usually vague, hardly adding to the practical value of the formula (see 1935 MORRISON; 1960 BUSH-BROWN; 1964 MUMFORD; 1966 SMITH; 1972 JORDY; 1980 HESKETT; 1980 LAMPUGNANI; 1982 CAPLAN; 1983 von SEIDLEIN; 1984 FRIEDLAENDER; 1984 HUXTABLE; 1989 ADAMS; 1992 WEIDENHOEFT). –– We would not deny on the other hand that there can be a real misunderstanding of the formula, as in the case of taking it as a technological/historical explanation explanation (e.g. 1993 LAMBERT & C1), or in the case of distinguishing between vulgar and non-vulgar kind of functionalist theory; see 1896 ADLER: c2.

c2: Theory-denial. Again, as in “The High Office Building Artistically Considered” also here Sullivan underlines what was to become the most striking feature of the modernist philosophy of design: the denial that modernism was driven by a theory, a program, that is, by something preconceived, premeditated. Sullivan in the above quotation that “all practical demands of utility should be paramount as a basis of planning and design; that no architectural dictum ... should stand in the way.” The probable reason why Sullivan did not see his FFF-formula as an architectural dictum in its own right, i.e. as a program, or a theory, was that he took the formula to be a natural law – i.e. a fact, and consequently a matter of moral choice between truth and falsehood. The American ‘philosophical speculator’ (as he calls himself) George Soros elucidated this phenomenon in his analysis of what he called ‘dogmatic thinking’, a historical category which he sees as a way of escaping the uncertainties produced by the ‘critical thinking’ of the open society. He argues that the dogmatic thinking attempts to win back certainties of the traditional thinking typical for traditional societies with no or little change. There the distinction between thought and reality, characteristic for the critical thinking is not developed. The problem of such escapes is however, that the changelessness which was a fact in traditional societies, is postulated here - is a program, and as such result of a choice. The dogmatic mode of thinking is therefore bound to practice what we call here a ‘theory-denial’: as Soros says, “in the dogmatic thinking it is out of question to admit that it puts forward a postulate, because to do so would undermine the unproblematic authority which it aims at.” (Cf. Soros 1991: 242; cf. also Becker 1963.)

c3: Biological – or metaphysical principle? Sullivan claimed in the text above that he developed the FFF-formula “through a long contemplation of living things”. This led some writes to suggest that the formula is a summary of a principle derived from biology (cf. Honzik...1963 (?); 1954 NEUTRA; 1985 BAYLEY; 1993 PALLASMAA). This, however, does not square with Sullivan’s own earlier statements. In “The Tall Office Building...” (see 1896 SULLIVAN) he claimed explicitly that FFF was “the pervading law of all things organic and inorganic...”, and he listed there among examples of the forms ever following functions also a winding stream, drifting clouds and granite rocks. In Kindergarten Chats he included other non-biological entities such as wave and rain among illustrations of his idea, synonymous to his FFF-formula, that “a thing looks like what it is, and, vice versa, it is what it looks like”: “form, wave, looks like function, wave; the form, cloud, speaks to us of the function, cloud; the form, rain, indicates the function, rain”. All this suggests that the FFF-formula should rather be seen as a summary of a cosmic (theological or metaphysical) principle rather than a biological one: Sullivan’s idea that form follows function was apparently meant to suggest ~~[that forms in Nature somehow follow fiats of a Superior Intelligence, or]~~ that these forms were material ‘correspondents’ to spiritual realities.  This was in fact claimed by Sullivan in fairly explicit terms: in one of many exalted passages in his Kindergarten Chats (ch. XII : 44), he writes about the “world of the silent, immeasurable, creative spirit, of whose infinite function all these things are but the varied manifestations in form ... a universe wherein all is function, all is form: a frightful phantasm, driving the mind to despair, or, as we will, a glorious revelation of that power which holds us in an invisible, a benign, a relentless – a wondrous hand”; and in the same chapter (45) he claimed that, “[forms] stand for relationships between the immaterial and the material ... between the Infinite Spirit and the finite mind.” It seems, in other words, that ‘function’ in the sentence FFF had apparently less to do with ‘utilitarian functioning’ and more with alleged metaphysical purposes of things. Forms of streams, waves, rain, clouds and rocks, just as forms of eagles, horses or rose-bushes, in Sullivan’s view followed the Purposes of a Superior Intelligence. That explained why they allegedly looked like what they were, and were what they looked like (see also 1966 NORBERG-SCHULZ: c1). And since most of then contemporary buildings in Sullivan’s view failed to look like what they purportedly were, and looked instead like what they were not, it was imperative that also architects should follow the suit by making the law, form follows function, into their own. (Where architects acquired the striking power to disobey the natural law, or, to put it differently, why the Superior Intelligence behind the natural law failed to make architects follow its commands, Sullivan does not discuss, though he does suggest that such unnatural behavior was due to faulty architectural education. Soros in the book quoted above in c2, points out on p. 244 the vicissitudes of the dogmatic thinking: “It seems that the mind is an instrumeant able to solve any contradictio produced by itself, by generating new contadictions somewhere else.” (“Zda se, ze mysl je nastroj schopny vyresit kazdy rozpor, ktery sama produkuje, vytvorenim novych rozporu nekde jinde.” ) [?-trans.!]

c5: The philosophy underlying the functionalist doctrine can be seen as a case of what Abrams 1971: 68 called 'Natural Supernaturalism', describing it as “the general tendency ... in diverse degrees and ways, to naturalize the supernatural and to humanize the divine.” •

1925 KIMBALL

Fiske Kimball: [FFF-FORMULA NOT COMMENTED]

Kimball, F. “Louis Sullivan – An Old Master.” Architectural Record 57 (April, 1925): 289-304.

COMMENTS TO 1925 KIMBALL

c1: Kimball does not refer to, mention or comment the FFF-formula, but he quotes at great length (two out of eight fully printed pages) the theoretical parts from Sullivan’s article “ The Tall Office Building...” which include all three FFF-passages. The article is interesting also because Kimball, as early as 1925, uses the words “functionalism”, “functionalist”, “modernist”, and “‘modernism’” (the last one in quotation-marks): “...the skyscraper, the last stronghold of functionalism...” (303); “In their narrow search for truth to nature, for expression of use and structure, too many of the impressionists and functionalists lost all form.”(304); “A new continent, a new society, a new community, was needed for the realization of modernist ideas.” (297); “...consistent ‘modernists’ like Sullivan...”. It is not quite clear what exactly he means by the words ‘functionalism’ and ‘functionalist’,but it is obvious that he refers to a theoretical position rather than style. Kimball speaks also of “functional mode of design which [Sullivan] championed...” giving both Albert Kahn and Frank Lloyd Wright as representatives of the mode. (No word in the above quotations is underlined in the original.) Here we would probably use the adjective ‘functionalist’ instead; see 1934 GROPIUS: c3 . •

1925 TEIGE

Karel Teige: [IN SEARCH OF A HANDY FORMULA (I)]

"The field has been dominated by civil engineers. Being without bias, not bound by petite aesthetic formulas, they approached their very concrete tasks with mathematic logic. Viaducts (such as the exemplary Pont Garabit by Eiffel), locomotives, cars, ships, airplanes; all the works of engineers have forms determined by function, given by calculation; they generate a new, not an apriori, aesthetic of the building art." (106)

Teige, Karel. “Moderni francouzska architektura I.” Stavba 3 (1924-1925): 103-107.

COMMENTS TO 1925 TEIGE

c1: Engineers and forms. ...... •

1928 MOHOLY-NAGY

László Moholy-Nagy: [IN SEARCH OF A HANDY FORMULA (II)]

“In all fields of creation, workers are striving today to find purely functional solutions of a technical-biological kind: that is, to build up each piece of work solely from the elements which are required for its function.” (61)

Moholy-Nagy. 1928. The New Vision: From Materials to Architecture.

Quoted after Susanne K. Langer, Feeling and Form, 1953, p. 93, n. 6.

COMMENTS TO 1928 MOHOLY-NAGY

c1: As far as I could find out, the FFF-formula itself – in contrast to the design doctrine of which it is a summary – was not known at the Bauhaus. When the elegant, brief and compact FFF-formula became known in Europe, it soon replaced the earlier and always somewhat clumsy attempts to define the essence of the functionalist design doctrine. Then, instead of using a long string of words explaining that the point of the modernist effort was “to build up each piece of work solely from the elements which are required for its function” one could say that the gist of the modernist principle was the dictum form follows function. (There was, incidentally, only one formulation of the modernist design principle which could compete with the elegance of Sullivan’s formula: the Russian artist Vladimir Tatlin’s slogan from the early 1920s: “Neither the new, nor the old, but the necessary”; cf. Andel 1990). •

1929 HITCHCOCK

Henry-Russell Hitchcock: SULLIVAN’S ‘IDEA’

“In the Wainwright Building in St. Louis, built in 1890, the year before Root's death, Sullivan attempted definitely in his exterior design to establish a formula. Despite his introduction of intermediate vertical piers of equal weight between his supporting piers, Sullivan pronounced here what has since been considered as the norm of logical treatment for tall buildings of steel construction. Anxious as he was to express his 'Idea' that form follows function it must to-day appear that in the Tacoma Building had already been provided a far more satisfactory solution of the problem. (...) In the latter part of his life, Sullivan devoted much time to the vain task of proselyting for his theory of form following function and of free ornament." (112-113)

Hitchcock, Henry-Russell. Modern Architecture: Romanticism and Reintegration (1929). New York: Da Capo Press, 1993.

COMMENT TO 1929 HITCHCOCK

c1: Hitchcock’s reference to the FFF-formula is the earliest reference to this formula known to me by a person not belonging to the Sullivan circle, and by a historian of architecture, albeit an apologetic one (for the notion of ‘apologetic historian’, see 1952 CONDIT: c1). In view of Hitchcock’s familiarity with the formula it is surprising not to find any mention of it in the later key modernist text published in 1932 by Hitchcock and Johnson in connection with the MoMA exhibition of the architecture of ‘International Style’ (cf. Hitchcock and Johnson 1932) where functionalism was discussed – and rejected – as an allegedly utilitarian creed. What was the reason for not mentioning the FFF-formula in that 1932 text as a gist of the functionalist creed? Was it simply because the authors who wrote mainly about European architecture, was aware that the formula was not yet known in Europe in the twenties and early thirties? Did they feel that formula was a purely US phenomenon, barely well-enough known in the States themselves, to be used as an illustrative summary of the European creed they were rejecting? Or was it perhaps because neither Hitchcock nor Johnson had much sympathy for Louis Sullivan: cf. Johnson 1956 for an early, long. and explicitly critical view of Sullivan as both architect and theorist of architecture.

c2: For further comment on the Wainwright building as an embodiment of the FFF-formula, see 1961 SCULLY. •

1931 MUMFORD

Lewis Mumford: [THE FFF-FORMULA NOT MENTIONED]

Mumford, Lewis. The Brown Decades: A Study of the Arts in America 1865-1895. New York: Dover, 1971.

COMMENTS TO 1931 MUMFORD

c1: Ignored. In his book The Brown Decades Mumford devoted some 15 pages to Sullivan. There he discussed both Sullivan’s article “The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered”,his Kindergarten Chats and his Autobiography but Mumford never came to mention the FFF-formula in that context. There is hardly any doubt that he was aware of its existence and its place in both in Sullivan’s “The Tall Office...” article and in The Autobiography but he obviously refrained from mentioning it. Could the reason for this absence have been his mindfulness of the seducive power of the formula and the harm it could do? Or did he perhaps not consider it an important articulation of the modernist idea? Hitchcock in his Modern Architecture of 1929 (see 1929 HITCHCOCK) mentions the FFF-formula with some sort of distaste. •

1931 WARNER

Sidney G. Warner: THE COROLLARY: NO DISGUISING

“A clear statement on functionalism came from Sidney G. Warner of the art division of Westingshouse’s engineering department. According to him, the contemporary designer's ‘creed’ – ‘form follows function’ – had two corollaries: ‘An object should not disguise the basic principles of its construction’; and ‘it should not disguise the materials of which it is made.’” (136)

Meikle, Jeffrey L. Twentieth Century Limited: Industrial Design in America, 1925-1939. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1979. Meikle quoted from *Warner 1931.

COMMENTS TO 1931 WARNER

c1: According to Meikle 1979:136 Warner spoke about the ‘contemporary designer’s creed’ as early as 1931. This possibly suggests that the formula came into circulation among industrial designers even earlier than among architects. See also 1936 CHENEYS who characterized the idea that form must determine function’ as ‘an overquoted axiom’. •

1931 a) WRIGHT

Frank Lloyd Wright: FORMS OF THINGS THAT ARE PERFECTLY ADAPTED TO THEIR FUNCTIONS

“Well – we begin to glimpse this great adversary [i.e. the Machine] as the instrument of a New Order. We are willing to believe there is a common sense. .... [...sic] A sense common to our time directed towards specific purpose. We see an aeroplane clean and light-winged – the lines expressing power and purpose; we see the ocean-liner, stream-lined, clean and swift – expressing power and purpose. The locomotive, too – power and purpose. Some automobiles begin to look the part. Why are not buildings, too, indicative of their special purpose? The forms of things that are perfectly adapted to their functions, we now observe, seem to have a superior beauty of their own. We like to look at them. Then, as it begins to dawn on us that Form follows Function – why not so in Architecture especially? We see that all features in all good buildings, too, should correspond to some necessity for being – the reason for them, as well as for other shapes, being found in their very purpose. Buildings are made of materials, too. Materials have a life of their own that may enter into the building to give it more life. Here certain principles show countenance. It is the countenance of Organic Simplicity. Order is coming out of Chaos. The word Organic now has a new meaning, a Spiritual one! Here is hope.” (62)

Wright, Frank Lloyd. “The Passing of the Cornice.” In Frank Lloyd Wright. Modern Architecture: Being the Kahn Lectures for 1930, 47-62. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1931.

COMMENTS TO 1931 a) WRIGHT

c1: The statement that “all features in all good buildings ... should correspond to some necessity for being – the reason for them, as well as for other shapes, being found in their very purpose” sounds incomprehensible, or downright inane - of course there is a purpose behind every feature in a building, especially behind ones consciously chosen by a designer. This strange exhortation, however, makes sense only if take the purposes Wright talks about to mean something else than purposes of architects and designers. Wright’s purposes (or functions) are apparently entirely independent of architects and designers intentions: they are purposes of ‘our time’.

c2: Wright mentions, perhaps for the first time in writing, the FFF-formula, but without making it clear that it was coined by his lieber Meister Sullivan. •

1931 b) WRIGHT

Frank Lloyd Wright: THE FORMULA EXPRESSES SIMPLICITY OF THE UNIVERSE

“Now, a chair is a machine to sit in.

A home is a machine to live in.

The human body is a machine to be worked by will.

A tree is a machine to bear fruit.

A plant is a machine to bear flowers and seeds.

And, as I've admitted before somewhere, a heart is a suction-pump. (...) ... now let the declaration that ‘all is machinery’ stand nobly forth for what it is worth. But why not more profoundly declare that 'Form follows Function' and let it go at that? Saying, 'Form follows Function,' is not only deeper, it is clearer, and it goes further in a more comprehensive way to say the thing to be said, because the implications of this saying includes the heart of the whole matter. It may be that Function follows Form, as, or if, you prefer, but it is easier thinking with the first proposition just as it is easier to stand on your feet and nod your head than it would be to stand on your head and nod your feet. Let us not forget that the Simplicity of the Universe is very different from the Simplicity of the Machine.” (77-78)

Wright, Frank Lloyd. “The Cardboard House.” In Frank Lloyd Wright. Modern Architecture: Being the Kahn Lectures for 1930, 65-80. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1931.

COMMENTS TO 1931 b) WRIGHT

c1: FFF goes further. Wright seems to be taking Le Corbusier to task not because he suggested that “the house is a machine for living in”(cf. Le Corbusier, 1976: 10), but for not going far enough. A universal principle (i.e. the FFF-formula) should according to him replace the Le Corbusierian machine principle.

c2: It may be that function follows form. In a gay, exhilarated moment, Wright tosses the idea that perhaps it is the form which determins function. See also 1964 MUMFORD (2).•

1932 REILLY

C. H. Reilly: FROM THE SCHOOL OF SULLIVAN AND WRIGHT

“This [Chicago] school, of which the late Louis Sullivan may be said to be the founder and Frank Lloyd Wright the chief apostle and prophet, claims (as indeed most architects would do to-day) that their building are in the first and last place functional and that with them form follows function both within and without.” (124-125)

Reilly, C. H. The Theory and Practice of Architecture. London: Victor Gollancz, 1932.

COMMENTS TO 1932 REILLY

c1: The oldest European FFF-quote? Reilly is apparently one of the first (or perhaps the very first?) among European architect who mentioned the FFF-formula. Reilly places the formula in the context of the late 19th century Chicago architecture of Sullivan and Wright., but he does not see the sentence as a summary of any particular doctrine, nor does he mention Sullivan, or anybody else, as its author. It is unclear whether Reilly’s remark that most architects today would claim “that their building are in the first and last place functional” refers only to this sentence or also to the next, saying “that with them form follows function both within and without”. 1932 appears to be too early in the 1930s to expect that the FFF-formula was already in general use among British architects. •

1932 HITCHCOCK & JOHNSON

Henry Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson:

[THE FFF-FORMULA NOT MENTIONED]

Hitchcock, Henry-Russell, and Philip Johnson. 1932. The International Style: Architecture since 1922. New York: W. W. Norton.

COMMENTS TO 1932 HITCHCOCK & JOHNSON

c1: This is another instance, after 1931 MUMFORD, when the FFF-formula fails to be mentioned in a context where one would expect it to be mentioned; see 1929 HITCHCOCK: c1. •

1934 GROPIUS

Walter Gropius: THE PITH OF THE FUNCTIONAL DOCTRINES OF TO-DAY

“In the United States the revival of architecture had begun as far back as the Eighties, contemporaneously with the development of a new constructional technique. –– Root built a brick skyscraper in Chicago in 1883. About the end of the century Sullivan – Frank Lloyd Wright's far too little recognized master – constructed buildings of this type which are epoch-making, and also formulated architectural principles which contain the pith of the functional doctrines of to-day. We must not forget that it was Sullivan who wrote 'form should follow function.' Intellectually speaking, he was more modern in his ideas than Frank Lloyd Wright, who was later to inspire so many European architects in both a spatial and a structural sense.” (65-66)

Gropius, Walter. “The Formal and Technical Problems of Modern Architecture and Planning.” Journal of the Royal Institute of British Architects XLI, (May 19, 1934): 679-694, reprinted with minor changes as “Appraisal of the Development of Modern Architecture.” In Gropius, Walter. Scope of Total Architecture, ed. Ruth Nanda Anshen. 61-69. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1955.

COMMENTS TO 1934 GROPIUS

c1: Second oldest European FFF-quote? This is, as far as I know, the second oldest European reference to FFF , after 1932 REILLY, and the first one in Europe which identifies Sullivan as the author of the formula.

c2: The should. It is important to note that, contrary to Gropius formulation, the should was not a part of Sullivan’s formula ‘form follows function’: Sullivan never wrote that ‘form should follow function’. It seems in fact that Sullivan tried rather hard to avoid using the word should, preferring to keep his formula in a descriptive mood, so that it would sound like an objective natural law. We do not say that water should boil or freeze at certain temperatures, or that a stone when unsupported, should fall on the ground. Sullivan was apparently worried – more than Gropius seems to have been – about the logic of claiming a status of a cosmic law (as he explicitly suggested) for his FFF-formula,, while at the same time bitterly complaining that most architects were busy disobey that law. ‘What kind of cosmic law was it that architects were in position to disobey?,’ would be the obvious question. His repeated insistence that form follows function was apparently meant to inculcate in the designer that form should follow function; to say so explicitly, however, was something he seemed to have studiously avoided. (Still, Sullivan sometimes couldn’t help using the should-formulation, as in this sentence from “The Tall Office ....” article where he exhorted “that the shape, form, outward expression, design or whatever we may choose, of the tall office building should in the very nature of things follow the functions of the building..” (207-8) But this formulation was buried in the middle of a long sentence and seemed innocuous enough.) The issue has one more side to it: It is true that modernists could argue, that it would be wrong to say that form should follow function for in the natural, uncorrupted state of affairs, form does follow function all by itself. On the other hand, modernists could also argue that in contrast to forms in nature, in human products the function cannot find its form without mediation of the human designer; to say that form ought to follow function would be confusing because it would sound as if the designer ought consciously manipulate the form so that it followed function. The only way to go about it was not to want any particular form. This paradoxical position was put most clearly by Mies van der Rohe when he wrote in 1927: "I do not oppose form, but only form as a goal. (...) Form as a goal always ends in formalism” (Ich wende mich nicht gegen die Form, sondern nur gegen die Form als Ziel. (...) Form als Ziel mündet immer in Formalismus.” Conrads 1986: 102; Conrads 1970: 96; cf. also Fitch 1963). The designer should do only one thing: to purify his mind and senses of all the corrupting influences (cf. Sullivan's attacks on education; Bauhaus design pedagogy [?]). Having done that, having renounced his own intentions, he would become a medium that would let the true Intentions of the Epoch come through. The American industrial designer Walter Dorwin Teague put this ‘mediumistic’ aspect of the modernist design doctrine in the relief when he, as a true believer, wrote: “There is no longer any justification for looking beyond our horizons, or back into history, to discover a form for the thing we are making: we feel a compulsion to look within the thing itself for the form it should have, and we are the midwives of what we find there.” (Teague 1949: 216). Only then, when one has learned, to put it paradoxically, to intend without intending, would forms truly follow functions. See 1934 GROPIUS: c2.

c3: Functional or functionalist? Gropius speaks about “ functional doctrines of today”, something we would call ‘functionalist’ now, since we understand them as stylistic doctrines. (Not surprisingly, Gropius dislikes the term functionalism as well, and proscribes it as a ‘spurious phrase’ some three pages earlier.) The notion of ‘functional doctrines’ strictly speaking, does not make sense; Gropius had hardly in mind doctrines that are functional, in the sense that they work well. He was obviously straining the language in order to avoid suggesting – by employing the word ‘functionalist’ – that he spoke about new stylistic doctrines based on conventionalized aesthetics. What he had in mind were of course doctrines of ‘functional form’ or ‘functional design’. These terms, however, are today as useless, or rather as confusing, as the term ‘functional doctrines’. Hardly any of these terms would be question-begging today if Gropius and his fellow-functionalists were engineers, and not architects and designers, i.e. if functionalists aimed at forms and designs with superior functional performance only. But architects and designers are professionals called in where superior visual performance is asked for, and their interest in forms, whether these are ‘functional’ or otherwise, is bound to be visual. What architects and designers create out of their visual interest cannot (under normal circumstances) be described by terms ‘functional’ forms or ‘functional’ design since such terms were coined to refer to things produced out of functional (i.e. non-visual) interest. From the perspective of those who don’t believe in ‘functional’ doctrines, terms such as functionalist forms, functionalist design, and also functionalist doctrines, are obviously more fitting because they suggest a stylistic, i.e. visual, interest. What functionalists on their part wanted to communicate when opting for terms such as ‘functional form’, etc. was denial of any apriori visual interest: perfect visual forms were expected to be born out of interest in perfect functional solutions. Conclusion: To use terms such as ‘functional’ forms, ‘functional’ design or ‘functional’ doctrines when referring to forms or ideas of professional designers makes sense today only if we belong to those who believe that forms of functionalist architecture and design really came about the way functionalists themselves believed. If we don’t, we have to speak about ‘functionalist’ forms, etc. •

1935 MORRISON

Hugh Morrison: DIRECT ADAPTATION OF A GREAT BIOLOGICAL PRINCIPLE

1935 MORRISON (1) “Sullivan's life long search in architecture was for a ‘rule so broad as to admit of no exceptions.’ This rule, as he evolved it from his experience with Nature, is the simple one that form follows function. To Sullivan, this was simply natural law. It was a direct adaptation of a great biological principle to the sphere of architecture.” (251)

1935 MORRISON (2) “Unfortunately, this rule [i.e. form follows function] sounds simpler than it really is. Taken at its face value, it was accepted by some of Sullivan’s contemporaries, and has been more widely accepted since, as the text of modern ‘functionalist’ theory, and has frequently been perverted into something which Sullivan never intended. A similar fate befell Cézanne’s phrase, that ‘all nature can be reduced to terms of the sphere, the cone, and the cylinder’; as employed by the Cubists, it by no means comprehended Cézanne’s theory of painting. (...) Sullivan’s functionalism ... means something far more than mechanism and utilitarianism. It means that a building must be organic, unitary, that it must have life; it means that a building must express intellectual, emotional and spiritual realities. The fact that he insists that expression grow out of actual experience keeps him tight to earth; but in his insistence on expressiveness as well as on adequacy he goes beyond pure functionalism as it exists in its most bald form today; that is a form which he would have considered as unsensitively [sic] materialistic as the eclecticism which he so passionately condemned.” (251 and 253)

Morrison, Hugh. Louis Sullivan: Prophet of Modern Architecture. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press Publishers, 1971 (1935).

COMMENTS TO 1935 MORRISON (1)

(1) c1: A law and a rule at the same time? Morrison claims that the FFF-formula was a rule and natural law at at the same time. He seems not to be bothered by the question which we suspected bothered Sullivan (see 1934 GROPIUS: c2), namely that there is a difference between a natural law and a rule: if a natural law is found ‘disobeyed’ it tends as a consequence, to loose the status of a law, while a rule remains a rule whether disobeyed or not, and in fact often exists exactly because it tends to be disobeyed. 'Rule' is a human-made law which is necessary exactly because the particular behaviour or action it wants to induce is not natural; consequently all rules admit exceptions by definition. The sentence 'rule so broad as to admit of no exception' seems therefore to be a contradiction in terms.

COMMENTS TO 1935 MORRISON (2)

(2) c1: Morrison as founder of the ‘misunderstandist ‘school. Morrison’s book and this quotation in particular seems to be the locus classicus for the later ‘misunderstandist school’ of commentators who claimed that Sullivan’s formula (and/or his whole design philosophy) was misunderstood (for more comments on the misunderstandist school, see 1924 SULLIVAN: c1. The main contention of the misunderstandist school has been the suggestion that the modernist design doctrine is basically sound, and that the problems which emerged in connection with its practicing are due to human errors, i.e. results of various kinds of misunderstandings. Morrison seems to set a pattern in this context. In his book he claims that Sullivan, “ in his insistence on expressiveness as well as on adequacy ... goes beyond pure functionalism as it exists in its most bald form today...”. It is, however, not clear whether Sullivan’s alleged insistence on expressiveness referred to the nature of his design doctrine where form should ‘express’ function, or whether ‘expressiveness’ meant, as Morrison appears to suggest, that the architect should somehow, apparently on his own account, infuse the building with something that would “express intellectual, emotional and spiritual realities”. These realities, should according to the doctrine surface during the solution of the problem at hand. Now, if they don’t, and the result is a ‘bald’ architecture, at least two other explanations could be thought of, beside the ‘misunderstandist’ one of Morris: 1. that the architects failed to express these realities not because they misunderstood the functionalist philosophy but because they were simply bad architects. Or, 2. that they failed to express these realities because the doctrine itself is useless as a practical design rule, and as such turns out to be entirely arbitrary. Consequently, that their concentration on practical solutions failed to lead the architects to any definite forms, leaving them with imitating the aesthetic of leading architects who relished in ‘bald’ architecture, as the only way out. (Incidentally, Sullivan himself uses the word ‘bald’ in his ‘Kindergarten Chats’ to describe a department store in which, according to his own words, the form follows the function; see 1901-1902 SULLIVAN (1) & 1901-1902 SULLIVAN: c2.) •

1935 TSCHICHOLD

Jan Tschichold: [IN SEARCH OF A HANDY FORMULA (III)]

“The form as visual or aesthetic creation is ... a working result, not a realization of an external formal intention.”

”Formen som synlig eller æstetisk Dannelse er ... et Arbejdsresultat og ikke Virkeliggørelsen af en ydre Formfremstilling. (dansk oversettelse 1937:22)

“Die Form als anschauliches oder ästhetisches Gebilde ist ... ein Arbeitsergebnis, nicht die Realisierung einer äusserlichen Formvorstellung.” (24)

Tschichold, Jan. Typographische Gestaltung. Basel: Benno Schwabe, 1935; Danish tr. Funktionel Typografi. København: Det Berlingske Bogtrykkeri.

COMMENTS TO 1935 TSCHICHOLD

c1. Tschichold’s formulation is another illustration (after 1928 MOHOLY-NAGY) of how the modernist design doctrine was phrased before the FFF-formula arrived to Europe and started to be used as a shorthand for this idea. •

1936 CHENEYS

Sheldon and Martha Cheney: AN OVERQUOTED AXIOM

“[Louis Sullivan] first insisted that function must determine form ... (...) [he was] was far more than author of an overquoted axiom about form and function. He and Cézanne were brother prophets crying out simultaneously in the wilderness of sterile, imitative, nineteenth century architecture and painting. Cézanne heralded the new way of seeing. Sullivan saw the new way of doing. Louis Sullivan demanded honest expression of function and of materials. He asked for organic building and foreshadowed today's ideal: that there is to be constructed out of industrial forms such an expression of industrial America's life as will become the American machine-age architecture.” (152, 30 )

Cheney, Sheldon and Martha. Art and the Machine: An Account of Industrial Design in 20th-century America. New York: Whittlesey House / McGraw-Hill, 1936.

COMMENTS TO 1936 CHENEYS

c1: Cheneys’ reference to ‘an overquoted axiom’ suggest that by the mid-1930s the formula was in frequent use among American architects and probably among designers as well. •

1936 PEVSNER

Nikolaus Pevsner: [THE FFF-FORMULA NOT MENTIONED]

Pevsner, Nikolaus. 1936. Pioneers of the Modern Movement from William Morris to Walter Gropius. London: Faber & Faber.

COMMENTS TO 1936 PEVSNER

c1: Although Pevsner discusses Sullivan he does not mention the FFF-formula. It is unclear whether the reason was that Pevsner was not familiar with the formula, or did not know Sullivan was the father of the phrase, or whether he for some reason refrained form mentioning it. In the British context the formula appeared at least twice earlier; see 1932 REILLY and 1934 GROPIUS. •

1937 BEHRENDT

Walter Curt Behrendt: SIMPLE BIOLOGICAL TRUTH

“... fate threw in[Sullivan’s] path young John Edelmann, of German descent, philosophically minded and a keen thinker like Sullivan himself. He was foreman in the office of William LeBaron Jenney, where Sullivan found his first job. Once in the course of their endless youthful discussions he flung out to Sullivan the startling phrase, ‘suppressed functions’ — inspiring words which opened up to him another vision. (...) –– When the word ‘function’ was detonated by the word ‘suppressed,’ a new synthesis articulated itself within him. If architecture was to revive, it must intelligently serve — it must not suppress. With this elemental perception, he set out to develop a new philosophy of architecture, based on a principle of general validity, putting to test a rule ‘so broad as to admit of no exceptions.’ Expressing no more than a simple biological truth, stating the morphological law of all organic growth, he finally formulated this guiding principle in the words: ‘Form follows function.’ –– In this simple formula, the new spirit of building acquired its credo.” (115)

Behrendt, W. C. 1937. Modern Building: Its Nature, Problems, and Forms. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1937.

COMMENTS TO 1937 BEHRENDT

c1: Sullivan’s FFF-formula arrives in Europe – and comes to stay. Walter Curt Behrendt appears to be the man who imported, in the 1938 British edition of his 1937 book (Behrendt 1938) the FFF-dictum to Europe. Among other things, he identified unequivocally Louis Sullivan as the father of the dictum, and opened for the subsequent popularization of the formula. 1934 GROPIUS did mention both the formula, and Sullivan as the author three years earlier, but his text, although published in Journal of the Royal Institute of British Architects probably remained confined to narrow professional circles. Besides, Gropius expended no more than three sentences on Sullivan and his formula while Behrendt devotes some eight pages to him, three of them under the heading “Sullivan: The Founder of a New Theory”. Behrendt presented also Greenough for the reader, probably for the first time in the context of modernist architecture and together with Sullivan, and suggested that Sullivan might have known Greenough’s writings. Behrendt’s book was published in the USA in 1937 by Harcourt & Brace (according to Teague 1949: 276); the British edition contains no date of publication but British libraries give 1938 as the publication year.

c2: Omitted. What Behrendt did not make clear was where and when Sullivan published the FFF-formula for the first time; in other words, Behrendt mentions neither the article “The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered” nor 1896 as the year.

c3: ‘Suppressed functions.’ Sullivan mentioned these words and their effect on him in a paragraph of his Autobiography (Sullivan 1956: 207); he claimed that he “saw in a flash that [the theory of suppressed functions] meant the real clue to the mystery that lay behind the veil of appearances”. Unfortunately (and, perhaps, typically) Sullivan gives only vaguest of hints about what he might have meant by the theory, and the ‘mystery’. Behrens suggests in the quotation above that the opposite ‘to suppress’ should be understood as ‘to serve intelligently’. This seems to point in the direction of the utilitarian interpretation, and indeed it appears to agree with what Sullivan says in his Autobiography... of 1924 (Sullivan 1956: 258). But it may be more probable that opposite to the notion ‘suppressed functions’ were ‘expressed functions’ – i.e. functions which were embodied in forms. On this interpretation, ‘suppressed’ would be synonymous with ‘intrinsic’, ‘inherent, or ‘innate’. This interpretation fits well with Sullivan’s own idea expressed in Sullivan 1947: 203 that “it is of the very essence of every problem that it contains and suggests its own solution.”

c4: ‘Suppressed functions’ and the idea of preformation in embryology. It is also interesting to note that there may be a parallel between on the one hand the ideas of ‘suppressed functions’ in the sense of ‘intrinsic solutions’ in the modernist theory of design, and on the other the idea of preformation, i.e. simple unfolding of pre-existent structures which was a key idea in embryology prior to 19th century. The preformation theory would claim that male sperms, or alternately female eggs, contain in miniature the future body with all its parts, and that also this future body to be ‘evolved’, contains, while still in the egg or sperm, in its own sperm or her own egg all parts of the future body to be ‘evolved’, and so forth. The opposing embryological theory was called epigenesis; cf. Needham 1959.

c5: Behrendt ignored. Behrendt’s book has been strangely ignored in contemporary literature. In Modernism in Design edited by Paul Greenhalgh (Greenhalgh 1990) the book is not even mentioned, neither in the general bibliography, nor in the article specially dealing with promoting modernist design in Britain. Beside the fact that in Britain the modernist scene was dominated by Pevsner’s Pioneers, the reason for still very low standing of Behrend’s book may have been that 1938 was the very eve of the Second World War, and the book did not get the due attention in the tense pre-war atmosphere. •

1937 PEVSNER

Nikolaus Pevsner: [IN SEARCH OF A HANDY FORMULA (IV)]

“As long as considerations of usability dictate the shapes, one need not be afraid of horrors.” (84)

Pevsner, Nikolaus. An Enquiry into the Industrial Art in England. Cambridge: University Press, 1937.

COMMENTS TO 1937 PEVSNER

c1: Not yet handy (IV). Still another example (after 1928 MOHOLY-NAGY and 1935 TSCHICHOLD) of a somewhat awkward formulation of the modernist design philosophy before the FFF-formula came to be used as a shorthand for the doctrine. The FFF-formula is absent from Pevsner’s Enquiry, which suggests that Pevsner was probably not familiar with the formula at the time; had he known it he would very probably have used it. On the other hand, it seems improbable that he would have been unacquainted with Walter Gropius’ lecture read to the Design and Industries Association (DIA) in London in May 1934, and published in the Journal of the Royal Institute of British Architects of the same month. (see 1934 GROPIUS). •

1938 BARNES & REINECKE

J. F. Barnes and J. O. Reinecke: A PLATONIC HANGOVER

“‘Form follows function,’ as a formula for the evaluation of design is no more helpful than the old maxim that the writer should ‘write as he would speak’. The writer must still ask, how he would speak under the circumstance of time, place and purpose; and the designer must still inquire, how he will best express the function of the machine he will design, considering the circumstances of manufacturing costs, volume, public taste and the use or purpose of the device. We think you will agree that the writer can best gauge his skill by the effect upon his audience. It is equally apparent that the designer can best test his skill by the effect upon his audience, the buying public. –– Such criteria as ‘form follows function’ are unsound because their first premise is unsound. They make the error of assuming that there is one, and only one right way of doing a thing. This is a hangover from the Platonic postulate of an eternal and immutable ideal form inhabiting a misty other world. Things were beautiful or right, according to Plato, only as they approximated this super-terrestrial form. If we are to judge industrial design, or any other product of modern thought, let us at least judge it by a standard which modern thinkers have evolved. I believe we designers are agreed on the validity of the pragmatic test of design, which judges it by its results, viz., sales. Let us, then, adopt this pragmatic test as our conclusion. But let us not delude ourselves that John Doe buys a machine we have designed because something deep within him responds to the universal beauty embodied therein, and guides him unerringly to the purchase." (148-149)

Barnes, J. F. and J. O. Reinecke. “Does It Sell?” Art and Industry 24 (April, 1938): 146-150; quoted in part in Meikle 1979: 134.

COMMENTS TO 1938 BARNES & REINECKE

c1: Rejected as outright nonsense. This seems to be the first unequivocal, straightforward rejection of the FFF-formula as a meaningless rule and a downright nonsense. As such it was unique, and was to remain so for many years to come. The diagnosis is still unsurpassed in its precision and boldness. The next similar rejection came only some 25 years later, with David Pye in 1964; see 1964 PYE (also Pye suggests a platonist source of Sullivan’s idea of function). This 1938 critique came from two US industrial designers with apparently pragmatic, down-to-earth, no-nonsense approach to their trade. While Barnes and Reinecke flatly rejected the formula, and ridiculed the Platonic element in it, such approach was by no means a rule among industrial designers in the USA, or elsewhere. Almost invariably, designers found the phrase intriguing and defended it. A striking example of successful industrial designer who fell flat for exactly the Platonic element in the theory, seemingly without any reservations whatsoever was the American industrial designer, W. D. Teague, a man with large office, and an eminently successful commercial career, cf. his large book Design This Day from 1940 (see 1949 TEAGUE). •

1938 ULRICH

Cynthia Ulrich: NOT AN AESTHETIC CRITERION

“Can function determine form? The question has been dignified by age. In the middle of the eighteenth century it first appeared in its modern connotations, and since has been developed and spread about, until with Louis Sullivan's terse formulation of it as ‘form follows function’' it has become the creed and war-cry of most modern architects and designers.[#here in a note Ulrich referes to Behrendt 1937] In spite of this common acceptance I have yet to find a convincing analysis and justification of the idea as an aesthetic criterion. If it could be justified according to logical and workable principles it might become a much needed regulating ideal for the reviving interest in industrial art.” (50)

Ulrich, Cynthia. “Form versus Function.” Vassar Journal of Undergraduate Studies XI (May, 1938): 50-61.

COMMENTS TO 1938 ULRICH

c1: Who was Cynthia Ulrich? Here the first woman design theorist enters the (American) scene. In addition, this is the first article since the rather cursory comments of Adler in 1896 (see 1986 ADLER) which presents an extended discussion of the FFF-formula. What is more, Ulrich does it in a surprisingly able, serious, critical manner unseen so far. (I haven’t been able to find out who Cynthia Ulrich was, or what she did subsequently, in spite of inquiries, via e-mail, directly at the Vassar College in the USA.)

c2: War cry too soon. Ulrich exaggerates when she writes that with Sullivan the formula became “the creed and war-cry of most modern architects and designers”; a sort of war-cry it became only since mid-thirties in the USA, and since after the Second World War in Europe; what 1916 REBORI or 1917 / 1918 BRAGDON represented were still voices in the wilderness.

c3: Do objects have an intrinsic identity of their own which designers can unearth? In discussing the notion of function and its relation to beauty of useful objects Ulrich proposed "to distinguish between the relation... of the maker, the user, and the spectator... to the object." In her short reflection about the spectator’s perspective she came to the conclusion that a thing does not say anything about its function unless one is familiar with that particular thing, or the category of things, in advance. This brilliant piece of a common sense design psychology rejected the Greenoughian, Sullivanian, and Wrightian ‘metaphysical semantics’, or ‘semantic automatism’ (as I propose to call it) which would entail, in Greenough’s words, that when designers truly adapt forms to functions, “the bank would have the physiognomy of a bank, [and] the church would be recognized as such ...” (as Greenough put it; see 1843 GREENOUGH (10 & 11). For Sullivan’s belief in ‘sematic automatism’, see 1896 SULLIVAN (1); for Wright, see 1939 WRIGHT; for more examples illustrating the idea of ‘semantic automatism’, see c1 to 1966 NORBERG-SCHULZ. On a pragmatic psychology of design, cf. Norman 1988, who by deafault shows how unrealistic such a vision really is. •

1939 WRIGHT

Frank Lloyd Wright: FORM AND FUNCTION ARE ONE

“‘Organic’ is the word which we should apply to this new architecture. So here I stand before you preaching organic architecture; declaring organic architecture to be the modern ideal and the teaching so much needed if we are to see the whole of life, and to now serve the whole of life, holding no “traditions” essential to great TRADITION. Nor cherishing any preconceived form fixing upon us either past, present or future, but – instead – exalting the simple laws of common sense – or of super-sense if you prefer – determining form by way of the nature of materials, the nature of purpose so well understood that a bank will not look like a Greek temple, a university will not look like a cathedral, nor a fire-engine house resemble a French chateau, or what have you? Form follows Function? Yes, but more important now Form and Function are One.”(6)

Frank Lloyd Wright. An Organic Architecture: The Architecture of Democracy. London: Lund Humpries, 1939.

COMMENTS TO 1939 WRIGHT

c1: Automatic visual identity. Wright believed, just as Greenough and Sullivan did, that ‘organic’ architecture, i.e architecture where forms followed functions, would be not only beautiful of its own accord, but would, as a consequence, also provide the object or building with its visual true identity. Such vision which we here dubbed ‘semantic automatism’, was cogently attacked by Ulrich a year earlier (1938 ULRICH: c3); see also 1966 NORBERG-SCHULZ: c1.

c2: ‘Form and Function are One.’ Wright’s formulation “Form and Function are One” should be seen as an expression largely synonymous with the FFF-formula, rather than a revision of it; see 1901-02 SULLIVAN: c2. •

1940 CRAVEN

Thomas Craven: AN IDEAL OF SIMPLICITY

“ ... Richardson had designed some excellent houses in the English tradition – but Wright was an American; and Sullivan’s principle that ‘form follows function’ had not been applied to domestic buildings. From his twentieth to his thirtieth year, Wright conceived and developed an absolutely new type of building, as original a form of architecture ... as any man has ever brought forth working alone. How did he do it? Largely by sheer genius. He worked from an ideal of organic simplicity and unit fabrication ... “ (277)

Craven, Thomas. Modern Art: The Men, the Movements, the Meaning. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1940 (1934).

COMMENTS TO 1940 CRAVEN

c1: FFF as ideal of simplicity? An early ‘less is more? •

1940 TEAGUE

Walter Dorwin Teague: THE ANCIENT TRUTH

“In the early eighteen-nineties, Louis Sullivan announced to an inattentive world that ‘Form follows Function’, and laid down the principles of an architecture based on rational solutions of our own practical building problems. (...) Sullivan [re-proclaimed] the ancient truth, received by his day as a new revelation, that function determines form, and form expresses function (...)” (50, 52)

“In the superlative rightness of certain modern airplanes, power plants and machine tools, parkways and bridges, nothing has been admitted which did not contribute to performance, and forms have been determined solely by efficiency, materials and processes; while an accurate integration of all the parts in precise relationships has been achieved by the pressure of necessity.” (53)

Teague, Walter Dorwin. Design This Day: The Technique of Order in the Machine Age. Revised ed., New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1949 (1940).

COMMENTS TO 1940 TEAGUE

c1: Teague - a ‘utopian pragmatist’? As pointed above (see 1938 BARNES & REINECKE) some industrial designers rejected emphatically the functionalist design doctrine as a nonsense, while others accepted it with wide-open arms. The hugely successful US industrial designer of the founder generation, W. D. Teague belonged to this second category. His well informed opus Design This Day published in 1940 was a veritable panegyric on the functionalist design doctrine. The clue to this strange marriage of a pragmatic practice with utopian ideology in one person may be Teague’s distress and anguish caused by his having to give up his artistic career (as Meikle 1979: 44 suggests). This may have motivated him into embracing a design doctrine which, by making the designer a midwife of natural forms, abolished the applied art status of industrial design activity, and made it of almost equal standing with autonomous artistic activity. It is still difficult to believe though that Teague could seriously claim that the aesthetic appeal of “modern airplanes, power plants and machine tools, parkways and bridges” was achieved without conscious aesthetic intention. Teague’s mystical bent presented in his mentioned opus makes him the Hermes Trismegistos of the American industrial design theory. In fact, the force and articulateness of 1938 BARNES & REINECKE may have been provoked by Teague’s many articles published during the 1930s in journals such as Advertising Arts, Society of Automotive Engineers Journal, Advertising Arts, Commercial Art and Industry, Industrial Education Magazine, or Electrical Manufacturing, arguing for the functionalist design philosophy. (I have not succeeded in obtaining any of these articles but I refer to some of them here nonetheless: *Teague 1932; *Teague 1934a; *Teague 1934b; *Teague 1935; *Teague 1936; *Teague 1938). For a discussion, critique, and radical rejection of modern art as being a revival of ancient occultism and magic, rather than being a modern phenomenon, see Robsjohn-Gibbings 1947.

c2: The modernist understanding of the FFF-formula. The quotations document a representative modernist understanding of the FFF-formula: to say about a designed object that here “form follows function” meant that “nothing has been admitted which did not contribute to performance, and forms have been determined solely by efficiency, materials and processes”.

c3: Two editions. The 1940 TEAGUE quotations come from the second edition of the book published in 1949. As Teague writes in the introduction to the second edition, he made some changes in the first two chapters and the final statement, while our quotations come from chapter five. I therefore presume that the original 1940 edition contained the above quotations. •

1947 LORAN

Erle Loran: WRIGHT’S CREATIVE IDEAL

“The creative ideal that ‘form follows function’ is now commonly associated with architects like Frank Lloyd Wright. We trace Wright's development back to Sullivan and thence to Richardson, who was born in 1838. To most, it will come as a surprise to learn that the American sculptor, Horatio Greenough, born in 1805, had formulated ideas on art and architecture that read, even today, like the words of a progressive contemporary.’ (xiii)

Loran, Erle. “Introduction.” In Horatio Greenough, Form and Function: Remarks on Art, Design, and Architecture, ed. Harold A.Small. xiii-xxi. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1962 (1947).

COMMENTS TO 1947 LORAN

c1: Wright the author of the FFF-formula? Loran associates the FFF-formula with Wright and mentions Sullivan only as Wright’s mentor and evolutionary predecessor – without suggesting that Sullivan had anything to do with the origin of the formula. This is surprising if we take into account that there were at least two pro-modernist books published in the USA since the mid-1930s in which Sullivan was hailed as the father of the FFF-formula: Morrison 1971 and Behrendt 1937. Did Loran fail to mention Sullivan as the author of the FFF-formula because Loran was a painter and art teacher, and not an architect and as a consequence out of touch with the recent literature? On the other hand, Loran does not launch Greenough as the true author of the formula as many did later on (see 1896 SULLIVAN (1-2): c3 ). As to Wright, I read somewhere ( I do not recall where) that he wanted the public to believe, at least at the beginning of the 1930s, that it was he himself who launched the idea. •

1948 SAARINEN

Eliel Saarinen: FORM FOLLOWS PRACTICAL AND SPIRITUAL FUNCTION

“By ‘dryly practical form’ we mean cases where the matter-of-fact understanding of form is brought into the foreground. Form is considered a mere material thing for its practical purpose, where the commonly used slogan ‘form follows function’ is understood to mean that form follows its practical functioning only. In other words: it is maintained that if form is functional, it is bound to be already beautiful for this sole reason. This is no valid statement, however. (...) the quality of ‘function’ must not mean practical function only. It must also mean spiritual function. (...) Consequently, when we speak about ‘form follows function,’ we are inclined to accept the slogan only in as broad a sense as above indicated; namely, that form must satisfy those functional requirements that originated its reason for being – both physical and spiritual. Only in such a sense can form be significative as an art-form.” (14)

Saarinen, Eliel. The Search for Form in Art and Architecture. New York: Dover, 1985.

COMMENTS TO 1948 SAARINEN

c1: Salvaging the unsalvageable. (a) When one thinks of it, the modernist design doctrine was an extremely sketchy affair. The FFF-formula was not only a summary of a doctrine – in many ways it was the doctrine itself. There was not much more to it. Modernists were never able to make it less sketchy; the cursoriness seemed to be the very essence of it. This design doctrine seemed to work all the same in spite of its sketchiness, at least as long as there still was a design establishment opposing modernism. Modernists believed their design showed a unitary style because it followed the same design principle but it was rather thanks to its rhetoric power that the doctrine gave the impression of delivering. Much to the dismay of European modernists, the more pragmatic Americans (cf. Hitchcock and Johnson 1932)showed conclusively already in early 1930s that functionalist style was not a result of following a design principle but of applying aesthetic norms derived from contemporary abstract aesthetics (cf. Michl 1996). This seemed on the one hand to have led to legitimatizing the use of abstract aesthetic in the post-war architecture and design, and on the other to attempts to salvage the doctrine, often by salvaging the FFF-formula.

(b) But all this rescue work was apparently in vain because the modernist architects were unable to understand that their doctrine never really worked in the first place. The striking modernist forms were not results of following functions. Therefore the efforts to improve a doctrine that never started to work were doomed. Adherents of modernism did not really understand that their sketchy design doctrine worked only in the sense of making them, mentally, into autonomous artists, and setting them free of the constraints of applied art. The doctrine was so sketchy because it served as a flimsy dress barely covering the modernist dream of artistic freedom – a freedom similar to the one enjoyed by the fine artists. The functionalist design philosophy can be seen as a kind of liberation theology. The doctrine was a patchwork of arguments, brought in from wherever they could be found and whenever they seemed to support the idea that the architect’s prime task lied in developing the historically necessary style of the new epoch – the concomitant conclusion being that architect was entitled to be relieved of the task of serving the public, the institutions, the clients, the users, the market, on their terms. Such design doctrine couldn’t be improved in the direction of practical feasibility – it could only be abandoned. But before large minority of respectable designers came to that conclusion, the salvage attempts continued.

c2: ‘Multifunctionalist’ strategy. Saarinen’s attempt at salvaging the doctrine can be called ‘multifunctionalist’. Its aim was to enlarge the notion of function which many modernist architects started to claim was too narrow. It was now to include also other than practical functions, such as spiritual, psychological, symbolic and perhaps even aesthetic ones. The trouble with such ‘multifunctionalist’ improvement, however, was that it was undermining the very raison d’être of the modernist revolution: the vision of objective, taste-independent and ultimately classless design. The ‘strength’ of the functionalist notion of function was that it was a concept so independent of any particular user or client that it did not have to be related to them at all, neither as an individual nor as a social beings. The ‘multifunctionalist’ trend towards inclusion of ‘spiritual’, ‘psychological’ or ‘symbolic’ and other functions into the functionalist notion of function opened the door to inclusion of individual and social distinctions . This undermined the concept of ‘function’ as something objective, undermining at the same time the vision of objective design. •

1949 KORSMO

Arne Korsmo: TECHNIQUE AND MATERIAL BOUND TOGETHER

“Innforlivelse i historien gir oss en bakgrunn for gjenstandenes formuttrykk. Det klarlegger deres tidsbetonte verdi og gir også historien om teknikkens utvikling. Teknikk og materiale er knyttet sammen i uttrykket ‘form følger funksjon’. Det er en setning som utkristaliserer seg ved århundreskiftet, den uttrykker en mer bevisst forestilling om sammenhengen mellom teknikk og form.” (84-85)

Arne Korsmo as quoted in Teigen, Karl. “Nye sølvarbeider.” Bonytt [Oslo] (1949): 81-85.

COMMENTS TO 1949 KORSMO

c1: Korsmo seems to be the first Norwegian designer who used the FFF-formula. Odd Brochmann (Brochmann 1987: 60), however, mentions the Swedish architect Elias Cornell, who shortly after the end of the WWII allegedly during his visits in Oslo spoke among other things both of the FFF-formula and Sullivan, but I have not come yet to pursuing the clue. •

1950 EGBERT

Donald Drew Egbert: FROM THE THEORY OF ‘SUPPRESSED FUNCTIONS’

“It is worthy to note that Sullivan was the first to employ – in 1896 – the phrase which is still the slogan of the functionalists, ‘Form follows function.’ (...) As a young man he first came into contact with German philosophy through his friend John Edelmann, a fellow draftsman in the office of William LeBaron Jenney at Chicago. Not only, said Sullivan, did Edelmann know ‘the highest transcendentalisms of German metaphysics,’ but it was from Edelmann. also, that Sullivan derived his ‘theory of suppressed functions,’ the theory on which he based his doctrine that form follows function.” (346, 368)

Egbert, Donald Drew. “The Idea of Organic Expression and American Architecture.” In Evolutionary Thought in America, ed. Stow Persons. 336-408. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950.

COMMENTS TO 1950 EGBERT

c1: Nobody seems to know for sure, though, what Edelmann/Sullivan might have meant by their theory of ‘suppressed functions’ and in what sense he based his FFF-formula on it. On this question see 1938 BEHRENDT: c3; 1979 STEADMAN (2): c1; for an article devoted to the mysterious figure of John Edelmann, cf. Egbert and Sprague 1966 •

1950 ZEVI

Bruno Zevi: THE FORMULA OF ORGANIC ARCHITECTURE

“He [i.e. Sullivan] insisted on the organic concept of architecture as he felt that a building, being an embodiment of life, should be conceived as a living entity. His is the formula form follows function. (Zevi’s appended note nr. 18: Wright would have it that the phrase is not Sullivan's but his partner Adler's. Yet it seems right to attribute it to the man who was constantly talking about ‘suppressed functions’.) By function, however he never meant merely something mechanistic and utilitarian but the sum of all the intellectual, emotional and spiritual as well as material activities which would go on within a building.” (84)

Zevi, Bruno. Towards an Organic Architecture. London: Faber & Faber, 1950.

COMMENTS TO 1950 ZEVI

c1: Morrison. Zevi takes over the Morrison defense of the FFF-formula from 1935; see 1935 MORRISON.

c2: Adler’s? Phrase is in one sense (but only in that sense) Adler’s; see 1896 ADLER: c1 and 1963 BLAKE.

c3: ‘Suppressed functions’. “the man who constantly talked about ‘suppressed functions’”: does Zevi mean Sullivan or Edelmann? Sullivan may have talked ‘constantly’ about suppressed functions to Wright, but in writing be barely mentions the notion; cf. Sullivan 1956: 207; see also 1938 BEHRENDT: c3; 1950 EGBERT and 1979 STEADMAN (2): c1.

c4: Whatever has become of the aesthetic function? Zevi seems to be assuming a revisionist, ‘multifunctionalist’ position (see 1948 SAARINEN: c2), when he claims, after Morrison, that Sullivan meant by function “the sum of all the intellectual, emotional and spiritual as well as material activities which would go on within a building.” In one sense, however, Zevi remains on the orthodox functionalist position, in spite of his stretching the notion of function both far and wide. The fact that he limits himself only to the inventory of ‘activities’ happening within the building suggests what he wants to leave out of the definition: it is the aesthetic function the building’s inside and outside is expected by the users to fulfill. The possible inclusion of the aesthetic function was by far the most suicidal feature of the ‘multifunctionalist’ tendency. Had it been included, the designer would be obliged, logically speaking, to meet the aesthetic demands of the users, just as he felt obliged to meet the utilitarian demands. The essence of the functionalist position was that the aesthetic form of a building or of a product had to be found in non-aesthetic considerations – not chosen out of aesthetic ones. tampering with this principle, which was about to occur, was bound to bring about disintegration of functionalism from within. •

1951 NEWTON

Norman T. Newton: DO WE KNOW WHAT FOLLOWS WHAT?

“Science [of biology] does not reveal to us which, if either, comes first in living organisms, the inner activity or the surrounding form. It does not reveal whether ‘form follows function’ (as Louis Sullivan said of architecture) or whether ‘function follows form.’ What it does reveal is that, through a steady process of evolution, form and function come to be mutually and structurally interrelated in all enduring organisms.” (133)

Newton, Norman T. An Approach to Design. Cambridge, Mass.: Addison-Wesley Press, 1951.

COMMENTS TO 1951 NEWTON

c1: Not architecture but nature. Contrary to Newton’s claim, Sullivan did not say FFF of architecture but of nature(or rather of the whole cosmos); in Sullivan 1956: 258 he spoke about “a formula he had evolved, through long contemplation of living things” (see also 1924 SULLIVAN). Sullivan saw his FFF-formula as a 'natural law' that was to be binding for human artefacts including architecture as well.

c2: What follows what. Newton referred earlier in his book to 'the great biologist' C.M.*Child and his book Individuality and Organisms (Chicago 1915); Newton’s quote suggests that Childe was a Lamarckian biologist: “Structure and function are mutually related. Function produces structure and structure modifies and determines the character of function.” This would explain Newton's claim that biology can give no definitive answer about what comes first. But according to Neo-Darwinism which have been the scientific orthodoxy in biological sciences since about 1940s, the FFF-formula would be considered a Lamarckian. i.e. pre-Darwinian explanation of adaptations in nature. See also 1985 ANDREW; for current views on the questions of ‘what follows what, cf. Gould 1986; Gould 1992b; Gould 1992c; Gould 1992d; Gould 1992e; Gould 1992f •

1951 NOWICKI

Matthew Nowicki: FORM FOLLOWS FORM

“I suspect that I will no longer provoke you as much as I should by opening these remarks on the origins and trends of modern architecture with a statement that sometime ago our design became a style. (...) A style perhaps follows sales, quoting Edgar Kaufmann, just as form followed function in the words of Greenough [sic] and the Renaissance architecture followed its antique models in the work of Palladio. (...) We have to realize that in the overwhelming majority of modern design form follows form and not function.(...) Where is the future of modern design? It seems to me that it depends on the constant effort of approaching every problem with the consciousness that there is no single way of solving it.”

Nowicki, Matthew. “Origins and Trends in Modern Architecture.” The Magazine of Art, November (1951): 273-279; reprinted as Nowicki, Matthew. “Function and Form.” In Roots of Contemporary American Architecture: A Series of Thirty-Seven Essays dating From the Mid-Nineteenth Century to the Present, ed. Lewis Mumford. 411-18. New York: Dover, 1972, 411, 417-18)

COMMENTS TO 1951 NOWICKI

c1: Nowicki starts the Greenough-rumor? Nowicki is to my knowledge the first writer who explicitly suggested that Greenough was the author of the FFF-formula. Neither Nowicki, however, nor anybody else after him, produced any concrete evidence that this really was the case; for a list of other writers suggesting the same, see 1896 SULLIVAN: c3.

c2: Form follows form - a 20 years old discovery. Without putting it in this striking manner, Hitchcock and Johnson 1932 made this very same discovery already in the early 1930s: the European functionalists architecture, they said, was a result of following four leading architects who in their turn followed the contemporary abstract aesthetic. But, in contrast to Nowicki, Hitchcock and Johnson did not really see this as a problem because they devised a theory (developed especially in Hitchcock 1948) that abstract art and architecture are a sort of communicating vessels. Cf. also Michl 1996.

c3: Functionalism shot dead. Nowicki, in saying that problems provide no single way of solving them, rejected the very essence of the modernist doctrine, which claimed, in the words of Sullivan, that “ it is of the very essence of every problem that it contains and suggests its own solution” (Sullivan 1947: 203). This doctrinal position also was rejected already by Hitchcock and Johnson; cf. Hitchcock and Johnson 1932: 37.

c4: And how about nature? Still, Nowicki does not take issue with the claim that form follow function. Did he mean that in nature, or in ships, or in primitive tools, forms really did follow functions – and that only in modern design they did not? •

1952 CONDIT

Carl W. Condit: THE IDEA FIRST STATED BY PLATO

“Sullivan was often inconsistent; yet the philosophy which matured with his growing powers as an architect was original and profound. More than any other artist of his time, he understood the social basis, the responsibility, and the problem of art in a technical and industrial society. He felt that he had discovered the rule with no exceptions in the concept ‘form follows function.’ The idea was first stated by Plato but it remained for Sullivan to give it its systematic concrete demonstration in terms of a contemporary building art. [Condit’s note 9: “Socrates says, ‘The excellence or beauty or truth of every structure, animate or inanimate, and of every action of man, is relative to the use for which nature or the artist has intended them (Republic X, 601C).”] The proper understanding of the word ‘function’ is the key to his whole philosophy. An organic architecture, he believed, is one which grows naturally or organically out of the social and technical factors among which the architect lives and with which he must work. These factors embrace not only the technical and utilitarian problems of building but also the aspirations, ideals, and needs of human beings. Thus functionalism involved for him something much wider and deeper than utilitarian and structural considerations, as important as these are. (...) The style of a building would become whatever the materials, structural problems and utilitarian demands might make it. It would have to be partly determined by the ideals, aspirations, ambitions, and the total human needs of the people who give the architect his commission. Thus a modern style would be a matter not of one form or another but rather of an organic shape taking form from the physical, intellectual, and emotional milieu in which it exists. Consciously or unconsciously, the architects of the Chicago school approached their task in this way, and their achievement must be measured against these criteria.” (37)

Condit, Carl W. The Rise of the Skyscraper. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1952.

COMMENTS TO 1952 CONDIT

c1: Apologist historian. Carl Condit was called “...the [Chicago] School's apologist and its architects' hagiographer” (cf. Charernbhak 1981: 112) and the 1952 CONDIT quotation above with its unquestioning reproduction of Sullivan’s various theoretical claims bears out the evaluation. Other influential apologist historians, i.e. historians standing on modernist positions, can be said to include Giedion, Pevsner, and Hitchcock. The term ‘apologetic historians’ is Reyner Banham’s; cf. Banham 1986: 7.

c2: FFF-idea first stated by Plato? Condit comes with the strong claim that the FFF-idea was first ‘stated by Plato’ but the quotation he refers to hardly supports the claim . Still, the functionalist notion of function appears to have some features common with Platonic ideas. It was, however, mostly those strongly critical of the FFF-formula who pointed out the connection; see 1938 BARNES & REINECKE; 1964 PYE. •

1952 MUMFORD

Lewis Mumford: SALUTARY – BUT INCOMPLETE

MUMFORD (1) “It was Greenough who carried further, as a student of anatomy as well as sculpture, the great theorem of Lamarck: Form follows function. This principle carries two corollaries: forms change when functions change, and new functions cannot be expressed by old forms. Greenough saw that this applied to all organic forms, even man-created ones. He recognized that the effective works of art in his own day, the primitives of a new era, were not the current specimens of eclectic decoration and eclectic architecture, but the strong virile forms, without any other historical attachment than to their own age, of the new tools and machines, forms that met the new needs of modern life. The American ax, the American clock, the clipper ship – in every line of these utilities and machines necessity of function played a determining part. They were without ornament or decorative device of any kind, except perhaps for a surviving ship's figurehead: like the naked body when harmoniously developed, they needed no further ornament or costume to achieve beauty. For what was beauty? ‘Promise of function.’ –– As expressed by Greenough, that was a breath-taking, a spine-tingling thought; and in the minds of Greenough's successors, such as the architect Louis Sullivan, who might well have breathed in Greenough's words with his native New England air, this doctrine provided a starting point for the new architecture. (...) But while Greenough's doctrine was a salutary one, it was incomplete; for it partly failed to do justice to those human values that are derived, not from the object and the work, but from the subject and the quality of life the architect seeks to enhance. Even mechanical function itself rests on human values: the desire for order, for security, for power; but to presume that these values are, in every instance, all-prevailing ones, which do away with the need for any other qualities, is to limit the nature of man himself to just those functions that serve the machine.” (117, 119)

MUMFORD (2) "So it came about that symbolic expression, driven out the front door by the doctrine that form follows function, came in by the rear entrance. The conscious theories of functionalists from Greenough to Sullivan, from Adolph Loos to Gropius, have by now succeeded in eliminating almost every historic or archaic mode of symbolism. They established the fact that a modern building cannot be imitation Egyptian, imitation Greek, imitation Medieval, Imitation Renascence [sic], or imitation hodgepodge. Their new structures were not refurbished traditional forms, improved with modern plumbing and elevator service; they were naked, clean, properly devoid of extraneous ornament. But still they said something. They were not merely products of the machine; they revealed that the machine itself might become an object of veneration; and that an age that despised and debunked symbols might nevertheless, like the hero of a forgotten play by Eugene O'Neill, find itself worshipping a dynamo. Feelings and emotions that hitherto had attached themselves to organisms and persons, to political and religious concepts, were now being channeled into machine forms. These new forms not merely revealed function: they reveled in function, they celebrated it, they dramatized the mathematical and the impersonal aspects of the new environment. And so far forth the new buildings were symbolic structures." (121-122)

MUMFORD (3) "Now all this is not to say that the doctrine that form follows function was a misleading one. What was false and meretricious were the narrow applications that were made of this formula. Actually, functionalism is subject to two modifications. The first is that we must not take function solely in a mechanical sense, as applying only to the physical functions of the building. Certainly new technical facilities and mechanical functions required new forms: but so, likewise, did social purposes and new psychological insights. There are many elements in a building, besides its physical elements, that affect the health, comfort, and pleasure of the user. When the whole personality is taken into account, expression or symbolism becomes one of the dominant concerns of architecture; and the more complex the functions to be served, the more varied and subtle will the form be. In other words – and this is the second modification – expression itself is one of the primary functions of architecture." (124-125)

Mumford, Lewis. Art and Technics. New York: Columbia University Press, 1952.

COMMENTS TO 1952 MUMFORD (1)

(1) c1: FFF a Lamarckian theorem? If it is right (as Gould 1982: 78 puts it) that Lamarckism was “ a still respectable, if fast fading theory” in the 1930s, it is surprising to find Mumford speaking as late as early 1950s about ‘a great theorem of Lamarck’. Apparently Mumford was not aware of the Neo-Darwinist consolidation of the Darwinist theory a decade earlier. Whether FFF can be considered Lamarckian is a moot point; according to neo-Lamarckians, acquired characteristics were directly imposed by the environment upon passive organisms; while Lamarck himself emphasised active , creative response of organisms to their needs.

(1) c2:Greenough. Another explicit suggestion that the FFF-formula can be found in Greenough, but again without any supporting evidence. Sullivan gets barely mentioned.

(1) c3: Could the communist system have been improved by introduction of free market economy and liberal democracy? Also Mumford attempts to improve functionalism. Although Mumford seems to have understood that functionalism was in its very essence – in its obsession with bringing about the new style proper for the new age – a formalist movement, he criticizes the functionalist obsession with the machine as a deplorable exception rather than a rule. To redress the situation, he proposes to introduce what was allegedly left out: the ‘human values’. But, as suggested above (see 1948 SAARINEN: c1&c2), such ‘improvement’ was bound to lead to disintegration of the movement. To say that the functionalist doctrine was salutary but incomplete, is similar to saying that Lenin’s vision of the communist society was salutary but incomplete, because it needed introduction of liberal democracy and free market economy. But just as the communist system were explicitly erected as alternatives to free market economy and liberal democracy, and attempts to improve it in the above way were bound to destroy it (as they indeed did), so the infusion of ‘human values’ into functionalism was bound to kill functionalism. To reintroduce ‘human values’ was to confirm in the end legitimity of individual human preferences including aesthetic choices. Bruce Allsopp, one of the keenest British critics of modernism in the 1970s pointed out in 1974 that "Deep at the root of all problems of providing homes for people is the lack of concern among architects and administrators, including town-planners, for people as they are and as they want to be. Inhumanity, lack of sympathy, lack of understanding, intolerance of ways of life which are different from our own – these are the worst sins of architects, even of those who are most socially concerned; indeed some of the most active 'do-gooders' are the least humane, the true heirs of the biblical scribes and Pharisees." (Allsopp 1974: 42) In a philosophy of design that was deeply intolerant of the ways of life which were different from those of architects’, the well-meaning attempts to reintroduce ‘human values’ into this philosophy was bound to speed up its demise.

COMMENTS TO 1952 MUMFORD (2)

(2) c1: Can the functionalist architecture and design really be interpreted as a kind of symbolism? On this question see 1986 BANHAM: c2. In contrast to Banham, however, Mumford’s symbolic interpretation of functionalism seems to be more down to earth: he does not say, as Banham does, that functionalist let the form follow function in a symbolic way – which is a claim rather difficult to understand. Mumford can be understood as saying that the functionalist architecture is symbolic in the sense that functionalists, in their ubiquitous visual relishing of forms of industrial and mechanical provenience were consciously worshipping the machine – and what they claimed was Machine Age. •

COMMENTS TO 1952 MUMFORD (3)

(3) c1: ‘Multifunctionalism’. Mumford suggests a ‘multifunctionalist’ improvement of functionalism; on the notion of multifunctionalism, see 1948 SAARINEN: c2.

1953 GOMBRICH

E. H. Gombrich: AN EXPLANATION-PRINCIPLE IN ART HISTORY

“For we know that ‘style’ in art is really a rather problematic indication of social or intellectual change; we know this simply because what we bundle together under the name of art has a constantly changing function in the social organism of different periods and because here, as always, ‘form follows function’.” (91)

Gombrich, E. H. “The Social History of Art ” The Art Bulletin, March 1953, Republished in Meditations on a Hobby Horse and Other essays on the Theory of Art, 86-94. London and New York: Phaidon, 1978 (1963).

COMMENTS TO 1953 GOMBRICH

c1: FFF-formula as explanatory principle. Ernst H. Gombrich, one of the most influential art historians of the second half of the 20th century, appears to be the first among the non-apologetic art historian to mention the FFF-formula (on the notion of ‘apologetic historian’, see 1952 CONDIT: c1). Gombrich gives, however, a special twist to the phrase, with the purpose of using it as an art historical explanation principle. Such use was advanced in several of his books and essays: Gombrich 1968; Gombrich 1976; Gombrich 1992a; Gombrich 1992b. (For a fuller statement of the perceived methodological, or rather heuristic, value of the formula, see 1976 GOMBRICH). Gombrich, in other words, turn his back upon the original functionalist meaning of the formula, i.e. on the fact that it was launched as a design principle (almost an exhortation) addressed to practicing designers, not as an explanation principle for understanding human artefacts. (On the contrary, very few of such artefacts could be described in this way...- perhaps some engineering works could. (Admittedly, within the monist philosophy of functionalism the design principle was at the same time also an explanation principle, but this would be valid only for forms in nature, plus for objects resulting from the functionalist philosophy.) –– How different Gombrich’s employment of the phrase is compared to the functionalist understanding of the formula can be seen form the following examples. –– (1) Gombrich apparently takes the term function in the FFF-formula to be fully synonymous with terms such as human purposes, human intentions or human ends. In functionalism the notion of function is ambiguous, meaning, vaguely, purposes of men, but standing more clearly for impersonal objective needs of men, and impersonal factors allegedly determining forms in architecture and design, such as nature of materials, production processes, or techniques of construction – all of them forces beyond human choice. And in wider context the functionalist notion of function often stands for transpersonal forces such as ‘natural’ purposes, or purposes of History or purposes of a Superior Intelligence (see Introduction, above). Gombrich’s use of the formula, in contract with that of the functionalists, is simply down-to-earth. –– (2) Another important difference is that, contrary to functionalists, Gombrich never suggests that the notion of function (or’ purpose’ or ‘end’) should be understood as meaning practical, utilitarian function, or purpose, or end; for Gombrich the FFF-formula never implies what it implied for the functionalists, namely that “nothing has been admitted which did not contribute to performance, and forms have been determined solely by efficiency, materials and processes” (from 1949 TEAGUE). Above all, the FFF-formula makes no room for the notion of ‘aesthetic function’: aesthetic is not something to be used, something aimed at users of products and buildings, as as their physical utility is – but something to be generated by this utility. This explains why the notion of aesthetic function never was, and could not be, an integral part of functiionalism. –– In other words, Gombrich employs the FFF-formula entirely in his own right and for his own purposes, but out of the functionalist context – while repeatedly suggesting that the notion comes from the architectural theory. The above criticism is of course not meant to insinuate that the Gombrichian usage of the FFF-formula is illegitimate. On the contrary, it obviously helps to bring the art historical explorations within the orbit of common sense. –– The only trouble is that Gombrich’s import of the formula into the art historical context over the years sounds as if he espoused also the monist philosophy of design behind functionalism, which he obviously does not. Perhaps, what Gombrich has in mind when employing the FFF-formula is more the Semperian ‘functionalism’ in explanation of artefacts, which, though historically speculative, seems free from the heavy metaphysical speculations in which the functionalist design philosophy was steeped. (The same criticism can be directed to 1982 JANSON) –– For other, similarly explanatory views, or uses, of the FFF-formula, see 1982 JANSON; see also 1962 GIEDION: c1, 1962 JANSON: c1, 1972 JORDY: c1, 1986 FORTY: c1, 1986 SCHMALRIEDE, 1993 LAMBERT: c2. •

1954 NEUTRA

Richard Neutra: ACCORDING TO THE NEW SCIENCE OF BIOLOGY

“In America, pragmatism and behaviorism attracted wide attention. Following James, Dewey and instrumentalism proclaimed that an idea was true if it worked. –– If a thing had truth because it worked, it now also had beauty because it functioned. A hundred years ago the American sculptor Horatio Greenough declared that the structural form created by man must follow function, just as was the case for living organisms, according to the new science of biology.” (44)

Neutra, Richard. Survival Through Design. New York: Oxford University Press, 1954.

COMMENTS TO 1954 NEUTRA

c1: New science of biology. It is unclear what Neutra may have meant by the term ‘new science of biology’. The word biology was coined by Lamarck at the very beginning of 19th century, so in the 1840 biology was hardly a new science. He could not have meant the Darwinian biology (or if he did, he was mistaken) since Darwin entered the scene with his idea of natural selection at the end of 1950s, i.e. some eight years after Greenough’s death.

c2: Greenough? The gist of Greenough’s writings can no doubt be summarized the way Neutra did. It is not clear, though, whether Neutra would claim that Greenough coined the FFF-formula (for which there is no evidence for it so far) , or whether he would only argue that Greenough said practically everything what Sullivan said some fifty years later – with is no doubt right. On the claims that Greenough is the father of the FFF-formula, see 1896 SULLIVAN: c3.

c3: Two arguments against equating beauty and utility – or: is there a theory of rational beauty? The mentioned American philosopher John Dewey would probably not agree with Neutra that “If a thing had truth because it worked, it now also had beauty because it functioned.” Dewey argued already in 1934, apparently as a response to the modernist idea of beauty, that efficiency cannot equal beauty because efficiency is perceived by our thought, while beauty is perceived by our senses. This seems to have put finger on an elementary confusion in the functionalist argumentation. Since this is a most important point, I append a quotation from Dewey’s 1934 book Art as Experience . After the Dewey quotation I cite, also at length, another cogent argument published in 1952 by the British architectural historian and theorist Bruce Allsopp, one of the earliest critics of functionalism, who looked beyond the rhetoric of equating utility and beauty, and exposed the logical absurdities this view entailed. –– First Dewey: "A good deal of intellectual effort has been expended in trying to identify efficiency for a particular end with 'beauty' or esthetic quality. But these attempts are bound to fail, fortunate as it is that in some cases the two coincide and humanely desirable as it is that they should always meet. For adaptation to a particular end is often (always in the case of complicated affairs) something perceived by thought, while esthetic effect is found directly in sense-perception. A chair may serve a purpose of affording a comfortable and hygienically efficient seat, without serving at the same time the needs of the eye. If, on the contrary, it blocks rather than promotes the rôle of vision in an experience, it will be ugly no matter how well adapted to use as a seat. There is no preëstablished harmony that guarantees that what satisfies the need of one set of organs will fulfill that of all the other structures and needs that have a part in the experience, so as to bring it to completion as a complex of all elements." (Dewey 1980: 115) This is, admittedly, an argument from the position of common sense, against a metaphysical idea of beauty. The problem here is, however, that the commonsense and the metaphysical arguments tend to shoot past each other; there seems to be no way to argue rationally against a belief since a belief is impervious to rational arguments. One might probably reformulate Dewey’s argument and distinguish between a rational (or efficiency-based) theory of beauty, where beauty is perceived by thought, and a sensual theory of beauty, where beauty is perceived by our senses. But it seems that such rational theory of beauty would still land us with the same logical absurdities which Allsopp humorously described in the following quotation from his 1952 book: "Now let us look at something and see whether it is beautiful. There is a curious thing over there on the table. Is that beautiful? We cannot honestly say because we do not know what it is for. But fortunately there is a gentleman here in a white coat who seems friendly. He tells us that this is a microscope and that it is probably as convenient and efficient a microscope as has ever been made and that there is nothing there which is not essential to its being a good microscope. 'Thank you!' we exclaim and go away happily knowing that the microscope is beautiful. But as we are going downstairs some inquisitive fellow says that he would like to look through the microscope. So back we go and ask the obliging gentleman in the white coat if we can have a peep through the microscope. Poor fellow! He seems very much upset. He would have 'simply loved to show us some germs, but unfortunately a wretched lab. boy [sic] was cleaning the microscope only this morning and somehow or other he dropped a little lens from inside it – no, you can't see it – and it smashed to smithereens.' So the microscope is absolutely useless at present. –– Alas for our theory of beauty! The microscope is no longer beautiful but it will be in a day or two when it has had a little lens fixed somewhere inside it." (Allsopp 1952 : 36-37) A similar argument against seeing fitness as the cause of beauty was advanced by Edmund Burke in his Philosophical Inquiry of 1757; cf. Burke 1990: 95-7. •

1954 VAN DOREN

Harold van Doren: THE THESIS THAT THINGS SHOULD BE THEMSELVES

“Many years ago the great American architect Louis Sullivan, after years of search for a statement of design principle admitting of no exceptions, felt that he had reached his goal when he declared: Form follows function. It became the battle cry of the new architecture, a clarion call for a return to first principles in a day when the fashion was to deck out banks to look like Greek temples and to make railroad stations resemble the baths of Diocletian. (...) I have often wondered how Sullivan would have tackled some of the problems involved in modern industrial design. Aesthetically no fault can be found with the thesis that things should be themselves. But with present-day engineered products we find ourselves in a dilemma, because these products are merely assemblies of dissimilar components, each of which may perform similar functions in entirely different ways. (...) The more complicated a machine becomes ... the less likelihood of its retaining any particular form identity. Modern machinery, whether used in the factory or the home, evolves with breath-taking rapidity. It may change shape completely in a decade. – Two machines performing identical functions, both in current manufacture, may not even look like distant cousins. Figure 65 is a dictating machine. But so is 66. Each uses disk-type records and provides the same service. (...) Examples could be multiplied indefinitely.” (127, 128)

Van Doren, Harold. Industrial Design: A Practical Guide to Product Design and Development. 2. ed., New York: McGraw-Hill, 1954.

COMMENTS TO 1954 VAN DOREN

c1: Can things be what they ‘are’? After having payed lip-service to the FFF-formula, van Doren made the formula – perhaps inadvertently – sound like a nonsense as soon as he had exposed it to the empirical test of his own experience as industrial designer. In his unassuming way van Doren explodes the key concomitant of the FFF-formula, which goes back to Greenough (see 1843 GREENOUGH (11)) that an object should look what it is, and be what it looks like – an idea that re-emerged with the notion of product semantics in the 1980s. The idea that there is an identity between the appearance of phenomena, living organisms or artefacts, and their ‘essence’, is seems natural as long as we look at things we have known since ‘the time immemorial’ (i.e. since our early childhood (“form eagle, function eagle” as Sullivan put it). When encountering unfamiliar, phenomena, unfamiliar living organisms or new artefacts the seeming persuasiveness of the idea evaporates. See 1938 ULRICH: c3; 1965 NORBERG-SCHULZ:c1.

c2: US industrial design: both pragmatists and idealists. In the theoretical writings of the American designers of the founder-generation it is possible to find both exceptionally down-to-earth positions (see 1938 BARNES & REINECKE, Doren, Dreyfuss) as well as exceedingly idealistic ones (see 1940 TEAGUE). •

1957 DE ZURKO

Edward Robert de Zurko: FORM SHOULD FOLLOW FUNCTION

“There is no simple definition of the word [functionalism] upon which all agree. The basic premise that form should follow function becomes a guiding principle for the designer, but it is also a standard by which to measure architecture.” (3)

De Zurko, Edward Robert. Origins of Functionalist Theory. New York: Columbia University Press, 1957.

COMMENTS TO 1957 DE ZURKO

c1: ‘Should’? See 1934 GROPIUS, c2. •

1958 MIES VAN DER ROHE

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe: FORMS HOUSE FUNCTIONS

“‘As you see, the entire building is a singe large room. We believe that this is the most economical and most practical way of building today. The purposes for which a building is used are constantly changing and we cannot afford to tear down the building each time. That is why we have revised Sullivan's formula “form follows function” and construct a practical and economical space into which we fit the functions. In the Mannheim building, stage and auditorium are independent of the steel construction. The large auditorium juts out from its concrete base much like a hand from a wrist.’” (339)

Norberg-Schulz, Christian. “A Talk with Mies van der Rohe.” In Fritz Neumeyer. The Artless Word: Mies van der Rohe on the Building Art, 338-9. Cambridge, Mass., London, England: The MIT Press, 1991.

COMMENTS TO 1957 MIES VAN DER ROHE

c1: •

1960 BANHAM

Reyner Banham: AN EMPTY JINGLE

“... Functional has, almost without exception been interpreted in the limited sense ... summed up in Louis Sullivan's empty jingle 'Form follows function'”. (320)

Banham, Reyner. Theory and Design in the First Machine Age. London: The Architectural Press, 1960.

COMMENTS TO 1960 BANHAM

c1: Granted that the FFF-formula was an empty jingle; but how come it proved to be so fascinating to designers? Answer: Because it promises them liberation and art status. Banham accused functionalist of formalism, but pointed out the industrial vernacular inspiration; he seemed not to consider the abstract art connection (see 1932 HITCHCOCK & JOHNSON; and 1974 ALLSOPP) as important formal source. Could the reason be that he was preparing ground for allegedly non-formalist high-tech boys of his second machine age?, and the abstract art- argument made the logic messy? •

1960 BUSH-BROWN

Albert Bush-Brown: A MUCH ABUSED DICTUM

“Sullivan's principle [of organic architecture] was summarized in his often-quoted and much-abused dictum,’...form follows function...,’(note 31) first announced in 1895 [sic].” (19)

Bush-Brown, Albert. Louis Sullivan. New York: Brazilier, 1960.

COMMENTS TO 1960 BUSH-BROWN

c1: The proper announcement year is 1896. Bush-Brown left us in the dark, as most of ‘misunderstandists’ do, as to what the abuses consisted in supporting the claim, that it was really Greenough who coined the phrase itself (for ‘misunderstandists’, see 1924 SULLIVAN: c1.). •

1961 PEVSNER

Nikolaus Pevsner: THE PRINCIPLE OF TWENTIETH CENTURY ARCHITECTURE

“The principle purpose of this paper is to draw attention to what I regard as an alarming recent phenomenon. It is what can only be called a return of Historicism. This is, in my opinion, one aspect of a deeper change (...). –– The change, generally speaking, is this. The principle of twentieth century architecture up to this change had been that of form following function, in the sense that a building must first of all function well and should have nothing on its exterior to reduce its well-functioning, or, to put it the other way around, that the beauties of exteriors of buildings and, for that matter, of their interior spaces as well, must be developed subsequent to the assurance of their well-functioning. The new tendency is, if I am right, towards exteriors which are created not necessarily at the expense of function, although that is very often true too, but certainly at least with an expression which does not convey a sense of confidence in their well-functioning.” (243)

Pevsner, Nikolaus. “The Return of Historicism.” In Studies in Art, Architecture and Design; vol. two, Victorian and After, 243-59. London: Thames & Hudson, 1968.

COMMENTS TO 1961 PEVSNER

c1: Pevsner: forms of modernist architecture a result of FFF. Pevsner apparently never accepted the claim launched by American modernists, that the new forms of the European modernist architecture had their aesthetic roots in abstract art, rather than being result of forms following functions. The formal novelty of the functionalist architecture was according to Pevsner, and in agreement with his functionalist belief, the result of giving top priority to functional considerations. This was in his view also the meaning of FFF. In this article he implies that the aesthetic contribution of the new architecture consisted in not reducing the utilitarian well-functioning of the whole – a pretty bleak postulate. - For the American claim mentioned above, that abstract art is the aesthetic source of the modernist forms, cf. Hitchcock and Johnson 1932, Hitchcock 1948; see also 1991 JACKSON (1), and (1)c1. [redesigned 21-12-00]

c2: Emasculating the profession. It is not improbable that interpretations of the modernist architecture and of the modernist design theory as presented here (the aesthetic side of buildings and products claimed to be a by-product of non-aesthetic considerations) contributed substatntially to undermining the standing of architects among other building-related professions. Architects as traditional specialists in visual values of buildings were apparently making themselves superfluous by their own rhetorics claiming that neither their design doctrine nor their architecture had anything to do with a priori aesthetic interests – and that this design philosophy was to be the sacred standard of the profession. With such a philososphy and such interpretation it became probably increasingly difficult, for all those not on intimate terms with the functionalist design metaphysics, to understand why engineers and other technical professions would not do at least as as well as architects themselves. [redesign 21-12-00]

c3: (Here comment on the namesake: historicism as defined by Popper ) •

1961 SCULLY

Vincent Scully: FORM FOLLOWED A PHYSICAL FORCE

“Then, in the Wainwright Building of 1890-91, his first great skyscraper, where the masonry elements were merely the cladding over a steel skeleton, Sullivan abandoned Richardson's arches, doubled the vertical piers and spandrels, and inserted the whole plait of piers and spandrels into the frame created by base, attic, and corner planes. Note should be taken of the fact that every other pier has no structural column within it, and that Sullivan was therefore consciously stressing both the verticality and the plastic density of the building and avoiding any expression of the structural bay – upon which the other architects of the Chicago school, with their ‘Chicago’ windows, were all concentrating. Sullivan's intention was more complex and humane than theirs. The form that ‘followed’ the function for him was not that of an open steel cage but that of a physical force, contained but vertically standing. Finally, the Guaranty Building, of 1895, brought all the elements together.” (19)

Scully Jr., Vincent. Modern Architecture: The Architecture of Democracy. London: Studio Vista, 1961.

COMMENTS TO 1961 SCULLY

c1: FFF-formula was a carte blanche principle. Scully interprets the extra piers in Sullivan’s Wainwright Building as a sign of a Sullivan’s humane intention. This rhymes well with what Sullivan wrote in 1896 about the nature of ‘the tall office building’ as something lofty. A question remains, though, whether the non-structural extra piers, which Sullivan made look visually equal to the structural ones without their being so, is a practice which is, in principle, in any way different from what historicists were engaged in. Architects have always introduced formal elements into their buildings for expressive reasons (e.g. the practice in historicist architecture of putting blind windows on the facade for the sake of symmetry, where there was no need for real windows). We can therefore accept Scully’s suggestion that the introduction of non-structural piers in the Wainwright building was an embodiment of the FFF-formula, only in the paradoxical sense: that the FFF-formula was really a carte blanche principle.The FFF-formula could be used to legitimize whatever form a designer with enough authority and/or rhetoric power happened to chose because the designer had a total control over the meaning of the notion of function. ‘Function’ was a carte blanche that gave the architect authority to do whatever he deemed right. To put it differently, FFF-formula can be seen as a red herring that allowed the leading architects and designers to pursue whatever formal solution they eventually chose, and still harbour a feeling that their choice was objective one. This was very probably the main reason for the immense popularity of the formula. See also 1963 JACOBUS Jr. & c1. •

1962 GIEDION

Sigfried Giedion: MATERIALIST CONCEPTION

"The theory of art ... became trapped in this materialist conception. The structure of the nineteenth century makes it understandable how the influence of the rationalist mentality became almost omnipotent in the field of art theory. This was expressed by the use of the causality principle – by the conviction that the realm of art was also controlled by an inevitable relation of cause and effect. The origin of all created forms lay in the relation of material and intent; or, as it was later expressed: form follows function. –– The German architect Gottfried Semper stated (1860-1863) the theoretical principles behind this conception. When in London, as a refugee from 1848 Revolution, he had acquired his practical experience (in large-scale industry) and his ideological directive (Darwinism).” (15)

Giedion, S. The Eternal Present: The Beginnings of Art. A Contribution on Constancy and Change. New York: Bollingen Foundation & Pantheon Books, 1962. Giedion 1962

COMMENTS TO 1962 GIEDION

c1: FFF as explanatory device. Giedion does not distinguish between FFF as a design imperative and FFF as a historical explanation, a fact which may suggest that he saw historical explanations as design principles. For similar view of the formula or more comments on the distinction, see 1953 GOMBRICH: c1, 1962 GIEDION: c1, 1962 JANSON: c1, 1972 JORDY: c1, 1976 GOMBRICH: c1, 1986 FORTY: c1, 1986 SCHMALRIEDE, 1993 LAMBERT: c2. For a comment on Giedion’s use of Semper as a scapegoat, and on the canonical misreading of Semper, also in relation to Riegl, see Wigley 1994.

c2: # Semper not a Darwinist in early 1850s. Giedion seems to suggest that Semper acquired a Darwinist “ideological drive” already in connection with his stay in London in the years shortly before and after 1850. But Darwin published his Origin of Species only in 1859, and “Darwinism”, the theory of evolution proposed by Darwin in this book, can be spoken of only since 1860s. Another sign of poor insight of modernist design theorist into the history and theory of biology?•

1962 JANSON

H. W. Janson: TECHNOLOGICAL EXPLANATION

“...to what extent can the Doric order be understood as a reflection of wooden structures? Those historians of architecture who believe that form follows function have pursued this line of approach at great length, especially in trying to explain the details of the entablature. Up to a point, their arguments carry conviction; it seems plausible to assume that at one time the triglyphs did mask the ends of wooden beams, and that the droplike markings known as guttae are the descendants of wooden pegs. The peculiar vertical subdivisions of the triglyphs are perhaps a bit more difficult to accept as an echo of three half-round logs. And when we come to the flutings of the column, our doubts continue to rise: were they really developed from adz [sic] marks on a tree trunk, or did the Greeks take them over ready-made from the ‘Proto-Doric’ stone columns of Egypt? (...) [Our point is] to suggest the complexity – and the limitations of the technological approach to problems of architectural form. The question, always a thorny one, of how far stylistic features can be explained on a functional basis will face us again and again. Obviously, the history of architecture cannot be fully understood if we view it only as an evolution of style in the abstract, without considering the actual purposes of building or its technological basis. But we must likewise be prepared to accept the purely aesthetic impulse as a motivating force. At the very start, Doric architects certainly imitated in stone some features of wooden temples, if only because these features were deemed necessary in order to identify a building as a temple. When they enshrined them in the Doric order, however, they did not do so from blind conservatism or force of habit, but because the wooden forms had by now been so thoroughly transformed that they were an organic part of the stone structure.” (92, 95)

Janson, H. W. and Dora Jane Janson. A History of Art: A Survey of Visual Arts from the Dawn of History to the Present Day. London: Thames and Hudson, 1962.

COMMENTS TO 1962 JANSON

c1: Janson sees the FFF-formula as a summary of the ‘the technological approach to problems of architectural form’. It seems that the formula as used in this quotation has very little to do with the Sullivanian meaning. It seems to be employed here as a short-hand summary of Semperian rather than Sullivanian doctrines. For Sullivan the formula was not an explanation principle but a design principle. In Sullivan’s eyes The FFF-formula was a natural law which should revitalize architecture if it was embraced by architects. Functionalist thinkers (whether Greenough, Sullivan or Wright) would certainly not describe the Greek temple as a result of forms following functions – i.e. as an organic architecture; on the contrary, in their eyes it was the very opposite; cf. Wright’s violent attack on classical architecture in “The Passing of the Cornice” of 1931 Wright 1931b. Functionalists were in general not interested in the scientific or historical origins of forms or style at all (though Josef Frank may have been an exception from the rule; cf. Frank 1931). For a critique of the technological determinism in design from empirical perspective, cf. Grinten 1960. For use of the FFF-formula in Gombrichian sense (1953 GOMBRICH) see 1982 JANSON: c2. For further examples of seeing the formula as an explanatory device, see 1962 GIEDION: c1, 1972 JORDY: c1, 1976 GOMBRICH: c1, 1986 FORTY: c1, 1986 SCHMALRIEDE, 1993 LAMBERT: c2. •

1963a BLAKE

Peter Blake: MIES’ RADICAL IMPROVEMENT: FORM FOLLOWS NO SPECIFIC FUNCTION

“Material – function – creative work. Mies had found the right materials. What about the function? Here Mies developed a concept so radical within the modern movement that it is still being fought by many of his contemporaries. Louis Sullivan had said that ‘form follows function’ – or, at least, Sullivan’s partner, Dankmar Adler, had said it, and Sullivan had accepted the idea with a grain or two of salt. But Mies decided to find out whether this was really a valid maxim. Did not buildings tend to outlive their original functions? Did not functions change with increasing frequency in the modern world? Was it really possible to predict, in 1940, what functions the laboratories and machine shops and classroom structure at I.I.T. might be called upon to fulfil [sic] in 1950 or 1960 or in the year 2000? Obviously not, Mies decided. The only function one could be sure of in any building built to last was the function of flexibility of use throughout its lifetime. So, the only kind of building which would make sense, in terms of functionalism, would be a building not adjusted to any specific function at all!” (77)

Blake, Peter. Mies van der Rohe: Architecture and Structure. Penguin, Harmondsworth: 1963.

COMMENTS TO 1963a BLAKE

c1: Functionalism is what you please. Was not Mies’ ‘radical concept’ just another evidence of carte blanche character of the FFF-formula, and of the arbitrariness implied in the functionalist design doctrine in general? •

c2: Did Adler coin the FFF-formula? Blake fails to reveal reasons for his claim that it was Adler, and not Sullivan, who launched the formula. Blake is in one sense right, though, when he suggests that Adler, not Sullivan, said that form follows function. It was indeed Adler who in his comment to Sullivan’s 1896 article shortened Sullivan’s phrasing ‘form ever follows function”’ to a simpler phrase ‘form follows function’; see 1896 SULLIVAN. But there is hardly any doubt that it was Sullivan who coined the longer phrase; Adler only shortened it. Sullivan therefore had no need to accept a phrase he himself launched, with or without grains of salt.

c3: (How clever, practically speaking, was really this idea of Mies?) •

1963b BLAKE

Peter Blake: TODAY’S FUNCTIONS OUTDATED TOMORROW

“The old slogan 'form follows function' has ... been made obsolete by the fantastic rate at which our functions change. It is no longer possible, in most cases, to give a form to a building that is not only valid today but will also be valid tomorrow.” (149)

Blake, Peter. “People, Mass Production, and the Miesian Universal.” In Four Great Makers of Modern Architecture: Gropius – Le Corbusier – Mies van der Rohe – Wright, 146-53. New York: Columbia University/ Wittenborn, 1963.

COMMENTS TO 1963b BLAKE

c1: An outdated eternal law? Blake apparently presumes that the FFF-formula really worked – that architects and designers did follow it, thus producing architecture and design at once functional and aesthetically ‘right’. But if they did follow the formula, they could do so only on the strength of the formula qua ‘law’. How could then such a ‘law’, allegedly governing whole cosmos, after only some sixty seven odd years, be found obsolete? The problem, it seems, was not that the formula was obsolete – the problem was that it was empty, and thus allowing for artistic licence under a cloak of a purportedly natural law .

c2: ‘Validity of form’ – does Blake mean visual or functional form?)•

1963c BLAKE

Peter Blake: A PRINCIPLE AS OLD AS BUILDING ITSELF

“Functionalism. ‘Form follows function’ is the catchphrase that spells modern architecture to most laymen. In the 1920s it seemed like a strange idea, cold and forbidding; today, although widely accepted (and even more widely misunderstood), ‘form follows function’ continues to evoke the image of modern as opposed to traditional architecture more readily than any other slogan. Yet there is no architectural principle that can claim a more ancient and distinguished tradition. Form has followed function from the paleolithic cave-dwellers to the neo-lithic lake dwellers; it followed function in Roman forts and aqueducts, in medieval castles and the Great Wall of China, in the 18th-century English warehouses, and in 20th-century Manhattan office piles. Functionalism, in short, is as old as building itself.” (112)

Blake, P. 1963. “Functionalism.” In Encyclopaedia of Modern Architecture, edited by G. Hatje. London: Thames and Hudson. Blake 1963a

COMMENTS TO 1963c BLAKE

c1: Misunderstandist; old principle?

From Blake, 1963a

1. Blake passes completely the question of the authorship of the FFF-formula. He does mentions Sullivan in his article but without any hint as to the authorship or otherwise.

2. Blake never made clear that functionalism was based on the belief in intrinsic formal solutions, on solutions hidden in problems. This is what made the equation of formalism with functionalism difficult because it could be argued that the FFF-doctrine overcome both functionalism and formalism; only that doctrine explains why functionalists could claim, and according to the logic of their own belief rightly, that functionalism defies formalism. Blake has flattened the most interesting dimension of functionalism, making unwittingly the 'reflection of functions', or ‘expression of functions', into a purely aesthetic, and purely arbitrary choice.

3. He does mention the influence of engineering forms ("Functionalists got much of their inspiration from the machine itself"), but fails even to mention the cubism-based abstract art as the main source of the functionalist aesthetics.

4. All Blake says about the two rules of functionalism suggests a predominantly formalist orientation - without his saying so openly; the only thing he claims openly is that "Functionalism was [really] a coherent system of organization, a completely integrated method of putting a building together..." (113) without substantiating the claim in any manner. •

1963 HONZÍK

Karel Honzík: LAMARCK’S AXIOM

“[In the 1920s Karel] Teige ... stuck to Lamarck’s biological axiom that form follows purpose. More or less all of us professed this belief, just as the proto-functionalists of the 19th century. But this axiom applied in the theory of architecture easily turns into a useless academic platitude. Architects, standing at their desks and struggling with the ambiguity of functions during solution of individual ground plans, were struggling with form as matter. –– They kept facing the palpable fact that the artistic inventiveness must play the role of midwife, that it must help the form to be brought forth out function. Otherwise, when the deduction of form from function was done in an disinterested, uninvolved, uncommitted way, the result was amorphous. This process is on the other hand so subtle that if the aesthetic imagination is less than disciplined the form is either divorced from function or else oppress it. What then occurs is ... what we called ... ‘formalism.’ –– I have often compared function and form two carbon rods of an arc lamp which generate light when and only when the two meet in a certain optimal position. If they are too distant, or, if they press against each other, the radiation ceases. That is why, in my view, the discovery of a radiating poetization of the functional solution is the greatest art one can imagine.” (84-85)

Honzík, Karel. Ze zivota avantgardy. Praha: Ceskoslovensky spisovatel, 1963 (the present writer’s translation)

COMMENTS TO 1963 HONZÍK

c1: Unclear whether Lamarck’s name was discussed in the 1920s or whether it is a much later insight. Lamarck was, however, suggested as a source of Greenough’s design philosophy by Mumford; see 1952 MUMFORD. (On the German lamarckian author Raoul Francé and his influence in the 1920s, cf. Steadman 1979: 161-3.)

c2: Lamarck’s philosophy wouldn’t work as a base for functionalism, because purpose refers to the individual’s intentions (at least in higher, sentient organisms) and therefore to their creative response to their needs; this would suggest that ‘purpose’ is nothing objectively given. It may have fared better with the neo-Lamarckian interpretation, considering organisms as passive receivers of environmental impositions (impressions).; see 1952 MUMFORD, C1 to quotation (1).

c3: Honzík distances himself from the functionalist theory only to subscribe to it all the same, in his vision of objective, taste-independent, solutions.

c4: Honzik admits that the FFF-formula as such is of not much help in the design process: artistic inventiveness must act midwife in order to bring form out of function But is that statement and the carbon rod analogy of much more help? The quotation presents another illustration of the irredeemable arbitrariness of the design doctrine allegedly aiming at objective forms. •

1963 JACOBUS Jr.

John M. Jacobus, Jr.: STRUCTURAL REQUIREMENTS ONLY A POINT OF DEPARTURE

“Contrary to the implications of his oft-quoted epithet, ‘Form follows function’, Sullivan used the building’s material and structural requirements as a point of departure for his creation, rather than conceiving of functional expression as a fixed, limited goal.” (276)

Jacobus, John M. Jr. “Sullivan, Louis.” In Encyclopaedia of Modern Architecture, ed. Gerd Hatje. 275-8. London: Thames and Hudson, 1963.

COMMENTS TO 1963 JACOBUS Jr.

c1: That Sullivan used the building’s material and structure as a point of departure only, sounds like a matter-of-factly observation. But what does it say about the value, and status, of that ‘oft-quoted epithet’? Does not it suggest that the FFF-formula was really a carte blanche principle? (see 1961 SCULLY: c1) •

1964 CHERMAYEFF

Serge Chermayeff: COINED BY GREENOUGH

“I cannot understand, for instance, how ... one can omit from required readings for your professed purposes Mr. Greenough, who by the way first said, 'Form follows Function,' and not Mr. Sullivan who merely repeated it.” (23)

Chermayeff, Serge. “Random Thoughts on the Architectural Condition (1964).” In The History, Theory and Criticism of Modern Architecture: Papers from 1964 AIA-ASCA Teacher Seminar, ed. Marcus Whiffen. 23. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1970.

COMMENTS TO 1964 CHERMAYEFF

c1: On the claim that Greenough and not Sullivan launched the FFF-formula, see 1896 SULLIVAN, c3. •

1964 MUMFORD

Lewis Mumford: MISUNDERSTOOD

(1) “Despite the shallowness of theory of mechanical progress, the first erections of modern architecture, beginning with the Crystal Palace in 1851, rested on a firm foundation: the perception that the technology of the nineteenth century had immensely enriched the vocabulary of modern form and facilitated modes of construction that could hardly have been dreamed of in more ponderous materials, while it made possible designs of a far more organic nature than the heavy shells that constituted buildings in the past. –– In their pride over these new possibilities, the engineers who turned these processes over to the architect naturally over-emphasized this contribution and when Louis Sullivan proclaimed that form followed function, his successors falsely put the emphasis on mechanical form and mechanical function. Both are in fact essential to the constitution of modern architecture; but neither by itself – nor both together – is sufficient.” (175-76)

(2) “Greenough's original analysis of form, on a basis of the biological and physiological nature of organisms, did justice to both process and function, but overlooked their transformation through a still higher and more complex category, that of human purpose. Man is not just an actor and a fabricator: he is an interpreter and a transformer. On the higher levels of existence, form determines function, no less than function determines form. At this point the continued development of the whole man takes precedence over the continued development of his instruments and his machines; and the only kind of order that can ensure this is one that provides a many-sided environment capable of sustaining the greatest variety of human interests and human purposes.” (182-183)

Mumford, Lewis. “The Case Against 'Modern Architecture'.” In Lewis Mumford. The Highway and the City, 171-184. New York: ?, 1964 (1962).

COMMENTS TO 1964 MUMFORD (1)

(1) c1: Misunderstandist view. The claim that Sullivan successors falsely ephasised the mechanical, makes Mumford a member of what we dubbed here the ‘misunderstandist school’. Its members argue that there is not really any problem with the FFF-formula – the main problem was that it was misunderstood. For more comments see 1924 SULLIVAN: c1.

COMMENTS TO 1964 MUMFORD (2)

(2) c1: Multifunctionalist position. Here Mumford joins the ranks of ‘multifunctionalists’ (see 1948 SAARINEN: c2): the trouble with the ‘multifunctionalist’ improvement of functionalism was that infusion of ‘human purposes’ was bound to lead to ideological disintegration of the modernist movement. The really new element in the functionalists doctrine, and its very raison d’être, was namely that it ruled out human purposes: Not only had the functionalist idea of beauty nothing to do with human purposes, the functionalist notion of function, in spite of the impression to the contrary, had hardly anything to do with those purposes either (see 1961 SCULLY: c1). The introduction of such purposes spelled the end of functionalism. See also the analogy with attempts to improve the communist system, in 1952 MUMFORD: c3. •

(2) c2: Form determines function. Mumford suggests that this may be a case too. For the same previous suggestion see 1931b WRIGHT.

1964 PYE

David Pye: SULLIVAN’S ‘FUNCTION’ A PLATONIC IDEA

“ Louis H. Sullivan, who expatiated of form following function in a most entrancing manner (’...the form, wave, looks like the function, wave ...’ etc., etc.) quite evidently meant by function something approximating to the Platonic idea: the eternally existing pattern of which individual things in any class are but imperfect copies. But apparently he did not consider that the copies of it were necessarily imperfect. He considered that the Idea (which he chose to call by the name function) was continually striving to find perfect expression; the Idea being something willed by God, and active on its own account; active moreover through the agency of human invention (in its widest and least restricted sense) so that the form axe might be a perfect expression of the Idea axe for all that it was not a natural form, but man-made.” (95)

Pye, David. The Nature of Design. New York: 1964.

COMMENTS TO 1964 PYE

c1: The platonic idea, and its lure. Pye seems to have got straight to the core of the problem launching the most precise early criticism of the FFF-formula (see a similarly unique rejection of the FFF-formula in 1938 by BARNES & REINECKE). But Pye never mentioned the main appeal of the formula – the attendant concept that the Idea can only act through the agency of human invention. The formula seemed to imply that the modernist designer acting as a channel, or instrument, or medium, for the Idea, receives the status of a godly messenger set apart from the rest of the rank and file. As such he is not supposed to take any heed of the wishes of the unenlightened rank and file, and go forward with his designs whether people like it or not. The more rank and file dislike the results the more clear the sign that the designer is on the right track. •

1965 COLLINS

Peter Collins:

(Collin’s comments on the FFF-formula )

COMMENTS TO 1965 COLLINS

•

1966 NORBERG-SCHULZ

Christian Norberg-Schulz: ONLY A GENERAL RELATIONSHIP

"Semantical concepts which might grasp the relation between the task and the means hardly exist. Lately one has usually been content discussing the slogan 'form follows function'. The question how an architectural form may serve a particular purpose, however, is not answered by this slogan, which only points out to the existence of a general relationship between the two aspects." (88)

Norberg-Schulz, C. Intentions in Architecture. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1977.

COMMENTS TO 1966 NORBERG-SCHULZ

c1: Functionalist solution of the problem of meaning in architecture: ‘semantic automatism’. There is no doubt true that the ”question how an architectural form may serve a particular purpose ... is not answered by this slogan”. Norberg-Schulz’s statement should, however, not be construed to mean that functionalists ignored the question of semantics, or that the formula had no semantic implications. On the contrary: both Greenough and Sullivan, and the later functionalists after them, all passionately believed that the FFF-formula effectively solved the semantic problem. In fact, it may be that the greatest attractions of the formula was in its claim to have solved the problem of meaning in architecture and design. Greenough wrote that “unflinching adaptation of a building to its position and use gives, as a sure product of that adaptation, character and expression. (...) As its first result, the bank would have the physiognomy of a bank, the church would be recognized as such, nor would the billiard room and the chapel wear the same uniform of columns and pediments.” (1843... GREENOUGH (11)). Sullivan for his part claimed exactly the same: according to him the form which had followed function ipso facto always communicated the object’s (i.e. ‘function’s’) identity. “If you put an acorn in the ground, that acorn, containing the function oak, will seek the form oak, and, in process of time, will become an oak-tree. “ Sullivan 1965b: 99) Earlier in the Kindergarten Chats he wrote: “Now, it stands to reason that a thing looks like what it is, and, vice versa, it is what it looks like. (...) For instances: the form, oak-tree, resembles and expresses the purpose or function, oak; the form, pine-tree, resembles and indicates the function, pine; the form, horse, resembles and is the logical output of the function, horse; the form, spider, resembles and is the tangible evidence of the function, spider. So the form, wave. looks like function, wave; the form, cloud, speaks to us of the function, cloud; the function, rain, indicates the function, rain; the form, bird, tells us of the function, bird; the form, eagle, is the function, eagle, made visible (...) And so in man-made things, ... the form ... knife, [means nothing more or less than] the function, knife; the form, axe, the function, axe; the form, engine, the function, engine.” (Sullivan 1965b: 43, 44). –– This naive semantics seemed to be taken for granted as late as in the mid-1980s, for example by the American industrial designer Uri Friedlaender, one of the exponents of the design philosophy, which was soon to be called ‘product semantics’; see 1984 FRIEDLAENDER. The key source of this functionalist vision of ‘sematic automatism’ (as we call it here) was that the belief “that problems contain and suggests their own solutions”, as Sullivan wrote in 1896. There is, however, no doubt that, as Norberg-Schulz put it, the “question how an architectural form may serve a particular purpose ... is not answered by this slogan ... .” For other remarks on the question of ‘semantic automatism’, see also the Sullivan quotation in 1841 EMERSON: c3; see also 1938 ULRICH: c3; 1954 VAN DOREN: c1; 1965 NORBERG-SCHULZ: c1. •

1966 SMITH

Norris Kelly Smith: CELEBRATED BUT MISUNDERSTOOD

”The ideal that was advanced by Sullivan and Wright was charged with poetic sentiment, as one learns as well from Sullivan’s Kindergarten Chats as from Wright’s Testament. In that section of the Chats in which Sullivan enunciates his celebrated but generally misunderstood dictum, ‘Form follows function,’ the examples he cites, it should be noted, are biological, not mechanical. (...) ... the meaning of Sullivan’s catch-phrase, ‘form follows function,’ ... is not that the form of a building should logically be derived from, and only from, utilitarian and structural considerations, but rather that it should exuberantly proclaim, should radiantly show forth, the goodness of the human experiences which the use of the building will give rise to. (...) Wright preferred another phrase, ‘Form and function are one.’ Certainly this better expresses what Sullivan himself had in mind, since it eliminates the misleading suggestion of causality or of logical derivation which is present in ‘Form follows function.’ Needless to say, their theory of function has nothing whatever to do with the problem-solving functionalism of the anonymous specialists of a firm such as Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill. An orientation towards problem-solving derives from Greek science, not from Hebrew poetry.” (40-41)

Smith, Norris Kelly. Frank Lloyd Wright: A Study in Architectural Content. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1966.

COMMENTS TO 1966 SMITH

c1: Not in the chats. Sullivan did not enunciate the FFF-formula in Chats but already some five years earlier, in “The Tall Office Building... “ (see 1896 SULLIVAN). In the Chats he mentions, rather than enunciates, it only a few times; see 1901-1902 SULLIVAN.

c2: From, and only from, utilitarian and structural considerations? It is true that Sullivan’s examples are not mechanical but they are not only biological, either: in his 1896-article he gives as examples of his law that form follows function for example “the winding stream at its base, the drifting clouds, over all the coursing sun, ...the granite rocks, the ever-brooding hills, ... the lightning ...”, and so on. What is more, in his Autobiography of 1924 he writes rather straightforwardly that Louis (i.e. himself) “could now, undisturbed, start on the course of practical experimentation he long had in mind, which was to make an architecture that fitted its functions – a realistic architecture based on well-defined utilitarian needs – that all practical demands of utility should be paramount as a basis of planning and design; that no architectural dictum, or tradition, or superstition, or habit, should stand in the way.” (257); see 1924 SULLIVAN & c1. This certainly does sound as if “the form of a building should logically be derived from, and only from, utilitarian and structural considerations...”, as Smith puts it above.

c3: Biological – not mechanical? Smith suggests that the examples Sullivan cites in Chats to illustrate his design doctrine are biological and not mechanical, suggesting that the phrase had been misunderstood in a mechanical direction. This is a common but questionable attempt to salvage the phrase. For the first, Smith writes as if heeding the FFF-imperative was as simple as obeying a traffic sign or following a recipe book. Nobody has ever show how to apply the FFF-formula. Second, Smith’s censuring of the allegedly mechanistic interpretation of the FFF-formula is further confusing because it suggests that making forms follow functions in a mechanical way is an easier – because ‘mechanical’ affair. The fact is that whether one interprets the phrase in a ‘biological’ way, or in a ‘mechanical’ one, the practical steps to be taken in application of any of these versions are entirely unclear, and always opened to accusation of arbitrariness. (Perhaps least objectionable comment to be had about the status of the functionalist notion of function (and by implication also of the FFF-formula) is Norberg-Schulz’s remark that “... a study of [Sullivan's] writings and buildings shows that he interpreted the words ‘function’ and ‘form’ liberally.” Norberg-Schulz 1980: 180)

c4: Watering down. Smith’s claims that “the meaning of Sullivan’s catch-phrase, ‘form follows function,’ ... is not that the form of a building should logically be derived from, and only from, utilitarian and structural considerations, but rather that it should exuberantly proclaim, should radiantly show forth, the goodness of the human experiences which the use of the building will give rise to.” Such qualification, besides not agreeing with what Sullivan said about the matter, is doubtful on logical grounds. Sullivan’s expressed point about the phrase was that that it is a rule that allowed no exception. In other words: deriving form from utilitarian and structural considerations was the very guarantee which was to produce the exuberant proclaiming and showing forth. If it did not, there might be in principle two reasons for the failure: (a) the deriving was done in a wrong way; or (2) the FFF-formula was a nonsense. But the feasibility of the catch-phrase cannot be saved by suggesting forms were not meant to be derived from the utilitarian and structural considerations only. To do so waters down the phrase in a fatal manner, making it it useless even on the level of an argument. •

1971 PAPANEK

Victor Papanek: AESTHETIC VALUE IS A PART OF FUNCTION

“‘Form follows function’, Louis Sullivan’s battle cry of the 1880s and 1890s, was followed by Frank Lloyd Wright’s ‘Form and function are one’. But semantically, all the statements from Horatio Greenough to the German Bauhaus are meaningless. The concept that what works well will of necessity look well has been a lame excuse for all the sterile, operating-room-like furniture and implements of the twenties and thirties. (...) Le style international and die neue Sachlichkeit have let us down rather badly in terms of human value. Le Corbusier’s house as la machine à habiter and the packing-crate houses evolved in the Dutch De Stijl movement reflect a perversion of aesthetic and utility. –– ‘Should I design it to be functional,’ the students say, ‘or to be aesthetically pleasing?’ This is the most heard, the most understandable, and the most mixed-up question in design today. ‘Do you want it to look good, or to work?’ Barricades erected between what are really just two of the many aspects of function. It is all quite simple: aesthetic value is an inherent part of function.” (19)

Papanek, Victor. Design for the Real World: Human Ecology and Social Change. Frogmore, St Albans: Paladin, 1972.

COMMENTS TO 1971 PAPANEK

c1: It is easy to agree with Papanek’s statement that ‘aesthetic value is an inherent part of [the concept of] function”. It is more difficult to understand why Papanek at the same time ridicules tastes of other people for things he himself finds useless and silly (e.g. an electrically heated foot stool with embroidered rose ornaments, illustrated in his book in ch. 4 on p. 56). If there is such a thing as an aesthetic ‘function’, then it would be the designer’s task to fulfill that function – on other than exclusively his own terms. But Papanek’s message in this book, in spite of his nominal criticism of functionalism (cf. his ch. 1), is that designers know so much better that they should take over and run society; cf. Heskett 1980: 206 for pithy critical remarks on that position.

c2: The FFF-formula was not a battle-cry in the 1880s, being coined only after mid-1890s. If it was a battle cry then it was one quickly cooled down by the immediate critique by Adler within some three month of its appearance, and not to be mentioned by its author for the next five years again.

c3: Papanek, in suggesting that formulas form follows function and form and function are one boil down to “the concept that what works well will of necessity look well”, makes the European functionalism look unbearably fatuous – much on the lines of Hitchcock and Johnsons’s misinterpretation of functionalism in 1932: Hardly any designer would ever subscribe to such a silly claim were it not for a design metaphysics which makes such claim sound plausible – a metaphysics which, in the words of Sullivan, claimed that it “is really the essence of every problem that it contains and suggests its own solution”. This metaphysics made it possible to fancy designers as people gifted with objective insight into nature of things. Papanek jettisons theatrically the formulas – only to embrace one to the same effect. He suggests not only that there is a way to decide in a non-arbitrary way where people’s needs end and wants begin, the needs being objective and the needs arbitrary. What is more, he submits that designers are those who are called to draw the line. So the service role he carved out for designers in stressing that “[d]esigning for the people’s needs rather than for their wants, or artificially created wants, is the only meaningful direction now” (163), perhaps proved so attractive at least as much for the master-role it implied, as for the service role. The resounding success of Papanek’s rather repetitive and theatrical book among young designers (it was translated into 21 languages, and claimed to be “one of the world’s most widely read books on design” can be perhaps explained, paradoxically, by the reassurance that the only legitimate task for the designer is to work with what users need – not with what users want – which comes close to making designers into educators of people. Papanek restated the modernists promise to designer community when modernism was lackluster: designer as a Platonic guardian, the moral consciousness of ... (?) •

1972 JORDY

William H. Jordy: AT LOGGERHEADS WITH NEO-DARWINISM

“Depending on the circumstances, his motto [i.e. Sullivan’s FFF-formula] makes equal sense turned any way. His own Auditorium Building proves the point. (...) Acoustic considerations primarily determined the design of the ceiling in the theatre of the Auditorium Building as a series of concentric arches telescoped in size towards the stage, although the shape also served as a focusing device. In this instance form did follow function. But because Adler derived this theatre design from a previous design, function also followed function. When Sullivan decided to mark the entrance of the theatre on one of the flanking walls with a tower, his engineering partner had to devise a complicated technique for building the foundations. Here function followed form. And of course Sullivan cribbed much of his exterior design for the Auditorium from Richardson's Marshall Field Wholesale Store. Form followed form. So the design of the Auditorium boxes Sullivan's slogan, with the only certainty that ‘form’ and ‘function’ are somehow interdependent. ([Jordy’s footnote:] Incidentally, ‘form follows function’ is as debatable in evolutionary theory as in architecture. Darwin’s position that nature randomly presents forms, some of which have superior survival potentiality because of certain functional advantages, rather reverses Sullivan’s motto. ‘Function follows form’ in the sense that the process of natural selection selects from the forms available to it. Sullivan’s formulation is closer to the Lamarckian position in evolutionary theory, which maintained that adaptive traits (function) tended to appear through inheritance in the next generation (altered form). The debate between Neo-Darwinists and Neo-Lamarckians continues. Although the area of conflict has constantly shifted, genetic investigations have given the Darwinian position a decided edge in the argument.)” (86)

Jordy, William H. “Functionalism as Fact and Symbol: Louis Sullivan's Commercial Buildings, Tombs, and Banks.” In American Buildings and Their Architects, vol. 4: Progressive and Academic Ideals at the Turn of the Century, 83-179. New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972.

COMMENTS TO 1972 JORDY

c1: FFF-formula an explanatory device? In this spirited interpretation Jordy sees both the FFF-formula and its variations as explanatory devices. But Sullivan was not after explanations generated by those who look at buildings and products, but after creative principles to be of help to those who design things; he was not interested in explaining things out there but in formulating design principles in order to produce things not yet there. According to Jordy. we can say that “Form invokes function; function invokes form ... and so around the circle. Yet if the circular movement is to be stopped anywhere as moral exhortation, it is best stopped at Sullivan's choice.” (87). Here the question is of course: why did then Sullivan choose to stop this ‘circular movement’ (if we can speak of such) at the point where he could claim that function invokes form? And why did he need the ‘’moral exhortation’? The answer, it seems, is the Brolinian one (cf. Brolin 1985): Sullivan’s choice of stopping at the FFF-formula was to indicate that some designers – in the least one of them (guess who?) – were able to tap the objective sources of form, while others remained bogged in their subjective guessworks. The sentence seems to have been offering the modernist designers not only a new self-confidence; it had at the same time a tremendous potential as a liberation ideology – an ideology that mentally released the designer from the duty to serve the public. –– For views similar to 1972 JORDY and more comments on the distinction between FFF-formula as an explanatory device and a design principle, see 1953 GOMBRICH: c1, 1962 GIEDION: c1, 1962 JANSON: c1, 1976 GOMBRICH: c1, 1982 JANSON: c2, 1986 FORTY: c1, 1986 SCHMALRIEDE, 1993 LAMBERT: c2.

c2: Jordy: FFF-formula at loggerheads with Neo-Darwinism. Jordy seems to be the very first architectural historian who was able to throw new light on the alleged biological inspiration of the FFF-formula. In contrast to his predecessors who often showed an embarrassing absence of insight into the Neo-Darwinist / Neo-Lamarckian controversy about the explanation of functional adaptations in nature he understood that the FFF-formula had been at loggerheads with the current Neo-Darwinian theory of natural selection. (the colleagues: Giedion, Mumford) •

1972 PEVSNER

Nikolaus Pevsner: IT WAS IN THE AIR

“Fitness for use – that was to be the slogan of the first half of the twentieth century. 'Form follows function' said Sullivan, 'the divine law of fitness', said Voysey, and so we are on the way to the Deutscher Werkbund and to Gropius and the Bauhaus.” (228)

Pevsner, Nikolaus. “The Battling Builder: Copism vs. Originality.” In Some Architectural Writers of the Nineteenth Century, 222-37. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972, 288.

COMMENTS TO 1972 PEVSNER

c1: Just as many other current explanations of the modernist preoccupation with functionality, also Pevsner creates impression that until the first half of the twentieth century buildings and products were largely unfit for use, and Sullivan, Voysey, Deutscher Werkbund, Gropius and Bauhaus were the knights who fought to save the world from this catastrophe. The modernist obsession with functionality, however, was not utilitarian but aesthetic in nature, as the incessant talk about new formal language proper to the modern epoch, bears witness. •

1972 TZONIS

Alexander Tzonis: REDUCTIONIST AND STERILE APPROACH

“The rich comprehensive approach to architecture and the shrewd introspection that characterized Perrault did not find a tradition in the theory of architecture. Instead an approach based on the laws of ‘nature,’ followed. (...) ...Perrault’s deep and rich observations led into a reductionist and sterile approach which tried to submerge all design decisions under only one formula: ‘Form Follows Function,’ ‘proportion ... means ... Functional Fitness,’” (57)

Tzonis, Alexander. Towards a Non-Oppressive Environment. Series on the Human Environment, Boston: I Press, 1972.

COMMENTS TO 1972 TZONIS

c1: •

1974 ALLSOPP

Bruce Allsopp: FORM FOLLOWED FORMS OF ABSTRACT ART

“According to the doctrine of the [modern] movement Gropius and his colleagues at the Bauhaus rescued modern design from its obsession with hand craftsmanship and related it to modern technology. The shapes of things were to be the logical result of solving functional problems by the use of machine tools in accordance with the ‘morphology of materials’. Form was to follow function. Ruskin’s lamp of truth was turned into a searchlight; all decoration was to be rejected and beauty was to be found in the functional shapes and inherent qualities of materials truthfully expressed. The history of medieval and vernacular architecture was bent in order to prove that architecture was the result of solving functional problems by the logical use of structural forms in accordance with the nature of materials and in relation to the climatic conditions. –– But the pure doctrine of functionalism made design into an intellectual process which modern artists instinctively rejected. Modern architecture naturally looked to modern movements in the other arts and especially to abstract painting. Le Corbusier made a synthesis in his own life-work, becoming much more famous as an architect but remaining, all his life, an abstract painter. –– To some extent the forms which followed function and the forms which interested the abstract artists seemed to be similar. It was a misleading coincidence. Architecture is, by its very nature of serving the need of man for built accommodation, a practical, functional art; but by overstressing the functional aspects, to the exclusion of nearly all the activities which architects have always enjoyed, and apparently reducing architecture to an intellectual, problem-solving occupation, the functionalists encouraged architects to find opportunities for abstract design in architecture. But the leadership in abstract art lay with painters and sculptors who owed no alliance to functionalism. They were concerned with form for its own sake and the nearest they came to functionalism was exploring for the forms which were appropriate to the materials they were using. (...) So the paradox arose that the artistic and, as the architect understood it, the ‘design’ aspect of his work, the component which really interested him as a creative artist, derived from painting and was not function-based. Thus the generality of architects developed a vague aesthetic in which solution of the functional problems, and truth in the expression of structure and materials, were the matrix from which he started to work as an artist and ... to express himself (...)” (8-9)

Allsopp, Bruce. Towards a Humane Architecture. London: Frederick Muller, 1974.

COMMENTS TO 1974 ALLSOPP

c1: Bruce Allsopp belongs to the absolute minority (see also 1991 JACKSON) of those who point to the formative role of abstract art in the makeup of the functionalist aesthetic – and sees this fact as something which explodes the notion that functionalist style was a result of functional considerations. The decisive role of abstract art in the constitution of the functionalist style was for the first time clearly and explicitly discussed in Hitchcock and Johnson 1932, and later again in Hitchcock 1948. In contrast to Allsopp, however, who questioned modernism as a whole, the position of both authors was thoroughly modernist. They attempted to replace the functionalist design theory which they rejected, with an ‘abstractionist’ design theory which presented abstract art as an entirely legitimate the source of modernist aesthetic. Hitchcock and Johnson, in contrast to 1974 ALLSOPP and especially to 1991 JACKSON, were modernist historians rather than historians of modernism (see also 1952 CONDIT: c1 for the notion of ‘apologetic historian’). For the notion of ‘abstractionism’, cf. Michl 1996; see also 1932 HITCHCOCK & JOHNSON). •

1975 SHARP

Dennis Sharp: FFF-FORMULA CURRENT IN THE USA BY 1850s

"The words 'functional' and 'functionalist' and the aphorism 'form follows function' had currency in America by the middle of the last century." (xxi)

Sharp, Dennis. “Introduction.” In Form and Function: A source book for the History of Architecture and Design 1890-1939, edited by Tim and Charlotte Benton with Dennis Sharp. London: Crosby Lockwood Staples, 1975.

COMMENTS TO 1975 SHARP

c1: There is no doubt that the word ‘function’ and ‘functional’ was current in America by the middle of the last century. But did also the word ‘functionalist’ (which I presume Sharp meant as adjective) and the aphorism 'form follows function'? Sharp’s book seems to be a locus classicus of several unsubstantiated claims which were sent into circulation by other writers (see 1986 SPARKE) •

1976 GOMBRICH

E. H. Gombrich: THE END DETERMINES THE MEAN

“I shall present some second thoughts about an idea I put forward sixteen years ago in my book Art and Illusion: I mean the idea, which is more familiar in the theory of architecture that in the criticism of painting, that form follows function or that the end determines the mean. Of course the slogans of this kind can never have more than what I called a heuristic value: they draw attention to the kind of question the historian should ask in confronting the monuments of the past.” (7)

Gombrich, E.H. Means and Ends: Reflections of the History of Fresco Painting. London: Thames and Hudson, 1976.

COMMENTS TO 1976 GOMBRICH

c1: Explanatory device. Gombrich seems to have been the first who suggested the use of the formula as an explanatory device in art history (see 1953 GOMBRICH: c1). For similar, explanatory views of the formula and critical comment on such views, see further 1962 GIEDION: c1, 1962 JANSON: c1, 1972 JORDY: c1, 1982 JANSON: c2, 1986 FORTY: c1, 1986 SCHMALRIEDE, 1993 LAMBERT: c2. •

1976 RYKWERT

Joseph Rykwert: GREENOUGH COINED THE TAG

“It was presumably in the Lives [of Famous Architects by Francesco Milizia] ... that Horatio Greenough read 'quanto è in rapresentazione, deve essere sempre in funzione' and the whole doctrine of necessity as the true source of ornament and of beauty. And from Greenough the tag that form follows function passed to Sullivan, to Wright and into the commonplace of architectural talk.” p. 22

Rykwert, Joseph. “Lodoli on Function and Representation.” Architectural Review, July 1976, pp. 21-26.

COMMENTS TO 1976 RYKWERT

c1: Rykwert seems to claim that the ‘tag’ form follows function had appeared already in Greenough’s writings. He gives no reference to any of Greenough’s work, though. There has been a whole line of authors claiming with various degree of ambiguity that Greenough, and not Sullivan, launched the FFF-formula; see 1896 SULLIVAN, c3. •

1977 BLAKE

Peter Blake: GREENOUGH

“Nobody is quite certain who first proclaimed that ‘form follows function.’ Most historians think it was Horatio Greenough, and all agree that Louis Sullivan, the master architect of the American skyscraper of the late nineteenth century, made this slogan, though not,[sic] entirely, his guideline. As Marcel Breuer once put it, ‘Sullivan did not eat his functionalism quite as hot as he cooked it!’ In any event, ‘Form follows function’ – or Functionalism – did become the dogma of the Modern Movement from its inception. And what the examples of Paul Rudolph’s building at Yale and that dingy ex-school of dentistry at Penn seem to suggest, in tandem, is that form not only does not necessarily follow function, but that it may, in fact, be the mortal enemy of the latter.” (16)

Blake, Peter. “The Fantasy of Function.” In Peter Blake. Form Follows Fiasco: Why Modern Architecture hasn't Worked, 15-28. Boston/Toronto: Little, Brown and Company, 1977.

COMMENTS TO 1977 BLAKE

c1: The Greenough track. Blake belongs to a fairly large group of those who keep suggesting, loosely and without ever substantianing it, that the FFF-wording was launched by Greenough. For the list of such ‘Greenoughians’, see 1896 SULLIVAN: c3.

c2: Obfuscating. Blake seems to criticize architects both for not sticking to the FFF-formula, and for doing so. He suggests it is wrong when the formula is executed half-heartedly (‘Sullivan’, as Marcel Breuer, according to Blake, put it, ‘did not eat his functionalism quite as hot as he cooked it!’), but it appears to be as wrong in his eyes when executed full-heartedly (‘form ...may ... be the mortal enemy of [function]’). Blake’s loud ‘critique’ of the FFF-formula contributed more to obfuscating than to elucidating the nature and purpose of the functionalist doctrine.

c3: Only since 1930s. Blake’s claim about is wrong if it is construed to mean that the FFF-formula itself was known and was used by the ‘Modern Movement’ form the very beginning: the formula became known in the architect and designer circles in the US only around mid 1930s, and was explicitly introduced the English architectural circles towards the end of 1930s by Behrendt 1938 (see 1937 BEHRENDT). But Blake is no doubt right if he is taken to suggest that the belief which the FFF-formula stands for (and which he calls ‘Functionalism’) became “the dogma of the Modern Movement from its inception”. •

1977 BRAWNE

Michael Brawne: FORM IS HIDDEN IN PURPOSES

“functionalism. In architecture, the theory embodied in Louis Sullivan’s dictum ‘form follows function’, i.e. that the form of a building can be derived from a full knowledge of the purposes it is to serve. (...) The theory had a further extension in the 1920s and 1930s in the view that the form which most closely follows function, as apparent in ships or aeroplanes, is also the most beautiful.” (251)

Brawne, Michael. “functionalism.” In The Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought, red. Oliver Stallybrass Alan Bullock, 251. London: Fontana, 1977.

COMMENTS TO 1977 BRAWNE

c1: Purposes? If derived from purposes, what is then new about it; sounds pretty obvious. Good suggestion that everything is hidden intrinsically in the purposes independently of man, •

1977 GOODMAN

Gary Goodman: INSANE TO ME

“To me it always seemed insane to suggest that form follows function, since to anyone but a bloody idiot the form defines the possible function.” (459)

From a letter of 1977, addressed to Eugene S. Ferguson from a US designer named Gary Goodman (Hardinsburg, Ky.), quoted by Ferguson in his article “Elegant Inventions: The Artistic Component of Technology.” Technology and Culture 19 (3, 1978): 450-60.

COMMENTS TO 1977 GOODMAN

c1: Anyone but a bloody idiot? To begin with, Goodman’s agitated statement seems to hit the FFF-formula right on the head. On closer look it seems, however, that Goodman criticizes the FFF-formula as if it was a part of a common sense doctrine of design, which it is not, rather than as a metaphysical one, which it it really is. As suggested earlier, the essence of this design metaphysics can be defined as the position claiming that the two common sense meanings of the term function, function in the sense of intended use and function in the sense of actual use, are not really two different meanings but an indivisible one – Function as such. Now, which one of the two common sense meanings does Goodman criticize? Not the first, it seems; there is no doubt that form can be said to follow function in the sense of intended use. Goodman seems to attack the second common sense meaning of the FFF-formula – form follows the actual use (i.e. what he calls ‘possible function’). He points out rightly, that it is the other way around: actual use presupposes a form, or, form defines the actual use. Was the formula meant as an explanation of the origin of forms in our common sense world, Goodman’s ire would have been justified; then, only ‘a bloody idiot’ indeed would have failed to notice that existence of a form precedes rather than follows its actual (‘possible’) use. But since ‘function’ in FFF was not a commonsense term, it is not enough to criticize it as if it was.

c2: On the other hand, Goodman’s point that a form defines what it can be used for, can be taken as a strong criticism of those who understand and defend FFF as a technological explanation. Goodman’s position on this point agrees both with Neo-Darwinian theories of natural evolution, and current historical theories technological evolution. According to the theory of natural selection a ‘form’ has to be there first in order ever to be selected. Also the first tools and weapons were probably found natural objects whose forms were seen as ‘affording’ certain uses (for the notion of affordances, cf. Norman 1988). See also 199? KIPNIS & c1 for a similar point.•

1978 ARNHEIM

Rudolf Arnheim: FORM CANNOT BE FULLY DETERMINED BY FUNCTION

“William James, in his Principles of Psychology mentions 'the celebrated French formula of "La fonction fait l'organe",' and architects are well known to have applied this biological principle to their own trade. But it has become evident by now that neither in biology nor in the applied arts can form ever be fully determined by function. The reason is, as the designer David Pye has explained with great clarity, that function consists in abstract principles, not in shapes. For example, the function to be fulfilled by a wedge can be described verbally. The principle designates a range of shapes as suiting the purpose, but it declares no preference for any particular embodiment.” (255)

Arnheim, Rudolf. “Ch. VIII. Expression and Function.” In Dynamics of Architectural Form, 248-274. University of California Press, 1978.

COMMENTS TO 1978 ARNHEIM

c1: Arnheim innocent of Darwin? Arnheim, just as Mumford and others before him, seems to be strangely unaware that Darwin’s theory of natural selection knocked out the ‘French’ (i.e. Lamarckian) formula above, and that, consequently, hardly any mainstream contemporary biologist would accept the formula as a ‘biological principle’.

c2: No unpacking. Arnheim, just as most of previous writers, refrains from any attempt to ‘unpack’ to monolithic notion of function, treating it as if it was a straightforward, unambiguous term (on ‘unpacking’ the notion of function, see Introduction to the present anthology, ch. ‘Function’: intended of actual functioning).

c3: Clinging to function. Arnheim is one of very few theorists of design that were aware of David Pye’s seminal observations, but he seems to overlook Pye’s main point. Pye threw the concept of function as such overboard as a confused and therefore useless concept. Arnheim clings as late as 1994, in an article in Design Issues to the the black-box, functionalist-like notion of function, and still admires a kind of ‘functional design’ in the functionalis sense of the term; cf. Arnheim 1994. •

1978 FERGUSON

Eugene S. Ferguson: THE SIMPLE-MINDED PHRASE DEMOLISHED BY PYE

“Let me eliminate from our analysis a red herring that frequently swims into view. I refer to the notion that form follows function, which suggests that the person who peoduces an elegant invention has somehow found the perfect form for the given function. All he has to do, we are told, is to study the function, and out of that will emerge a form. You may remember that it was Horatio Greenough ... who first tied form to function. That was a full generation before Louis Sullivan gave currency to what has become the simple-minded phrase ‘form follows function’. (...) In Pye’s first chapter [of his The Nature of Design; New York 1964] the notion that form follows function is thoroughly demolished.” (455; note 5, p. 456)

Ferguson, Eugene S. “Elegant Inventions: The Artistic Component of Technology.” Technology and Culture 19 (3, 1978): 450-60.

COMMENTS TO 1977 FERGUSON

c1: Pye. Ferguson is one of very few thinkers who drew attention to Pye’s penetrating, radical criticism of both the notion of function, the FFF-formula and the functionalist design doctrine first published in 1964.

c2: “Sullivan gave currency”. Ferguson careful formulation distinguishes between Greenough’s launching of functionalist ideas, and Sullivan’s coining the FFF-formula which gave them currency by virtue of its great striking power.  [add the Greenoughians]

c3: Not simple-minded. Still, neither the doctrine nor the formula can be with any justice described as simple-minded. Were it the case, we would have to consider all those hypnotized by it as simple-minded, too, which would probably be too facile an explanation of the staying power of the formula. Besides, were it really simple-minded, it would have been shown long time ago. It would be more proper to describe the formula, and the doctrine, as a kind of a mind-trap, perhaps similar to what Popper in his epilogue to the 1992 Russian translation of his Open Society and Its Enemies calls “the marxist trap”; cf. Popper 1995.  [monism]

1978 PYE

David Pye: FORM FOLLOWS WHAT?

“Plenty of people do really believe that form can follow function; that if you thoroughly analyse the activity proper to the thing you are designing, then your analysis will provide all the information needed, and the design can be derived logically from the function. Plenty of people still believe that ‘purely functional’ designs are possible, and believe that they themselves produce them, what is more! But none of them has yet divulged what an analysis of a function looks like and what logical steps lead from it to the design. All you get from them is talk about the purpose of the thing, which ... is a statement of opinion and can never be anything else.” (12)

Pye, David. The Nature and Aesthetics of Design. London: The Herbert Press, 1978.

COMMENTS TO 1977 PYE

c1: Another formulation of Pye’s criticism, from the expanded version of his The Nature of Design of 1964. [ Purpose of things is a statement of opinion ... = a statement of intention?] •

1979 STEADMAN

Philip Steadman: ‘FOLLOWS’ IS THE TROUBLE -WORD

(1) “Probably the most famous and certainly the most abbreviated statement of the whole idea [of the ecological analogy] is Louis Sullivan's well-known, indeed notorious, slogan 'Form follows function' (...) The trouble arises out of the use of the word 'follows'. Stated as 'Form is related to function' the phrase would be unexceptionable, though hardly as catchy. Perhaps Sullivan was betrayed by a weakness for alliteration.” (59)

(2) “It was from [John] Edelmann that Sullivan derived his ‘theory of suppressed functions’, which was the origin of ‘Form follows function’. The nature of this theory is not made plain in The Autobiography of an Idea. From other evidence it seems, however, that the central notion was a series of functions which lay ‘suppressed’ or dormant in the architectural problem, being ‘released’ through the architect’s work as he developed a form.” (155)

Steadman, Philip. The Evolution of Designs: Biological Analogy in Architecture and the Applied Arts. London: Cambridge University Press, 1979.

COMMENTS TO 1979 STEADMAN (1)

(1) c1: The word ‘follows’. Perhaps Sullivan did have a weakness for alliteration, although the alliterated three-word formula is was Adler’s reformulation of Sullivan’s four-word original slogan, launched in his polemics with Sullivan; see 1896 ADLER. All the same it is a fact that in Sullivan’s Kindergarten Chats, (Sullivan 1965a) published some 5 years after he had launched the formula, Sullivan, in chapters XII. and XIII. called “Function and Form (1)” and “Function and Form (2)” uses freely a great number of terms which can be understood as synonyms for the word follows. He writes that form “resembles”, “expresses”, “indicates”, “means”, “looks like”, “speaks for”, “stands for”, “makes us aware of”, “is the logical output of”, “is the tangible evidence of” function (in the same text his synonyms for function are: ”purpose”, “reason”, “nature”, “essence”, “inner purpose”. This shows that the FFF-formula was far from the only wording of the design doctrine Sullivan stood for, and that the innocent word ‘follows’ was hardly any troublemaker; as Pye suggested the real trouble was with the notion of function (and the assorted synonyms).

COMMENTS TO 1979 STEADMAN (2)

(2) c1: ‘Suppressed functions’. German Naturphilosophie, cf. Rádl 1930; Gould 1992a • [?]

1979 GOMBRICH

E. H. Gombrich: GUIDELINE TO ART HISTORIANS

“I have often suggested that the formula familiar from architectural theory that ‘form follows function’ also offers a guideline to the historian of the other arts.” (145)

Gombrich, E. H. The Sense of Order: A Study in the Psychology of Decorative Art. 2nd ed., Oxford: Phaidon, 1992 (1979).

COMMENTS TO 1979 GOMBRICH

c1: •

1980 HESKETT

John Heskett: OFTEN MISINTERPRETED

“... Frank Lloyd Wright ... had worked under Louis Sullivan, whose famous dictum 'form follows function' was to become one of the great polemical slogans of modern architecture and design. Often misinterpreted as expressing a somewhat crude structural and aesthetical determinism, Sullivan's phrase, in the context of his argument, was an attempt to formulate a concept of organic unity in architecture in which function, structure and appropriate decoration could be fused to give an artistic expression appropriate to the modern age.” (62)

Heskett, John. Industrial Design. London: Thames and Hudson, 1980.

COMMENTS TO 1980 HESKETT

c1: Also Heskett seems to join the ranks of the ‘misunderstandist’ school of the FFF-formula interpreters; see 1924 SULLIVAN: c1.

c2: The idea of “artistic expression appropriate to modern age” is no obvious or natural aim for any architect. The claim that the modern age longs for its own expression was a part of the modernist design metaphysics; here Heskett gives the impression of identifying himself with the modernist aim. •

1980 LAMPUGNANI

Vittorio Magnago Lampugnani: MISUNDERSTOOD

“‘Form follows function,’ the essence of [Sullivan's] extensive theoretical work, has been quoted and applied to excess, but mainly out of context and has thus been misunderstood. Sullivan did not simply demand that a building demonstrate its use, but postulated that its form should be derived from its function. In this sense function meant to him not only technical and economic but also psychological and aesthetical requirements. He thus formulated one of the guiding principles of the twentieth century architecture: functionalism.” (19)

Lampugnani, Vittorio Magnago. Architecture and City Planning in the Twentieth Century. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold Company, 1980.

COMMENTS TO 1980 LAMPUGNANI

c1: A condescending ‘misunderstandist’ comment suggesting falsely that there is not really any problem with the FFF-formula, apart from quoting and applying it out of context, and thus causing misunderstanding,. For the ‘misunderstandist school’, see 1924 SULLIVAN: c1. •

1981 WILLIAMS

Christopher Williams: COMPLETE FUNCTIONALITY?

“The biologists say that all morphology is adaptive, meaning that through the generations, a species will alter its form to better suit its climate, terrain, movements, food intake, fighting, mating, and all the countless circumstances that constitute its environment and its living within that environment – its functioning. The artists, designers and architects have put it another way – form follows function, meaning that the form of an object should be obedient to the necessities of its functions. – Both statements mean about the same thing applied to the natural and human environments, but both lead us to believe that there may be an end result, when in fact the process itself is the end, and the object of this process, the evolving form, could be for ever changing, hoping to catch up to that elusive form of perfect obedience. – Is there such a thing as a complete functionality? (...)” (73)

Williams, Christopher. Origins of Form. New York: Architectural Book Publishing Company, 1987 (1981).

COMMENTS TO 1981 WILLIAMS

c1: Species with will? Williams’ formulation “a species will alter its form to better suit its climate...” etc, seems to import intentionality onto the process which according to Neo-Darwinism is not there. “Species”, although a meta-individual notion, seems here to be invested with its own individual will. In this way “species” becomes similar to the individual organism which, according to Neo-Lamarckians, is striving to adapt to its environment. That is why Williams can say that the processes in nature and the FFF-formula “mean about the same thing”.

c2: Should. On the ‘should’-interpretation of the FFF-formula, see 1934 GROPIUS, C2, and 1957 DE ZURKO, c1. Cf. also the notion of normative vs. descriptive law, in Souriau 1994.

c3: ‘Complete functionality’. The question about complete functionality seems to make some sense only as long as we operate with the notion of function that means neither ‘intended use’, nor as ‘actual use’, but – somehow – both at the same time (function as the “destiny” of a thing, as Teague put it; cf. Teague 1949: 53). Williams’ final answer to his question is negative, and he suggests that the question itself is meaningless, since functionality is per definition incomplete. Cf. my article “On the Rumor of Functional Perfection” proposing a similar conclusion; Michl 1991. •

1982 CAPLAN

Ralph Caplan: A CORRECTIVE ADMONITION

(1) “That form follows function is, as critic Edgar Kaufmann, Jr. has pointed out, merely a statement of sequence: form follows function. What function dictates is not form but set of boundary conditions. Within the constraints imposed by these conditions a design may take any of a variety of satisfactory forms, depending on the technology and materials available and – above all – on the designer's talent. ‘Form follows function’ is still a useful way of describing order of concern – an order that in an ideal society would be too obvious to mention, but that in ours needs constant reiteration.” ( 33)

(2) “The notion that form follows function needs to be qualified. It seems initially to have been a corrective admonition: designers had better attend first to how an object works, then to its shape and appearance. But ‘form follows function’ was quickly interpreted to mean that if an object were made to function well, it would as a matter of course be appropriate and pleasing in appearance. This is demonstrably untrue. A sampling of any year's patent office drawings will reveal a wide variety of products in which function has been followed by forms truly dreadful to contemplate.” ( 32-33)

Caplan, Ralph. By Design: Why There Are No Locks on the Bathroom Doors in the Hotel Louis XIV and Other Object Lessons. New York: St. Martin Press, 1982.

COMMENTS TO 1982 CAPLAN (1)

(1) c1: The order of concern. The FFF-formula seems really to describe an order of concern, but not in the sense which Caplan means. What Caplan has obviously in mind is that function, i.e. use, should be the first consideration of the designer. But the formula in fact begins with the word FORM not the word FUNCTION, and form at the head of the formula seems to be the real order of concern of those who embraced it: it was as a vision of truly modern forms – not as a vision buildings and products with superior functionality – that functionalism won the battle against historicism and eclecticism. It is true, though that from the point of the functionalist design metaphysics, the concern for functioning and the concern for form were allegedly impossible to separate, speaking about the one entailed speaking about the other; as Wright chose to put it: form and function are one. If function can be said to have been the first consideration of the designer, it was because functional considerations were thought of as the only legitimate generator of forms, not because they were valued for their own sake.

(1) c2: Retrospective or prospective? Caplan seems not to be aware that he struggles with spectator-problems: whether form follows the intended functioning, whether such intention determines the form or only limits the choice – all these are spectator-questions. Spectator-questions are retrospective questions, while designer qua designer struggles with prospective questions. For designer qua designer there is only problem of choice: both choice of the problems and choice of solutions. If we qua designers start thinking in terms of these prospective questions, in terms of choice of the problems and choice of solutions, i.e. in terms of human purposes, it makes less sense to speculate about whether a purpose dictates the form altogether, or if it only limits the form. For not only do we qua designers choose form – we choose (or, in the least, define) purpose as well. We refer all our effort to our aim, out intention, our purpose with the product. We check the attempted formal solutions against that purpose. Qua designers we ask “Does the design facilitate the activities for which the building [or the product] was intended? (cf. Ligo 1984: 40) We do not ask: ‘Does the purpose dictate form?’ , or ‘Why couldn't I help choosing this solution?’, since such questions are spectator-questions. But these spectator-questions are not less real; all the same, they can never constitute the groundwork of a design activity; they are a part of design process only in the sense of being hitched to the intention: analysis of the actual functioning is often a part of work with the intended functioning. The actual functioning is a groundwork only for the science about design. And the aim of this science is to create new knowledge – not to create new artifacts. The modernist designers worked as designers, while talking like scientists. But their ‘scientific’ vocabulary didn't aim at more knowledge – it was a rhetoric arguing a case for objective design, and through that for a a total creative autonomy. (For the notions of retrospective / prospective, cf. Toulmin 1976, ch. 17.: “Philosophy and Human Nature”, esp. pp. 280-284)

COMMENTS TO 1982 CAPLAN (2)

(2) c1: Not a corrective admonition! It is downright depressing to find out that this hearsay interpretation of functionalism is written by an influential American design critic . There is no evidence whatsoever to support the claim that the FFF-formula was initially meant as a corrective admonition: to claim that in functionalism “designers had better attend first to how an object works, then to its shape and appearance” is simply silly. The corrective admonition idea is not only wrong factually (see e.g. 1896 SULLIVAN). It is as improbable on the ground of the historical logic, too: how could a movement which came to dominate a large part of our century ever get its steam from such a pedestrian admonition? On the contrary, much suggests that the FFF-formula was in fact understood from the very beginning the way Caplan considers a misinterpretation, namely “if an object were made to function well, it would as a matter of course be appropriate and pleasing in appearance”. (True, functionalists would probably have said “to function perfectly” rather than “to function well”, because the point was that only a perfect functional solution was expected to give a perfect aesthetic solution.)

(2) c2: Less beautiful = less functional. More beautiful = more functional? For a committed functionalist the case of the dreadful patent-office drawings quoted by Caplan, proves nothing. In fact, it could be used to show that functionalism was right: if the object was ugly is could be taken as an indication that the object still did not fulfill (or follow) the function the way it should. An essay of the Czech functionalist theoretician Karel Teige, published in 1925, argues, in my view legitimately, exactly that point. (In 1925 when the following text was published, Teige, following the Russian avantgardists, still called his position constructivism. He expresses all the same the gist of functionalism, a decade or so before this gist started to be summarized with the help of Sullivan’s formula.) I will quote this instructive passage at some length. Teige writes (in my translation): “... we can state that whenever a concrete task and problem is solved in its entirety, as economically, precisely and completely as possible, the result is a modern beauty achieved without any aesthetic intent. One cannot say that such beauty begins where the perfectly fulfilled purpose ends; it is simply impossible to distinguish the beauty and the utility in a form. One cannot say that architecture begins where construction ends; one cannot say that because at the very moment we arrive at an all-round, purposeful perfection, we arrive at the same time, automatically, at beauty.(...) It is objected that some machines, although perfectly purposeful, can be unsightly and ugly. This is not quite right. If they happen to be unsightly it is above all because they are probably not truly perfect; their perfection is only relative and needs further perfecting. We could say that an unsightly machine simply calls for further perfection, that its ugliness is a symptom of deficiency. We argue that the more perfect a machine is more beautiful it is. And a machine is perfect, and consequently beautiful, only when thorough purposefulness – not beauty – was the exclusive interest of its constructor. If there are two machines made for the same purpose, both deemed to be equally effective, and one of them is uglier, you can rest assured that the more beautiful one will turn out to be more effective. (...) The moral of the machine aesthetic is this: A beautiful product is one made as perfectly and as purposefully as possible, with economy and precision, and without any aesthetic intention whatsoever.” (Teige 1966: 140, 141-2) The passage shows, perhaps better than any other, how the allegedly anti-formalist position of functionalists can be seen as anti-formalist only within the narrow logic of their own design doctrine, and how profoundly formalist the doctrine was from any outside point of view. The passage gives support to a seemingly outrageous characteristics of modernism by the Greek-American architectural theorist Alexander Tzonis who wrote in 1972 that “The Modernist Movement (...) was founded on the principle, explicitly, that an efficient form is beautiful and harmonious and, conversely, that a harmonious or beautiful form is efficient. The emphasis was particularly on the second part of the statement and implied the wish to achieve, through the visual organization of a building, structural and functional efficiency.” (Tzonis 1972: 85) •

1982 H.F.K.

H.F.K.: EXPRESSING RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN ARCHITECTURE AND CIVILIZATION

“Sullivan's own dictum 'form follows function,' ... should not lead one to conclude that Sullivan believed that a design should be a mechanistic visual statement of utility. Rather, he believed that architecture must evolve from and express the environment in addition to expressing its particular function and its structural basis. It has been said that Sullivan was the first U.S. architect to think consciously of the relationship between architecture and civilization.” (796)

H.F.K. “Sullivan, Louis.” In The New Encyclopædia Britannica / Macropædia, Vol. 794-797. Chicago: Encyclopædia Britannica, 1982.

COMMENTS TO 1982 H.F.K.

c1: The idea of ‘thinking consciously of the relationship between architecture and civilization’ is similar to the idea of expressing the spirit of the epoch, which was the central idea of modernism. On the problem of expression in such context, cf. Gombrich 1978a; Gombrich 1978b.

1982 JANSON

Horst W. Janson: IN THE HISTORY OF ART FORM FOLLOWS FUNCTION

“I decided ... to choose a topic... that demanded a great deal of work and thought. ‘Form follows function’ suggested itself because the phrase had been nagging me, like a mild toothache, ever since my graduate student days in the late 1930s. I even discussed it it once with Walter Gropius, who was then teaching at Harvard, with less than satisfactory results. (..) Jacob Burckhardt, a great cultural historian as well as an art historian, opposed the trend toward an ever more formalistic history of art ... . In his old age, Burckhardt asked for a ‘Kunstgeschichte nach Aufgaben’ as his legacy for future generations. (...) I would propose that ... we take up Burckhardt’s challenge and view the history of art in terms of Aufgaben, or ‘tasks’, a term I should like to translate more broadly as functions. Let me then postulate as an axiom that in the history of art form follows function.” (3, 10, 12)

Janson, H.W. Form Follows Function – or Does It? Modernist Design Theory and the History of Art. Maarsen: Gary Schwartz, 1982.

COMMENTS TO 1982 JANSON

c1: What the American art historian H.W. Janson (see 1962 JANSON) postulates as an axiom, i.e. that “in the history of art form follows function”, was suggested by Ernst Gombrich as early as 1953 (see 1953 GOMBRICH), and proposed as a methodologican principle in mid-1970s (see 1976 GOMBRICH).

c2: It seems to be unwise to replace a fairly straightforward term such as ‘task’, which is a word clearly implying an intending agent, with the term ‘function’, which is an equivocal notion for both intended use, and actual use. Paul Zucker published in 1951 an article called “The Paradox of Architectural Theories at the Beginning of the 'Modern Movement'” (Zucker 1951) where he pointed out that while art historical research of architecture at the end of the last century and the beginning of this one was concentrating on themes such as symbolic or cognitive character of architecture, the aesthetic meaning of space, of volume and of their interrelationship, denying as it was any connection between [utilitarian] functions, and form or style, the modernist architects in the same period were busy arguing that function, material and technique were to be the base of architectural design. Seeing Janson employing the key modernist slogan at the time the slogan itself was being abandoned by the modernists themselves, the situation may deserve another article, this time named named “Paradox of the Art Historical Theories at the End of the ‘Modern Movement”. –– For similar, explanatory views of the formula or more comments, see 1953 GOMBRICH: c1, 1962 GIEDION: c1, 1962 JANSON: c1, 1972 JORDY: c1, 1976 GOMBRICH: c1, 1986 FORTY: c1, 1986 SCHMALRIEDE, 1993 LAMBERT: c2. •

1983 JOEDICKE

Jürgen Joedicke: FORM LATENTLY PRESENT IN THE ESSENCE OF THE TASK AT HAND

“In an article of 1896, published under the title ‘The tall office building artistically considered’, he concluded, on the basis of observation of nature, ‘that life is recognized in its expression, that form follows function’. From that he derived the principle: ‘…that it is really the essence of every problem that it contains and suggests the solution.’ Thus form is not understood as being based on previous knowledge or as something determined a priori, but as a search for something that is already latently present in the essence of the task at hand. The analogy of architecture with nature thus led to an ontologically (and not mechanically) founded version of Functionalism.” (254)

Joedicke, Jürgen, tr. from German by B. Bergdoll. “organic architecture.” In The Thames and Hudson Encyclopaedia of the 20th-Century Architecture, edited by V. M. Lampugnani, 254-255. London: Thames and Hudson, 1986.

COMMENTS TO 1982 JOEDICKE

c1: Straight to the core. Joedicke, pinpointed in an admirable fashion the very core of the functionalist doctrine. With a precision nobody (to my knowledge) achieved before him, he made it clear that according to this design tenet form is thought to be latently present in the problem to be solved. Strangely enough, his key observation was formulated in connection with the entry on ‘organic architecture’ – while the encyclopedia’s entry on ‘Functionalism’, signed PB/VML (Peter Blake / Vittorio Magnago Lampugnani) presented a wishy-washy picture of the doctrine which obscured rather than elucidated its theoretical makeup. (In contrast to Hatje 1963 entry on “organic architecture” conceived in a normative, programmatic tone - written by Arnold Whittick for the first edition of the Encyclopaedia - Joedicke’s text, published exactly 20 years later, is almost purely a descriptive text.)

c2: The form. Joedicke showed by implication that the designer who claimed to have made the FFF-formula as his ‘rule’, in fact claimed that the forms he had found were the form latently present in the essence of the task at hand. This momentous claim meant in other words that the form found in that way was THE form; that no other form was found fit for the task. Such claim was of course the heart of the functionalist contention that their architecture and its aesthetic was objective in its nature, i.e. beyond questions of taste (cf. Taut 1929: 166: " ... regarded from the standpoint of modern architecture, the question of taste may be altogether out of date ...") One of the problems of the claim was the burden of proof: how could the designer prove that his formal solution was the only possible one? Our contention is that it could be neither proved nor disproved, whether by empirical or logical means, and that the claim was supported only by the rhetoric fireworks of functionalists and their supporters. I outlined some of the logical and empirical problems the functionalist claim was bound to encounter in my early article on the FFF-formula, presented in 1984 and published in 1989; cf. Michl 1989. -- On the theme of latent forms cf. also Giedion remark form 1948 (1969: 359) where he deplores that the English reformers of the 1850, including Gottfried Semper, were unable to, perceive “the pure forms latent in machine-made objects. -- Only through fragmentary utterances did one glimpse the abstract forms inherent in industrial production.”

c3: ‘Organic’ ≠ ‘functional’? Joedicke on his part did not attempt to clarify the relationship between ‘organic’ and ‘functional’ architecture, i.e. functionalism, apart from the last sentence quoted above which is too abstruse for the reader to make any sense of: “The analogy of architecture with nature ... led to an ontologically (and not mechanically) founded version of Functionalism”. It remains unclear what Joedicke refers to by the terms ‘ontological’ and ‘mechanical’. It seems, however, that as far as the design principle is concerned, it is difficult to find any real difference between the doctrine of organic architecture and that of functionalism; the distinction between the two seems to be of stylistic rather than doctrinal nature. See 1983 von SEIDLEIN; on the vagueness of the notion of ‘organic’ cf. Gilbert 1951.

c4: Three minor imprecisions in Joedicke’s quotations: (a) Joedicke quotes Sullivan as saying “…that it is really the essence of every problem that it contains and suggests the solution.” What Sullivan really said was “… that it is of the very essence of every problem that it contains and suggests its own solution.”Sullivan 1947: 203).

(b) Likewise, Sullivan does not say “that life is recognized in its expression, that form follows function” but “that life is recognizable in its expression, that form ever follows function” (ditto, 208). The imprecisions were probably causes by translations going back and forth between English, German, and English again.

(c) Last minor imprecision: Sullivan does not derive his ‘principle’ stating that every problem contains and suggests its own solution from this observation that form (ever) follows function, but the other way around. In Sullivan’s article of 1896, the ‘principle’ is mentioned close to the beginning, while the FFF-formula appears close to the end of the text. •

1983 MÄNTY

Jorma Mänty: GIST OF EVERYTHING THAT FUNCTIONALISM IS OR CAN BE

“‘Ornament is crime' represents very strongly the exclusive line of thought. It is based on Adolf Loos's essay 'Ornament und Verbrechen', published in 1908. (...) ‘Form follows function’, on the other hand, gives most clearly the gist of an inclusive architectural rule. It comes from Louis H. Sullivan's book THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF AN IDEA from 1924. This slogan has come to represent everything that Functionalism is or can be, and it most probably will remain so. (...) It seems that the criticism against Functionalism, and especially against Functionalist town planning, is, in fact, criticism against those who have interpreted Functionalist principles in a highly reduced way. The principles themselves – I am prepared to argue – stay intact and are completely valid at the present time too.” (40, 45)

Mänty, Jorma. “Second Thoughts on Functionalism.” Datutop 4 (1983): 33-47.

COMMENTS TO 1983 MÄNTY

c1: Correction: The rule FFF does not come from The Autobiography ...but was launched by Sullivan almost twenty years earlier; see 1896 SULLIVAN. •

1983 von SEIDLEIN

Peter C. von Seidlein: OFT-MISUNDERSTOOD

“Opposed to ... [Sullivan’s ] conviction that art must be founded on scientific method ... is the conception of S.[ullivan] as a protagonist of organic architecture. But the organic aspect – in the sense of form derived from nature – of his building was confined to surface ornament, whose extraordinary richness in many cases seems a disconcerting contradiction of the aesthetic objectivity of structural elements. His oft-cited and oft-misunderstood maxim that form should follow function was not seen by S. as the point of departure for an organic architecture in the manner of Frank Lloyd Wright or Hugo Häring. It derived much more from an emphatic rejection of any autonomous form in building which failed to take account of function and construction.” (326)

von Seidlein, P. C. “Sullivan, Louis.” In The Thames and Hudson Encyclopaedia of the 20th-Century Architecture, ed. V. M. Lampugnani. 323-326. London: Thames and Hudson, 1986 (1983).

COMMENTS TO 1983 von SEIDLEIN

c1: ‘Should’? Sullivan never really said that form should follow function. On the ‘should’-interpretation of the FFF-formula, see 1934 GROPIUS, C2, and 1957 DE ZURKO, c1. Cf. also the notion of normative vs. descriptive law, in Souriau 1994.

c2: Misunderstandist. Also von Seidlein belongs to the ‘misunderstandist school’; see 1924 SULLIVAN: c1.

c3: Organic vs: functional? Von Seidlein writes as if FFF was really a feasible precept (on this, see 1983 JOEDICKE: c3). His claim that Sullivan did not see the FFF-formula as a point of departure for an organic architecture in the manner of Frank Lloyd Wright or Hugo Häring, and that he rather conceived of it as a rejection of autonomous form unrelated to function or construction, tries to smooth over a contradiction which is there only if one believes that FFF was feasible. ... these two claims are two sides of the same coin: rejection of autonomous form was organic architecture, in Sullivan’s eyes. See 1983 JOEDICKE: c2.

1984 BELLINI

Mario Bellini: ELECTRONICS – THE DEATH OF THE FFF-FORMULA

“My designs and ideas developed with [the] electronic revolution and I had the opportunity to design the new electronic machines starting from the consideration that form follows function, but in a rather subtle way. In a screwdriver this is easy to understand. But form following function in a black box full of chips is something quite different. I think I tried to give this process a new interpretation, considering that function is not exactly what is going on inside but the relationship between you, the machine and the environment. The machine is an extension of the person, or the environment where the person works, depending on the size of the machine; the small machine being more a tool, and the larger more architectural.” (32)

Bellini, Mario. “Mario Bellini Interview.” Design World (4, 1984): 30-35.

COMMENTS TO 1984 BELLINI

c1: Once they did but now they no longer do. Bellini seems to believe that in the past forms in some objects really did follow function, or rather that the designer was able to let form follow function. Here seems to be the fons et origo of the (Bellinisque?) idea that electronic technology, due to miniaturization, and in contrast to the previous mechanical technology, no longer dictates the form. It is, however, wrong to say that with miniaturization forms ceased to follow functions because – and this is a point which this chronicle tries to document – forms did not follow functions before miniaturization either. They did not because the FFF-formula is a formula out of a metaphysical rather than a commonsense world. I believe that this mistaken view of the past status of the FFF-formula, which Bellini seems to represent, became one of confused starting points of the product semantics wave of the late 1980s, and early 1990s. For more on this point, cf. my review of two proceedings from a 1989 product semantics conference in Helsinki, in Michl 1992a. See also 1954 VAN DOREN & c1-2, for similar though more down-to-earth insights than those of Bellini, expressed 30 years earlier. For a more balanced description of the impact of the miniaturization on design, cf. Lloyd Jones 1991. •

1984 FRIEDLAENDER

Uri Friedlaender: SEMANTIC FORMULA

“The misinterpretations that followed the functionalist theories of Adolf Loos and Lois [sic] Sullivan are remarkable. How can we label the outrageous pile of rationally packaged, smooth-surfaced, split-lined boxes as functionally designed products? Yet we blithely quote Lois [sic] Sullivan's ‘form ever follows function‘ without thought to the passage only a few lines below: ‘All things in nature have a shape .. that tells us what they are.’ ”

Friedlaender, Uri. “An Historical Perspective on the New Wave in Design.” Innovation 3, no. 2/Spring (1984): 12-15.

COMMENTS TO 1984 FRIEDLAENDER

c1: Friedlaender joins the ranks of ‘misunderstandists’. For this notion, see 1924 SULLIVAN: c1.

c2: For a comment on the allegedly semantical implications of of this belief, see 1966 NORBERG-SCHULZ: c1, and also 1938 ULRICH: c3; 1954 VAN DOREN: c1; 1990 KRIPPENDORF: c1. •

1984 ZEISEL

Eva Zeisel: FORM DOES NOT FOLLOW FUNCTION

“Designers must also learn to make the best use of the limitations imposed by manufacturing, merchandising, or functional requirements. In designing for production there are always many so called limitations – conditions which contradict one another. For instance, a very beautiful design might deform in the kiln. Price limitations might interfere with functional or aesthetic claims. By perceiving each instance that offers a choice, each fork in the road, as an opening for a new path, the designer can use ‘limitations’ to give him new ideas. More important, the designer must understand that form does not follow function, nor does form follow a production process. For every use and for every production process there are innumerable equally attractive possibilities.” (78)

Zeisel, Eva. “On Being Designer.” In Martin Eidelberg. Eva Zeisel: Designer For Industry, 73-104. Montréal: Le Château Dufresne, 1984.

COMMENTS TO 1984 ZEISEL

c1: Zeisel is one of very few designers who do not pay lip service to the conventional functionalist idea that outer forces determine form. She states unequivocally that manufacturing, and other processes, do not impose limitations in the sense of a definite formal solution. A similar, even more forceful because quantified formulation of such ‘indeterminacy’ position can be found in an article by the British designer Misha Black pubished in the 1970s: "In a not untypical [case] the designer may need to make nine important decisions during the development of a product. If there are twenty alternatives at each point of decision this produces, in the end, 512,000 million different design possibilities." (Black 1983: 204) •

1985 HANNA & HOLT

Anna Hanna & Steven Holt: FORM DOES FOLLOW FUNCTION BUT...

“Form does follow function but one of the things on the list of functions is pleasure; without it, you produce some pretty dreadful things.”

Anna Hanna and Steven Holt, “Bruce Burdick”. In: Industrial Design, March/April 1985: 41.

COMMENTS TO 1985 HANNA & HOLT

c1: Both authors seem to trust that the FFF-formula is feasible; in their view it only needs some improvement. On the ‘multifunctionalist’ idea of improving functionalism through adding non-utilitarian functions, see comment C2 to 1948 SAARINEN. •

1985 ANDREW

David S. Andrew: IN NATURE FUNCTION FOLLOWS FORM; IN CULTURE FORM FOLLOWS IDEAS

(1) “It can be argued that in nature function actually follows form, since the viability of any new mechanism is dependent upon its embodiment in an adequate physical form that is the product of random mutation.”(60)

(2) “Sullivan's [FFF-]formula is inadequate, however, in suggesting the solution to a far more difficult problem, namely, in what ways and by what means can [for example] a Supreme Court building suggest and embody the cherished libertarian and egalitarian principles the justices are sworn to uphold? How can the building articulate in an appropriate symbolic way a function that has nothing whatever to do with physical structure or materials? It is in such a case that the aesthetic of organic determinism falters, since there are no precedents for the symbolic communication of ethical convictions in the plant and animal kingdoms. Nature may originate new forms because new functions require them, but painstaking judicial deliberations are not among functions to be found in nature. (...) In any event, the efficacy of the aphorism [form follows function] in an architectural context was limited, I believe, by Sullivan's incomplete understanding of the true complexity and richness of the varied functions of architecture.” (67, 60)

Andrew, David S. Louis Sullivan and the Polemics of Modern Architecture: The Present against the Past. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1985.

COMMENTS TO 1985 ANDREW (1)

(1) c1: Andrew , just as 1972 JORDY (see) pointed out that the FFF-formula may not agree with the biologist’s explanation of functional adaptations in nature, and that, in fact, the reverse of what the formula claims may be a far better explanation.

(1) c2: Andrews drew attention to the perhaps gravest consequence of the functionalist design doctrine, its blackout of the institutional dimension of architecture, and with it, of the symbolic and other values attached to that dimension. This seemed to be the price for the functionalist redefinition of architecture and design as autonomous rather than ‘applied’ art.

COMMENTS TO 1985 ANDREW (2)

(2) c1:

1985 BAYLEY

Stephen Bayley: AN INTROVERTED PHILOSOPHY OF DESIGN

“Because the Functionalists’ understanding of form was determined by the construction and materials of the object rather than by its purpose, it was an introverted philosophy of design which made no reference to the use to which an object was to be put. The American architect Louis Sullivan, who said ‘form ever follows function’, took his inspiration from biological growth, not from any abstract principle.” (131)

Bayley, S., ed. The Conran Directory of Design. London: Octopus Conran, 1985.

COMMENTS TO 1985 BAYLEY

c1: Inspiration from biological growth? Bayley seems to perpetuate the claim that the FFF does have an analogy in nature and is derived from there; he at least does not suggests that this view is in conflict with the neo-darwinian position current at least since the 1940s; see 1972 JORDY: c2. Had Sullivan accepted Darwin’s theory of natural selection, he might have said: ‘It is my belief that each form contains and suggests its own function’, rather than: ‘It is my belief that each problem contains and suggests its own solution.” –– It seems to be safe to say that the FFF-formula has nothing to do with any biological principle per se; much rather it is a statement refering to the Platonic tenet, expressed among others by the Swedish mystic Swedenborg, that things of the real world correspond to things of the spiritual world. [?]

c2: Introverted. Bayley’s characteristics of the functionalist design doctrine as “an introverted philosophy of design” is rather fitting. The fact that the functionalist design theory was ‘introverted’, i.e. that it “made no reference to the use to which an object was to be put” was entirely logical from the perspective of the doctrine which postulated that the form was latently present in the problem itself. Other natural synonyms would be megalomaniac, uncommunicative, self-contained, narcissistic. •

1985 LANE

Barbara Miller Lane: BEHNE USED THE FFF-FORMULA IN 1925

"[Adolf Behne's book Der moderne Zweckbau published in 1925] traced the development of 'functional' and 'practical' architecture from progressive industrial and commercial building of the first two decades of the century through the recent work of Gropius, Mendelsohn, Mies van der Rohe, and similar designers in other countries, and described the German architects' work as the best application of Sullivan's dictum 'form follows function.'" (131)

Lane, Barbara Miller. Architecture and Politics in Germany, 1918-1945. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985 (1968).

COMMENTS TO 1985 LANE

c1: Lane appears to claim in this sentence that the FFF-formula was known and explicitly used by Behne already in the 1920s. Lane refers to pp. 33, 59, and 72 in the Zweckbau(cf. Behne 1964 in connection with the FFF-claim, but in the book there is in fact no reference to the formula. Behne does mention Sullivan, twice in fact, in one case using Arthur as his first name, which may suggest that he was not very familiar with the figure. In the new 1985 edition of her book Lane left the FFF- and Sullivan-related claim standing unchanged. Before the mid-1920s, when the book was being written, the formula was apparently known to and used by only a limited circle of Sullivan’s admirers in the United States; it is rather improbable that it would have found its way to Europe this early; had it been the case it would have probably been used in the German context since the mid-1920s. In seems, however, that it is only in 1932 (see 1932 REILLY) that the dictum appears for the first time in Europe, though without any explicit reference to Sullivan. See also comment to 1937 BEHRENDT. Cf. also Blatter’s intro to Behne 1996•

1985 McLEISH

Kenneth McLeish: In Kindergarten Chats

"Sullivan's inventive genius is overpraised. His fame, fanned by his polemical writings such as Kindergarten Chats (1902), in which the catchphrase 'form follows function' first appeared, and enthusiastically endorset by his disciple Wright, rapidly eclipsed that even of his partner Adler." (37) @

McLeish, Kenneth. The Penguin Companion to the Arts in the Twentieth Century. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986 (1985)

COMMENTS TO 1985 RUDD

c1: Not in Kindergarten Chats. It was in “The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered” of 1896. (....)

c2: Enthusiasticaly endorset by Wright? Wright seems to have endorset the phrase only after Sullivan death, perhaps as late as 1930s.

•

1985 RUDD

J. William Rudd: DRAWN FROM GREENOUGH

"In giving architectural expression to function, [311]Sullivan and Wright related form and function in subtly different but very important ways. For Sullivan the relationship was causal with function serving to influence form. Hence, the oft-repeated dictum drawn from Greenough: 'Form follows function.' For Wright the relationship was conditional with function and form interacting in search of their fullest integration. Hence, the search for an architecture wherein 'form and function are one.' –– This difference is exemplified in their buldings in the relationship between experience and image. The loftiness Sullivan advocated in 'Tall Office Building Artistically Considered' represents a viewpoint dominated by the foreground object. Wright's 'sense-of-shelter' represents a viewpoint celebrating sequentiality of movement dominated by space to be experienced. However, in either interpretation, the user ultimately benefits from a respect for his pragmatic needs (both instrumentally and symbolically) being accomodated in the arrangement and composition of the building." (310-311)

Rudd, J. Williams. “Sullivan, Wright and an American Organic.” Design Methods and Theories 19, no. 3 (1985): 289-318.

COMMENTS TO 1985 RUDD

c1: From Greenough.

c2: “Form and function are one.” •

1986 BANHAM

Reyner Banham: BELIEVED AND APPLIED AT A LEVEL OF SYMBOLISM

“.. if Louis Sullivan’s proposition that 'form follows function' had been pursued objectively and resolutely, there would be no way in which a design school could look like a factory, or an apartment block in Paris could resemble an automobile plant in the Detroit suburbs. These doctrines and dictums, it now seems clear, were sincerely believed and honestly applied, but at the level of symbolism or (perhaps more accurately) as a form of allegory. –– The appearance of industrial resemblances in nonindustrial buildings was construed, rather, as a promise that these buildings would be as functionally honest, structurally economical and, above all, as up-to-the-minute as any of the American factories that Le Corbusier hailed as ‘the first fruits of the New Age.’” (7)

Banham, Reyner. A Concrete Atlantis: U.S. Industrial Building and European Modern Architecture 1900-1925. Cambridge, Mass.: 1986.

COMMENTS TO 1986 BANHAM

c1: Could the FFF-formula have been pursued resolutely and objectively? Banham’s view that “had [the FFF-formula] been pursued objectively and resolutely, there would be no way in which a design school could look like a factory, or an apartment block in Paris could resemble an automobile plant in the Detroit suburbs” can be understood as simply saying that the mentioned buildings were not results of forms following functions. But as it stands the formulation begs a question as Banham seems to suggest that the modernist architects really wanted – had they pursued the formula “objectively and resolutely” – there could have been an modernist architecture whose appearance was only symbolically functional, but, somehow, really functional. The question in that case is: how could Banham, or anybody else, ever be sure that the buildings would look differently? The essence of the FFF-formula, the claim that there are ready-made formal solutions latently present inside the problems, implies a highly flamboyant claim, that the designer, in finding the latent forms, has attained some sort of direct access to the Intentions of the Maker of the Universe, so to speak. So unless Banham claims to be blessed with such an access himself, it is strictly speaking difficult to maintain that if the FFF-formula was truly observed, schools would not have looked like factories. The only proper comment, as to the question of pursuing the FFF-formula, would be, in my view, to say that the formula could be pursued neither objectively nor resolutely – because, simply, it couldn’t be pursued at all. The only thing which could be pursued – and indeed was pursued – were model designs of architects singled out as the best representatives of the functionalist design philosophy. For designers probably the great attraction of the FFF-formula was that whatever the designer who had embraced the formula did was per definition uncriticizable :depending on one’s persuasiveness and professional status amomg the peers,one could always insist that it was after all the Intention of the Superior Intelligence (whether presented in the countenance of Nature or History) that schools should look like factories and apartment blocks resemble automobile factories. Banham’s idea about objective and resolute pursuing of the formula is misconceived already at the level of a counterfactual statement because it is logically flawed: nobody can use properly something which is practically unusable in the first place. Banham’s earlier judgement on the FFF-formula, when he insisted (without elaborating) that the formula was an empty jingle (1960 BANHAM) is still a much better way to approach the formula, although such characteristic fails to explain, as already pointed out, why so many architects and designers found this handy summary of the functionalist doctrine so fascinating (our suggestion is that it was so eagerly embraced because it gave the designer a carte blanche; cf. Michl 1995).

c2: Can functionalism be deemed a symbolic (or allegoric) architecture? Also Banham’s proposition, that functionalist architecture and design should be read as a sort of symbolism, or allegory, raises two questions: (1) How can ‘an empty jingle’ can ever be “honestly [or otherwise] applied ... at a level of symbolism or ... as a form of allegory.”; 2) How can something which has never been intended to be perceived as allegory, be all the same interpreted as allegory? There is no doubt that architecture as symbol and allegory was exactly what functionalists wholeheartedly rejected. True, Banham does not suggest that functionalists intentionally aimed at producing an symbolic/allegoric architecture. But could they be said to have produced such kind of architecture unintentionally? There is no doubt that the notion of symbol – in contrast to the notion of allegory – can be seen also as something produced unintentionally. But if we see functionalism as an unintentionally symbolic architecture (which is what Banham appears to propose), then there seems to be hardly any difference between this allegedly new, Banhamian interpretation, and the traditional functionalist self-understanding where their architecture and design is seen as an expression of their own epoch. The interpretation of functionalism as a symbolic architecture seems to subscribe to functionalist own self-understanding. –– The idea that functionalism can be interpreted as symbolism was launched in Banham’s seminal book Theory and Design in the First Machine Age of 1960 and influenced many writers on modern architecture as a ‘post-functionalist’ way of understanding the functionalist architecture and design ; cf. Jordy 1963; Jordy 1972; Kallmann 1963; see also 1993 PALLASMAA. But was it perhaps Lewis Mumford who first aired the idea of modernism as symbolic architecture (in Mumford 1952: 121-122)? For other points concerning the interpretation of functionalism as symbolism, see ... •

1986 FORTY

Adrian Forty: SAME USE TO RESULT IN SAME FORM?

“To describe design as an activity that invariably disguises or changes the shape of what we take to be reality runs contrary to many present-day platitudes about design, in particular the belief that the appearance of a product should be a direct expression of the purpose for which it is used, a view embodied in the aphorism 'Form Follows Function'. The logic of this argument is that all objects with the same use should look the same, but this is patently not the case, as a glance at, say, the history of ceramics will show: cups have been produced in an endless variety of designs. If the only purpose of a cup was to drink from, there might well be only one design, but cups do have other uses: as articles of commerce, they serve to create wealth and to satisfy consumers' craving to express their sense of individuality, and it is from the conjunction of such purposes that the variety of designs results.” (12)

Forty, Adrian. Objects of Desire: Design and Society 1750-1980. London: Thames and Hudson, 1986.

COMMENTS TO 1986 FORTY

c1: A present day platitude? FFF is no doubt a platitude as far as explanation of form in design is concerned. But for designers, as distinct from design historians, the FFF-formula has never been a 'platitude about design' considering that it has for at least two generations been perceived as a central statement of functionalism in architecture and design. It is important to remember that it was not launched as an explanatory device for art or design historians (for representatives of such view, see 1953 GOMBRICH: c1; 1962 GIEDION: c1; 1962 JANSON: c1; 1972 JORDY: c1; 1976 GOMBRICH: c1; 1982 JANSON: c2; 1986 SCHMALRIEDE; 1993 LAMBERT: c2) but as a design imperative for practicing designers. One of the task of design history/theory is to elucidate why this formula which Reyner Banham characterizes as ‘empty jingle’ (see 1960 BANHAM) was all the same taken seriously by untold numbers of modernist designers, why it still lingers on (see 1984 FRIEDLAENDER; 1989 ADAMS; 1993 MÄNTY; 1993 PALLASMAA,, and also Hein 1985; Lampugnani 1992; Lea 1982; McCoy 1984; Rogers 1989, and also how it came about that FFF launched as a design imperative happened to be understood as an explanatory principle.

c2:One purpose – one form? Forty seems to mean seriously that “If the only purpose of a cup was to drink from, there might well be only one design”. But even purpose of holding liquid can itself be solved in very many different ways; cf. Tjalve 1979 and Black 1983 quoted in 1984 ZEISEL: c1.

c3: Forty identifies as a matter of course function in FFF with purpose. Then Form Follows Function is for him the same as Form Follows Purpose. But the trouble with 'purpose' is that it betrays – contrary to the notion of 'function' which seems to be something independent of our wishes – that purposes are always purposes of men, and as such they depend on their whims; consequently the forms that follow purposes follow these whims as well (unless of course we by purposes really mean Purposes – i.e. intentions of a Superior Intelligence; see 1924 SULLIVAN: c3; 1953 GOMBRICH: c1; 1986 BANHAM: c1. •

1986 LAMBERT & MURDOCH

Susan Lambert and John Murdoch: CLICHÉ

“ ‘Form follows function’, the cliché framed by Louis Sullivan, the Chicago architect, in 1901 and the maxim ‘truth to materials’ are slogans that have popularized twentieth century design theory.” (207)

Lambert, Susan, and John Murdoch. “From to-day 'modernism' is dead! Functionalism as style?” In The V&A Album, 206-16. London: The Associates of the V&A, 1986.

COMMENTS TO 1986 LAMBERT & MURDOCH

c1: Not 1901. The proper year is 1896. Both of these ideas were analysed – and found light – by David Pye (Pye 1968; Pye 1978), but he is not mentioned. •

1986 LARSEN

Svend Erik Larsen: NO SEMANTIC AUTOMATISM

“Er Campusbyggeriet [Odense Universitet] funktionalisme i renkultur? Er det en funktionalistisk misforståelse? Er det funktionalismens afløser? To synsspunkter afslører i hvert fald, at det ikke lever op til funktionalismens program om, at funktionen er umiddelbart indlysende for beskueren: form følger funktion. Det ene blev leveret af en gæsteforelæser der spontant udbrød: 'Er det et universitet, eller er det Vestre Fængsel?' En anden kommentar viser lidt mere spidsfindigt, at formen ikke umiddelbart følger funktionen. Når Søren Mørch kalder et foredrag 'Odense Universitets bygning som monument', er betegnelsen 'monument' en hårdere kritik end nok så mange hånsord om nålefilt og ionbalancer. For var det noget, funktionalistene skyede, så var det monumentet som begreb: det selvberoende produkt hvis funktion er selve tilstedeværelsen og dennes symbolkarakter.” (306-7)

Larsen, Svend Erik. “Funktionalismennesket [sic!] – streger til funktionalismens menneskebillede.” In Tema: Funktionalisme, red. Jørn Guldberg. 291-312. Odense Universitetsforlaget, 1986.

COMMENTS TO 1986 LARSEN

c1: Larsen points out that the FFF-formula claims not only that (1) form can be determined by function in the sense that there is only one solution, and consequently only one form, possible, but also that (2) the function of such intrinsic form is comprehensible for the viewer. This second point, a kind of ‘metaphysical’ semantics, was repeatedly stressed by American functionalists such as Greenough, Sullivan and Wright. On the notion of sematic automatism, see 1966 NORBERG-SCHULZ: c1; 1938 ULRICH: c3; 1984 FRIEDLANDER. On the attempt to interpret functionalism as a symbolism of sorts, see 1986 BANHAM. •

1986 RYBCZYNSKI

Witold Rybczynski: A SLOGAN – NOT A RULE

“The statement that ‘form follows function’ ... has been quoted so often that it is easy to forget that it was a slogan and not a rule. It had demonstrably not been true during the nineteenth century. The Victorians, who were, after all, great engineers, and who were first to glorify the idea of progress, never felt the need to develop what might be called an engineering aesthetic. The interiors of steamships, trains, and tramways – extraordinary inventions – always took comfortingly familiar forms.” (173-4)

Rybczynski, W. Home: A Short History of an Idea. London: Heinemann, 1986.

COMMENTS TO 1986 RYBCZYNSKI

c1: FFF was a recipe for generating authentic forms, not a description of mainstream human artefacts. Rybczinski developed a warm and persuasive defence of home in non-functionalist, or anti-functionalist terms, and his book belongs to the most persuasive anti-functionalist positions in recent years. But his pointing out that in the 19th century the FFF-formula did not apply as description of 19th century’s artefacts is hardly any argument against functionalism. In the eyes of functionalists this would not be an argument against the formula, but an argument against the artefacts of the 19th century: the functionalists would probably have retorted that the ‘comfortingly familiar forms’ were a masquerade of the aesthetic truth which functionalism came to reveal.

c2: “ ... he walked behind.” It is not entirely clear though what Rybczinski really means by saying that the formula was only a ‘slogan’ but not a ‘rule’; if he means that the formula was not practiced as a rule (it did not rule), it sounds as if he suggests it was a feasible rule all the same. Our position is that the formula as a rule was not practcable in any definite manner since the notion of function was really a carte blanche: on closer inspection it turned out that there was nothing definite to follow (see Introduction, ch. X, and Michl 1995). To put it in a somewhat facetious manner, the formula was as much help as the council of the ‘wise man’ from Leonard Cohen’s song “Teachers” where Cohen sings: “I met a man who lost his mind / In some place I had to find; / ‘Follow me,’ the wise man said / But he walked behind.”(cf. Vinson 1969: 82) •

1986 SPARKE

Penny Sparke: ECHOED GREENOUGH’S IDEAS EXACTLY

(1) “It was on the basis of ideas expressed in the sculptor, Horatio Greenough's book “Form and Function” – first published in the USA in the first half of the nineteenth century – that the theory of architectural Functionalism emerged in the early twentieth century. Greenough defined it as a principle which meant designing a building from the inside outward, and letting the essential structure dictate the form and therefore its external appearance. In his book he praises the work of American engineers in the design of ships, machines and bridges, and is critical of architecture with false façades. His ideas remained the basis of Functionalist thinking right up until the 1930s and the phrase 'Form follows Function', borrowed from the American architect Louis Sullivan at the turn of the century, echoed Greenough's ideas exactly. Functionalism became the dominant design philosophy and language of the first half of this century, interchangeable stylistically with the 'Machine Aesthetic'. (17, n. 6)

(2) “The US industrial designers, who were responsible for styling the new products, were all committed, at least in their writings, to the purist ideas about form established in Europe. The leading member of this group, W. D. Teague, expressed his emotional debt to the European movement when he wrote in his book of 1940, Design This Day, that ‘Factories of steel and glass are buildings in forms that are triumphs of rational planning and of the sense of the objective of industry’. The US designers lacked, however, the political and social idealism that inspired their European counterparts and soon their slogan ‘styling follows sales’ had replaced the more purist ‘form follows function’, and the machine aesthetic had been transformed from a philosophy into a marketing device.” (49)

(3) “Paul Clark’s ephemera (...) epitomized the 1960s’ interest in surface motifs, in this case, flags and bull-eyes, which were applied to a whole range of objects, regardless of their function. Thus the Modern Movement theory of ‘form follows function’ was ignored and replaced by a new emphasis on fun and expendability.” (120)

Penny Sparke. An Introduction to Design and Culture in the Twentieth Century. London: Routledge, 1995 (1986).

COMMENTS TO 1995 SPARKE

(1) c1: Not Form and Function. The misinformation about Greenough's book allegedly named Form and Function having been published in the first half of the 19th century may have come from Dennis Sharp's ‘Introduction’ to the 1975 anthology Form and Function (p. xxii) where Sharp wrote: “Greenough’s remarks on architecture and art, published in 1852 under the title Form and Function (...)”. The book with the above title, however, was an anthology of Greenough’s writings edited by Harold A. Small and published some hundred years later, in 1947 and with a subtitle Remarks on Art, Design, and Architecture by Horatio Greenough (Greenough 1962; see also 1947 LORAN). Incidentally, Greenough seems to have become a canonical part of the mainstream American literature on modern architecture only with Behrendt’s book of 1937 where he was given a one and a half-page presentation; cf. Behrendt 1937: 116-117; see also 1843 GREENOUGH: c2, and 1937 BEHRENDT. •

(1) c2: Via Sullivan. Sparke does not attribute the authorship of the FFF-formula to Greenough as many others do; she formulates the relation between Greenough and Sullivan in an elegant manner stating that Sullivan’s FFF-formula “echoed Greenough’s ideas exactly”. It should be added, though, that there is only circumstancial kind of evidence based on inference rather than hard historical facts, that Sullivan was familiar with Greenough’s ideas, and that he based his design philosophy on them (see e.g. 1952 MUMFORD). Sullivan does not mention, or refer to Greenough in his writings, and his biographers consider it at best probable that Sullivan knew Greenough’s essays [?CHECK!]. It is therefore misleading to suggest, as Sparke does, that “It was on the basis of ideas expressed [by] Horatio Greenough ... that the theory of architectural Functionalism emerged in the early twentieth century.” and that “[Greenough’s] ideas remained the basis of Functionalist thinking right up until the 1930s .. ..” Greenough’s name, and his theories, as suggested in c1 above, became a part of modernist consciousness as late as 1930s (probably late 1930s at that), i.e. some 80 years after his death. One thing appears at any rate certain: Greenough had no direct influence on the modernist design theory in the sense that Sullivan ideas had. It is, however, probable that Sullivan did know Greenough’s essays, and if that was the case, then, via Sullivan, Greeenough’s ideas did remain, as Sparke puts it, the basis of functionalist thinking – not only up to the 1930s, but in the neo-functionalist guise, right up until the present. For some recent neo-functionalist positions, see 1884 FRIEDLAENDER; 1989 ADAMS; 1993 PALLASMAA; cf. also Mänty 1983, McCoy 1984, and more loosely, Hein 1985 and Lampugnani 1992.)

1987 ROWE

Peter G. Rowe: THE GUIDING DOCTRINE

“Four positions, or classes of positions, have been chosen, but only for purposes of illustration. (...) The choice of positions reflects four strains of architectural thinking that are highly visible in contemporary theory and practice; but they have existed in the past, too, and will no doubt exist in the future. (...) The orientation of the functionalist position may be described in the following way. Architecture is a matter of accommodating the functions that are prescribed for it and of functioning in a manner that is consistent with its material composition and construction. 'Form follows function' is the guiding doctrine on both matters of use and building technology. Architecture must be made of the 'right stuff' and in the 'right way' without superfluous ornament or artifice. It must also work efficiently, in the sense of directly conforming to some ideal of use requirements; it must, as Le Corbusier put it, be a 'machine to live in,' with all the parsimonious aspects of machine design ... . The specific architectural devices of the position are numerous and varied. Often, however, explicit expression of a building's essential structure and process of fabrication are hallmarks. Spatial organization invariably grows out of the program of uses, in a straightforward manner (Herdeg 1983).” (124-5)

Rowe, Peter G. Design Thinking. Cambridge, Mass., London, England: The MIT Press, 1987.

COMMENTS TO 1987 ROWE

c1: Was functionalism a utilitarian position? Rowe does not comment on the fact that the ‘functionalist position’ as he describes it includes at the same time aesthetic norms (“Architecture must be made ... without superfluous ornament or artifice”.) If utilitarian functioning was the only important thing, why would functionalists bother about superfluous ornaments when ornaments usually neither detract from nor add to utility of a building or an artefact? The fact that normative aesthetic positions were a central part of functionalism suggest that the FFF-formula was an aesthetic, not utilitarian doctrine, and that functionalism has to be seen as an aesthetic fashion in architecture rather than as a non-aesthetic principle in architecture. •

1988 HAYS:

K. Michael Hays: FUNCTION AS A POSSIBILITY OF FORM

“Hilberseimer's drawing demonstrates peremptorily that form can only follow function when function has first been interpreted as a possibility of form.” (177)

Hays, K. M. “Reproduction and Negation: The Cognitive Project of the Avantgarde.” In Architectureproduction, ed. Beatriz Colomina. 153-179. Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press, 1988.

COMMENTS TO 1988 HAYS

c1: (a) Hays’ formulation seems to be a paraphrase of a statement by the American architect and theorist Jeff Kipnis (whom Hays does not refer to): “Form cannot follow function until function (including but not limited to use) has first emerged as a possibility of form,” quoted by Eisenman 1985: 197, n. 7; cf also 199?KIPNIS). Translated into plain language both statements seem to suggest that form can in fact never follow function – that form can only follow form: function can ‘emerge’, or can be ‘interpreted’, as a possibility of form only where there is a form to begin with. One, of course, does not know what the authors mean by words such as ‘emerge’ or ‘interpreted’: it sounds though as if ‘function’ was considered to be there prior to form, and was only modified by the ‘possibilities of form’. Anyway, if form is there to begin with, there is no need for it to follow function. Result: if function is something that ‘has to be first interpreted as a possibility of form’, it means that form precedes function; consequently it cannot follow function. In other words, function follows form. Whether this is or is not what Hayes has in mind, is uncertain; cf. the comments on Kipnis’s similar formulation beow, under 199? KIPNIS: c1.

c1:(b) Hays, in the tradition of the Frankfurt School, tends to see functionalism as a sort of utilitarianism or rationalism, rather than as utilitarianism-style, or rationalism-style, i.e. as an aesthetic phenomenon. For the ‘Frankfurtian’ interpretation of functionalism, cf. Berndt, Lorenzer, and Horn 1968; for a cogent critique of this interpretation, cf. Posener 1976. •

1988 SCHMALRIEDE

Manfred Schmalriede: APPLIES TO TECHNICAL INSTRUMENTS

“If design really has anything to do with the laconic formula ‘form follows function’, then it certainly applies to technical instruments.” (“Wenn Design tatsächlich etwas mit der verkurzten Formel ‘Form folgt der Funktion’ zu tun haben sollte, dann trifft sie auf technisches Gerst zu.”(14)

Schmalriede, Manfred. “The Meaning of Objects is Dictated by the Way People Relate to Them (Die Bedeutung der Objekte wird bestimmt durch die Art, wie der Mensch die Beziehungen zu ihnen gestaltet).” In Design in Europa, 12-23. Stuttgart: Design Center, 1988.

COMMENTS TO 1986 SCHMALRIEDE

c1:The FFF-formula is seen anno 1988 as a viable of explanation of the form of technical instruments. For an empirical critique of such technological determinism in design, cf. Grinten 1960. 1993 LAMBERT argues against such view, but fails to make clear that FFF-formula was launched as a design principle – not an explanation principle. For use of the FFF-formula in art history, see 1976 GOMBRICH: c1, 1982 JANSON: c2. •

1989 ADAMS

David Adams: BOTH FOLLOW BOTH

“To the extent that build form can ... influence human function, the credo of modern design comes around full circle. ‘Function follows form’ because ‘form followed function.’ The two expressions may then be understood as an interdependent polarity, two complementary aspects of one fundamental reality. Buildings designed from such an understanding will also find again, in a more essential and also more modern way, their harmonious relationship with the natural world.” (19)

Adams, David. “Form Follows Function: The Hidden Relationship Between Architecture and Nature.” Towards (Carmichael, Ca. ISSN 0732-1686) II (Winter, 1989): 10-19, 40.

COMMENTS TO 1989 ADAMS

c1: Adams is guilty of the usual mistake of treating the word function as if it was as unproblematic and everyday a word such as ‘spoon’ or ‘coin’ or ‘chair’, and as if everybody was in agreement on its meaning. Therefore, and in keeping with the functionalist usage, he does not distinguish between ‘function’ of an object already created, i.e. the actual functioning, and ‘function’ of an object to be created, i.e. an intended functioning (more on this distinction in the Introduction, above, and in Michl 1995). Besides, Adams claims as a matter of course that forms in nature follow ‘functions’ as uses as his witness, paradoxically, Gould 1986, who is a well-known opponent of functionalist interpretation of adaptations in nature. The article represents a neo-functionalist trend which saves its credibility by resorting to the metaphysical premises still apparent in the original functionalist philosophy of Greenough and Sullivan. The problem with this philosophy, then as now, has been that the alleged ‘hidden relationship between architecture and nature’ remains in the end as hidden as it was at the beginning. For all the critical value of metaphoric expressions such as ‘natural’ or ‘organic’, the key fact about buildings and products, which architects and designers have to learn to accept without grunting, is that buildings and products are artefacts, i.e. artificial, man-made objects. •

1990 DORMER

Peter Dormer: A STYLISTIC DOCTRINE

DORMER (1) “... modernism has had both a bad press and a misleading one. It is now fashionable to mock the form follows function argument which held that an honest design did not attempt to disguise what it did, how it worked and even what it was made from and how it was constructed. Such design philosophy was once held to be honest and democratic; and given the political context of its most formative period – perhaps 1914 to around 1930 – it was appropriate for socialist and revolutionary politics. After all, if the politics were in opposition to established mores, the aesthetics had to be in opposition also. – However, form follows function was only a style. The argument that modernist design took its cue from the logic of mass manufacturing was not true. If the dominant style of the objects and architecture produced by the old, non-socialist establishment had been plain and functional, then I am sure that the aesthetic riposte of the socialist or democratically inclined designers would have been towards elaboration, figuration and decoration. The point is that you can argue either style in both ways: both can be seen as oppressive, both can be seen as democratic. You can say that you are being honest about the object's role, or that you are bringing decoration and metaphor to the people. You can almost toss a coin.” (20)

COMMENTS TO 1990 DORMER (1)

(1) c1: Dormer is one of the most forthright design critics on the British scene. He points to the role of the functionalist design doctrine within the socialist opposition politics without the usual apologetic airs. The insistence on doing the opposite of what was liked was discussed earlier in the seminal essay by Brent Brolin name Flight of Fancy , cf. Brolin 1985. •

DORMER (2) “Pye punctures received opinions. In The Nature and Aesthetics of Design, he cuts open an embarrassing contradiction in the rubric of ‘form follows function’ ( a rubric that still has an emotional appeal).(...) He argues (a) that the ability of our devices to work and give results depends much less exactly on their shape than we think (even a pair of identical ball bearings differ from one another and each is not, in any case, spherical); and (b) that all our devices are prone to function in ways that we do not want. Car tires wear out, table tops get scratched, knives loose their edge, aircrafts crash.” (145-46)

Dormer, Peter. The Meanings of Modern Design: Towards the Twenty-First Century. London: Thames and Hudson, 1990.

COMMENTS TO 1990 DORMER (2)

(2) c1: Dormer is the second design writer, apart from 1979 FERGUSON, who is clearly aware of David Pye’s key contribution to dispelling the confusion remaining after the functionalist design doctrine. •

1990 KRIPPENDORFF

Klaus Krippendorff: OLD PARADIGM

“One of the points of the philosophy underlying product semantics:"Old Paradigm: Design is making forms to follow required functions. New Paradigm: Design is enabling users to make sense of things”

Krippendorff, Klaus. “Product Semantics; A Triangulation and Four Design Theories.” In Product Semantics '89, ed. Seppo Väkevä. a1-a23. Helsinki: University of Industrial Arts UIAH A4, 1990.

COMMENTS TO 1990 KRIPPENDORF

c1: How come the ‘old paradigm’ did not deliver? Klaus Krippendorff, one of design theorists behind the American attempt at amelioration of the modernist design doctrine in the late 1980s and early 1990s, known as doctrine of product semantics, suggested that designers should aim at enabling users to make sense of things instead of keeping to the old paradigm, i.e. that of ‘“making forms to follow required functions”. Now, there are at least three senses in which it is possible to claim that FFF-formula did work as a paradigm: (1) it can be said that the modernists did pay lip service to the formula; (2) it can be said that the FFF-formula functioned as a paradigm also in the sense that modernists by and large believed that the formula (or rather the philosophy behind it) would produce the ‘functional’ forms. But was FFF-formula a design paradigm also in the third sense, i.e. in the sense that (3) this formula in fact produced the ‘functional’ forms, i.e. the recognizable design aesthetic of functionalism? The answer here must be clear no: the functionalist forms were result of mimicking the industrial vernacular and/or of employing the abstract aesthetic developed outside architecture proper, in abstract painting and sculpture (cf. Banham 1986; Hitchcock 1948; Jackson 1991; Jackson 1994; Michl 1996; Venturi and Scott Brown 1984). Krippendorf on his part does not make clear in what sense he believes the FFF-formula functioned as a paradigm; it seems, though, that he, just as 1984 BELLINI believes that in the past the the functionalist forms really ‘followed functions’. If that is the case, it is strange that Krippendorf wants to replace ‘the old paradigm’ (i.e. the FFF-formula). He obviously suggests that as long as it functioned as the ‘old paradigm’ (whatever that meant practically) it failed to enable users ‘to make sense of things’; i.e. it failed to infuse products with meaning. However, the promise the functionalist doctrine in general and the FFF-formula in particular, was a promise of what we called ‘sematic automatism’: observing the formula would now produce objects which would look like what they are, and be what they look like. Krippendorf did not suggest, why the promise pertaining to the practice of the FFF-formula did not materialize, nor did he suggest in what way the purpose of his ‘new paradigm’ differed from the purpose of the ‘old paradigm’. The exceeding ambiguity at such points made the project of the design semantics ambiguous too; on this problem, cf. Michl 1992a. See also 1843... GREENOUGH (11); see 1966 NORBERG-SCHULZ: c1, and also 1938 ULRICH: c3; 1954 VAN DOREN: c1; 1984 FRIEDLANDER: c2.•

1990 PERIÄINEN

Tapio Periäinen: THE BASIC PRINCIPLE OF PEASANT OBJECTS

“At the turn of the century the roots of Finnish culture were searched for in Eastern Finland and Carelia. The Jugend (Art Nouveau) style liberated European art from eclectic styles at a convenient moment. In Finland it created opportunity for applying the country’s own flora and fauna and natural materials (...). The next milestone was functionalism. It appeared during the first decade of Finnish independence, which was achieved in 1917. The newly formed State needed official and social edifices, objects and symbols. A part was constructed according to the form school of neo-classicism, simplified in a Finnish manner. However, functionalism became the internationally best known form language of the visual identity of the new State. –– The basic principle of functionalism, ‘form follows function’, is the same as for peasant objects, the form of which was shaped for centuries according to the needs of practical use. This explains the naturalness of functionalist aesthetics, both in architecture and design, developing precisely in Finland.”

Periäinen, Tapio. Soul in Design: Finland as an Example. Helsinki: Kirjaytymä, 1990.

COMMENTS TO 1990 PERIÄINEN

c1: Promotion of abstract aesthetics. Periäinen seems to share the orthodox functionalist view that functionalism was a design approach with no particular aesthetic interests. Consequently, he accepts the functionalist claim that the functionalist architecture and design aesthetic was a result of forms following functions. It is unclear, though, whether he suggests that the functionalist aesthetic as such is an example of naturalness, or whether functionalism in Finland was perceived as ‘natural’ due to long local traditions of peasant object-making. Periäinen’s suggestion that forms of peasant objects and forms of Finnish functionalist objects have common roots in the same approach to design, should probably be understood as a promotional statement related to marketing of Finnish design. To say that “The basic principle of functionalism, ‘form follows function’, is the same as for peasant objects” seems to ignore the massive re-assessment of the functionalist thinking of the previous 30 years (cf. Asplund 1980; Blake 1977b; Brolin 1976; Collins 1967; Herdeg 1983; Jencks 1980; Mumford 1964; Norberg-Schulz 1977; Pye 1978; Watkin 1977; Wolfe 1981). Periäinen’s formulation suggest that even as late as 1990 the FFF-formula was still considered an effective advertising slogan for the modernist abstract aesthetics. See the notion of ‘promotionese’ in 1994 CHOATE: c1. •

1990 PILE

John Pile: A QUOTATION FROM GREENOUGH

“The phrase ‘form follows function,’ which [Sullivan] often used was not, in fact, original with Sullivan, but rather a quotation from the earlier 19th century sculptor and writer-critic Horatio Greenough. The phrase has, nevertheless, come to characterize the original contribution of Sullivan’s work. (...) [Greenough’s] book The Travels, Observations and Experiences of a Yankee Stonecutter included the famous concept ‘form follows function’ and offered, in support of this theory, such examples as the American clipper ship, an object of great beauty developed solely through pursuit of practical objectives.” (256, 106)

Pile, John. Dictionary of 20th Century Design [entries ‘Sullivan’ and ‘Greenough’]. New York Oxford Sydney: Facts On File, 1990.

COMMENTS TO 1990 PILE

c1: Not often. Contrary to Pile’s suggestion, Sullivan in fact did not use the FFF-formula often but rather seldom; three times in his 1896 article, some five times or so in” The Kindergarten Chats” of 1901-1902, and twice in his Autobiography....after our approximate count.

c2: From Greenough? In his entry on Sullivan, Pile claims that the FFF-formula was a quotation from Greenough, but as all writers before (or after) him who suggested the same, he leaves the claim undocumented. In his entry on Greenough, however, Pile downgrades the ‘quotation’ to ‘concept’ only: Greenough’s book The Travels, Observations and Experiences of a Yankee Stonecutter allegedly “included the famous concept ‘form follows function’”So perhaps Pile does not mean by quotation really a quotation but rather ideas, notions, convictions, opinions. In that sense he is no doubt right. Still it has not been documented in any hard-boiled way that Sullivan really knew Greenough’s essays, although it is more than probable. See 1896 SULLIVAN (1-2): c3; and 1986 SPARKE.•

1991 HOUSE

Nancy House: ASSOCIATED WITH BAUHAUS

“‘Form follows function’ is the phrase associated with the designs of the Bauhaus and later the Hochschule fur Gestaltung at Ulm, West Germany, which was considered the New Bauhaus. [Gaetano]Pesce worked there in 1961, and was acquainted with their design theories. They adhered to the esthetic of functionalism, with designs which served a purpose in a direct manner without ornamentation, and which could be mass-produced for the mass populace. – Pesce agrees that a piece of furniture serves a function and so has an inherent form. However he moves beyond this.” ” (865)

House, Nancy. “Gaetano Pesce (1939-) Up-1 chair, 1959..” In Contemporary Masterworks, edited by Colin Naylor. London: St James Press, 1992.

COMMENTS TO 1992 HOUSE

c1: FFF-formula unknown in Europe in the 1920s. There is no evidence known to me suggesting that during the Bauhaus existence the formula was known in Germany (despite Barbara Miller Lane’s claim; see 1985 LANE. It seems to have surfaced in Europe only in the early 1930s (see 1932 REILLY) but at this time Bauhaus was practically moribund. Gropius does mention the formula, but only in 1934 while in london (see 1934 GROPIUS). It is not quite clear, though, whether House claims that the phrase itself was associated with Bauhaus (which seems to be highly improbable) or whether she means that the design doctrine which the phrase embodied was associated with Bauhaus (which was no doubt the case).

c2: Historians circumspect in comment on the formula. House, just as 1990 KRIPPENDORFF, uses formulations which seem to suggest that the FFF-formula was a feasible rule. If it really was then it could perhaps be justifiable to say that Gaetano Pesce moved ‘beyond this’. But if the formula was never feasible, Pesce would be more properly said to have left the functionalist aesthetics rather than to have moved beyond a principle which never worked. House’s somewhat circumspect way of approaching the FFF-formula suggest that there is even among design historians no clear consensus as to the status of the formula. •

1991 JACKSON

Nancy Jackson: PRIMACY OF FUNCTION

1991 JACKSON (1) “The Modern Movement emphasised the primacy of function, and the need for form to follow function. The New Look introduced the idea that function need not be threatened by a more adventurous expression of form, and indeed that an object’s function extends beyond the parameters of its measurable usefulness. As the ceramic designer, Eva Zeisel, argued: ‘the designer must understand that form does not follow function, nor does form follow a production process. For every use and for every production process there are innumerable equally attractive possibilities.’” (21, 23)

COMMENTS TO 1991 JACKSON (1)

(1) c1: Abstract art the source. Jackson’s book documents for the first time in a matter-of -factly fashion (i.e. no longer in the apologetic manner of Hitchcock 1948) that the 1950s design and applied art aesthetic was based on an aesthetic developed outside the area of design and applied art itself, namely in the contemporary abstract painting and sculpture (see also 1974 ALLSOPP &c1). She does not comment though on the fact that the critique of functionalism launched by Hitchcock and Johnson 1932 and their legitimation of use of contemporary abstract art in architecture in the 1930s and 1940s prepared the 1950s’ embracement of the contemporary abstract art; cf. Michl 1996.

(1) c2: Feasible or not? Jackson, too, just as 1990 KRIPPENDORFF and 1991 HOUSE, writes as if the methodology of the Modern Movement did work, and as if the ‘New Look’ period later changed the priorities. Even the quote from Eva Zeisel (for a fuller quote see 1984 ZEISEL) sounds in the context as if the claim that form does not follow function was a stylistic rationalization rather than a statement denying that the formula was ever feasible.

1991 JACKSON (2) “The engineers of the Modern Movement sought to embody the nature of an object in the shape dictated by the object’s usage. They thought they could achieve this in a totally objective way without adopting any style. With the hindsight it is quite clear that Modernism was itself an expression of a style, and that it is impossible to dissociate style from design; style can be minimized, but it cannot be denied altogether. The New Look acknowledged from the outset that it was the embodiment of a style, but asserted that to have a distinctive style was not in itself an obstacle to good design.” (23-24)

Jackson, Lesley. The New Look: Design in the Fifties. London: Thames and Hudson, 1991.

COMMENTS TO 1991 JACKSON (2)

(2) c1: Historians seem to be unwilling to state clearly that FFF-formula was a nonsense as far as the feasibility goes; see also 1991 HOUSE &c2. Compare this cautiousness with the clear-cut judgments issued by some designers such as 1938 BARNES & REINECKE, 1954 VAN DOREN, 1964 PYE, 1977 GOODMAN or 1984 PETROSKI. 1960 BANHAM seems to be the only historian who radically rejected the formula, though without explaining his reasons; 1986 FORTY belongs to the few historians who took a clear position on the subject. –– Jackson on her part leaves it to the reader’s own judgment whether it was possible or impossible ‘to embody the nature of an object in the shape dictated by the object’s usage’ instead of stating it plainly that this was an impossible aim. The way she puts it suggests that the only problem with the modernist aim was that modernists did not live up to their own principles, implying vaguely that the aim was feasible, that a styleless design is possible but that Modernists failed to achieve it.

c2: Does use dictate form? On closer look, the sentence quoted from 1991 JACKSON (2) turns out not make sense: logicaly speaking, shapes are not dictated, or influenced, or determined, or decided, or suggested, by the object’s usage, and never can be. From the designer’s perspective, objects are not results of use - on the contrary, objects make use possible. First the objects have to exist in order to be used, and for an object to exist implies having a shape. The first useful objects were not designed for use but, literally, found useful. The shape of utilitarian objects is then not a result of use but of re-design (unless we think of use as wear). So to suggest to the designer that shape be created by use sounds like suggesting to the coachman that the carriage be put before the horse. The object’s use can influence the shape only in the next round of design, i.e. during re-design (see 1992 PETROSKI & c1).But even then, just as before, shapes of objects is decided by more intelligent or less intelligent choices exercised by designers; such choices can be based on insight into the past usage failures. •

1991 O’GORMAN

James O’Gorman: WILL-O’-THE-WISP

1991 O’GORMAN (1) “Although ['The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered'] is probably the most lucid piece he ever wrote ..., and contains a ringing statement of that (by others) mindlessly repeated phrase ‘form follows function,’ Sullivan in this article – as in the Wainwright, the Guaranty, and other commercial structures – failed to achieve a clear integration of space, structure, and exterior expression. Nowhere in this contemporary piece do we find an explicit prescription for 'a realistic architecture based on well-defined utilitarian needs' that the architect, writing his Autobiography in the early 1920s, said he was looking for at the height of his career.” (96)

1991 O’GORMAN (2) “Sullivan, of course, was concerned here only with the facade of his office building; he relegated structure, light courts and elevator design and placement to the realm of purely utilitarian. And designing for utility was the least of his concerns. (...) Sullivan stated concern was that the external, artistic expression of the tall office building should reflect its internal spatial divisions and declare itself ‘tall, every inch of it tall.’ The function that its form should follow was poetically visual rather than prosaically utilitarian.” (98)

1991 O’GORMAN (3) “ His tutor in mathematics [M. Clopet] produced, according to Sullivan, demonstrations ‘so broad as to admit of NO EXCEPTION!!’ (Sullivan’s typography), an idea Sullivan thought could be applied to architecture as to geometry through the formula ‘form follows function.’ Although the elder Sullivan would have his readers believe that he had achieved his end ... his Autobiography scurries over his work in architecture, and for very good reason. As we have seen, he had not in fact achieved, either in his writings or his buildings, an inclusive solution to the articulation of the tall office building. (...) Ultimately, Sullivan’s achievement lacks focus because he lacked a precision of purpose. His unstable personality was matched by his lack of intellectual clarity. He failed in the end to find that law that admitted of no exceptions, that law that was a part of the idea he chased like a will-o’-the-wisp throughout a life that has risen to its apex in the Auditorium tower [sic: no comma] then plunged into an abyss of neglect and futility. But along the way he managed to combine the tradition of conventionalized ornament he encountered in Furness’s office with a creative reading of Richardson’s legacy, and through him flowed a continuity of achievement beginning with H. H. Richardson and ending with Frank Lloyd Wright. There seems no reason to revise Mumford’s assessment in Brown Decades that ‘Sullivan was the link between two great masters.’” (104, 106, 111)

O'Gorman, James. Three American Architects: Richardson, Sullivan, and Wright, 1865-1915. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991.

COMMENTS TO 1991 O’GORMAN (1-3)

c1: No longer a protected monument. O’Gorman’s section on Sullivan is the third among the newer matter-of-factly, myths-dispelling and unsentimental treatments of this carefully-conserved hero of modernism; cf. Andrew 1985; Menocal 1981; cf. also an earlier somewhat harsh view of Sullivan by Johnson 1956. O’Gorman (just as Menocal and Andrew) showed that Sullivan’s architectural interests were primarily aesthetical and formal, and that the FFF-formula was meant to generate aesthetic effects. Sullivan represented the artistic part of the Adler/Sullivan partnership, and art – not surprisingly – was upper on his mind.

c2: O’Gorman seems to limit his criticism of the FFF-formula itself to the claim that it was mindlessly repeated. But the titles given to his two chapters dealing with Sullivan, “Form Follows Precedent” (ch. 3) and “The Tall Office Building Inconsistently Considered” (ch. 4), give a gist the recent view of Sullivan’s work and contribution, some ninety odd years after he coined the formula. O’Gorman’s formulation Form Follows Precedent may be, together with Petroski’s Form Follows Failure, the most insightful reformulation of the formula to emerge so far since functionalism started to be questioned. •

1991 PEVSNER

Nikolaus Pevsner: A UTILITARIAN CREED

"Functionalism. The creed of the architect or designer who holds that it is his primary duty to see that a building or an object designed by him functions well. Whatever he wishes to convey aesthetically and emotionally must not interfere with the fitness of the building or the object to fulfil its purpose. Though best known through Sullivan's slogan 'Form follows Function' and the writings of Otto Wagner and Adolf Loos, Functionalism has a long history in aesthetic theory." [full entry] (169-170)

Pevsner, Nikolaus. “Functionalism.” In The Penguin Dictionary of Architecture, edited by John Fleming, Hugh Honour and Nikolaus Pevsner, 169-170. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991.

COMMENT TO 1991 PEVSNER

c1: A defensive definition? It was probably due to growing criticism of the functionalist doctrine (among others by his former student Reyner Banham; cf. Banham 1955; Banham 1960) that Pevsner’s definitions of the functionalist doctrine grew more and more defensive – and less and less intelligible. The above definition, published for the first time in 1966, was originally only the first two sentences long. For the fourth 1991 edition of the Dictionary(i.e. after Pevsner’s death) Fleming and Honour added the third sentence which, besides Sullivan’s FFF-formula, mentions also Wagner and Loos, and which was apparently meant to give the functionalism-definition a historical dimension so conspicuously missing from Pevsner’s original two sentences. But these historical hints seem to have made the functionalism-entry even more muddled. The FFF-formula, suggesting as it does that there is one form to be married to one function, makes hardly any room for designer’s formal choices; it makes therefore little sense to speak of the architect’s’ wishes to convey aesthetically or emotionally this or that (as Pevsner writes in the second sentence). Neither did the mention of Sullivan, Wagner or Loos elucidated the matter. On the contrary, both Sullivan, Wagner, and above all Loos, demanded much more than absence of interference with the fitness of buildings and objects. They hitched functionalism to a definite, anti-historicist aesthetic – just as Pevsner himself always did. So here we have a definition of functionalism written by its prime European apologist historian, and two sympathizing design historians, which is so incoherent that it makes functionalism an entirely incomprehensible phenomenon (on the notion of ‘apologist historian’, see 1952 CONDIT: c1). It is intersting to note in passing that also Sullivan himself, in 1924, at the very end of his life, chose to define his position in far more utilitarian terms than at the beginning (compare 1896 SULLIVAN with 1924 SULLIVAN, above). The probable reasons for this development in Sullivan was that he wanted to be seen by posterity as the father figure of the European functionalism which which was taking shape in the early 1920s and which defined itself outwardly in anti-artistic and utilitarian terms; while Pevsner’s utilitarian definition seems to be a result of the attempt to meet the recurring suspicion that functionalism was an helpless formalist movement, despite its name indicating the contrary. (For one of the earliest critiques of this kind from within the modernist camp itself, cf. Hermann Muthesius’ 1927 crtique of the Stuttgart Exhibition of 1927 at Wiesenhof in his article “Die neue Bauweise “, in Muthesius 1964.) For a similar tolerantly sounding definition of functionalism, cf. Pevsner’s 1963 Yale address, in Pevsner 1968a: 265. Still, Pevsner’s view suggested by his original definition quoted above is puzzling, in view of his vigorous defense of the modernist orthodoxy only a few years later, as presented in his article “The Return of Historicism” (Pevsner 1968b); see also 1961 PEVSNER.

c2: The only kind of functionalism that makes sense. The problem with Pevsner’s original sentences is that they define functionalism as a creed without any preconceived aesthetic position. As a description of the nature of a central phenomenon in history of the 20th century design the definition is wide of the mark, simply because it refers to a kind of functionalism that never existed: Functionalists, both in theory and in practice, assumed a militantly anti-historicist aesthetic attitude, unequivocally prefering a definite, i.e. technical, minimalist, less-is-more kind of forms. But still: though the definition is entirely unaccaptable as a description of the extant functionalist theories and buildings, Pevsner original two sentences are, in our view, the only kind of functionalism which is defensible as a program. If we really worry about the conflict between formal and utilitarian solutions, the feasible starting point for the discussion should be the position apparently implied in this Pevsnerian definition of functionalism, namely that aesthetic problems and functional problems (here functional stands for all the rest of other non-aesthetic) in a building or in a product, are two entirely different set of problems, different in kind, and by definition in conflict with each other. Only then can designers abandon the will’o the wisp of searching after the hidden, innate, harmonious-because-the-only-possible solutions which Pevsner, in agreement with the tenets of the functionalist design philosophy postulated in the 1930s, and which, being a hollow promise, lead to the modern formalist excesses. •

1992 PETROSKI

Henry Petroski: FORM FOLLOWS ... FAILURE

“This extended essay [i.e. Petroski’s book The Evolution of Useful Things] ... may be read as a refutation of the design dictum that ‘form follows function’ (...) the way our common tableware has developed to its present form is but a single example of a fundamental principle by which all made things come to look and function the way they do. That principle revolves about our perception of how existing things fail to do what we expect them to do as well and as conveniently and economically as we think they should or wish they would. In short they leave something to be desired. –– But whereas the shortcomings of an existing thing may be expressed in terms of a need for improvement, it its really want rather than need that drives the process of technological evolution. Thus we may need air and water, but generally we do not require air conditioning or ice water in any fundamental way. We may find food indispensable, but it is not necessary to eat it with fork. Luxury, rather than necessity, is the mother of invention. Every artifact is somewhat wanting in its function, and this is what drives its evolution. –– Here, then, is the central idea: the form of made things is always subject to change in response to their real or perceived shortcomings, their failures to function properly. This principle governs all invention, innovation and ingenuity; it is what drives all inventors, innovators and engineers. And there follows a corollary: Since nothing is perfect, and, indeed, since even our ideas of perfection are not static, everything is subject to change over time. There can be no such thing as a ‘perfected’ artifact; the future perfect can only be a tense, not a thing.” (x, 22)

Petroski, Henry. The Evolution of Useful Things. New York: Knopf, 1992.

COMMENTS TO 1992 PETROSKI

c1: Imperfection and failure as engines in the evolution of useful things. The American design theorist and engineering historian Henry Petroski’s books and articles are among the most remarkable recent attempts to develop a realistic design theory. Petroski represents a sceptical, post-functionalist position in design theory which starts from the fact that nothing can ever function perfectly. Those things that do work satisfactorily do so not because someone managed to fulfill their ‘function’ but because the thing was repeatedly seen as failing to function properly and therefore was repeatedly redesigned. Petroski is one of very few designers who, during the first hundred years of the FFF-formula’s existence, unequivocally rejected it as a nonsense. For others who brought forth powerful arguments rejecting the formula, see 1938 BARNES & REINECKE; 1954 VAN DOREN; 1964 PYE; and 1977 GOODMAN. On the claim that useful things are essentially imperfect, cf. also Pye 1978, and Michl 1991. For important developments in the recent 10 to 15 years towards a realistic theory of design in Europe, cf. Lundequist 1991; Lundequist 1992a; Lundequist 1992b) •

1992 REYNOLDS

Donald Martin Reynolds: SKYSCRAPERS FOLLOW A GUDING PRINCIPLE

“THE CHICAGO SCHOOL. The skyscraper in Chicago of the 1880s began to reflect its skeletal construction externally in the grid pattern of vertical supports and horizontal beams that Bogardus had pioneered in his cast-iron fronts in New York in the 1850s and that had migrated westward later in the century; consequently, the internal structure was seen to dictate the external form, a guiding principle expressed later as 'form follows function'. (...)” (67-68)

Reynolds, Donald Martin. Nineteenth-Century Architecture. Cambridge Introduction to Art, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

COMMENTS TO 1992 REYNOLDS

c1: SKYSCRAPERS The skyscrapers are treated in a strangely animistic fashion, as if they were sentient beings who have their own guiding principles (such as FFF), who have their internal structure dictate their the external forms, and who apparently employ architects (such as Bogardus) to work for them. Louis Sullivan and later also Louis Kahn were known for a similar way of writing about architecture. There seems to be a fine line dividing poetic language from a gravely obscurantist exercise. Imputing intentions to artefacts can be perhaps classified as an example of theory-denial typical for the functionalist ‘applied determinism’. For the notion of ‘theory-denial’, see under 1924 SULLIVAN: c2. •

1993 DORMER

Peter Dormer: ‘FALSE TRAIL’

“Architects ... were prone to ‘discovering’ the beauty of such structures as grain silos or warehouses, or the utilitarian design for bridges, tunnels, viaducts, mooring posts, sluice gates and lock systems that emerged in the 18th -century English canal system. Steam railways yielded another source of examples which show how buildings-for-use seemed to produce beauty as a by-product. -- One of the ironies, however, about a ‘form follows function leads to beauty’ argument, especially one based on the evidence of anonymous, utilitarian objects from the past, is elitism. When intelligent designers of the late 19th or early 20th century looked at the anonymous artefacts of 18th- and 19th-century industrialization, they saw great beauty in the simple, engineered structures, and set about trying to divine general causal principles between function and beauty. However, the artisans and engineers who designed and built the structures were ignored. It was assumed that function could determine its own aesthetic - and assumption that overlooked the contribution of the anonymous artisans. It was forgotten that beauty is the consequence of deliberate choices by individuals. -- Function does not necessarily lead to beauty: most of the urban freeways and motorways in North and South America are functional but, to most eyes, quite ugly. (...) As an ‘ism’, functionalism sought principles that would guide design independent of the designer or the maker. It was a false trail.” (56,58)

COMMENTS TO 1993 DORMER

c1: Elitism?

•

1993 DOWNIE

David Downie: ‘PROMOTIONESE’

“For Seiko, [the design office] TKO created a line of sporty Sergio Tacchini eyeglass frames ... . Because the frames had to be both lightweight and strong, they were made of titanium and nickel steel, not typical frame materials. Form certainly followed function here. ‘I decided that the materials actually convey the image better than the forms,”’says [TKO’s] Davey. ‘And the material governs in some ways what the product is going to look like.’” (sine)

Downie, David. “The Rising Stars of Design: A New Generation of Designers is Making Its Mark.” Newsweek (November 1, 1993): Special Advertising Section.

COMMENTS TO 1993 DOWNIE

c1: Since the 1980s/1990s the FFF-formula has been turned into a ‘promotionese’; see 1994 CHOATE: c1. •

1993 LARSON & PRIDMORE

George Larson and Jay Pridmore: PEOPLE UNDERSTOOD

“... [Sullivan’s] ornaments never hid the structure of his skyscrapers. They highlighted it with leafy, light spandrels and cornices seeming to float amidst the powerful thrust of the steel frames within. It was difficult to categorize or even explain why the buildings appeared as indomitable visions against the sky. In the ‘Tall Building’ [sic] essay, he compares the skyscraper to a branching oak or a drifting cloud. In this context he utters the famous maxim of organic architecture: ‘Form ever follows function.’ When people saw his buildings, they understood.” (74)

Larson, George A. and Jay Pridmore. Chicago Architecture and Design. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1993.

COMMENTS TO 1993 LARSON & PRIDMORE

c1: Myth-making in action. It was not a skyscraper Sullivan compared to a branching oak or a drifting cloud in his article “The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered”; (let’s face it – to liken a skyscraper to a branching oak or a drifting cloud sounds pretty silly). Sullivan mentions the oak and the cloud, among many other things, as examples of the putative law that “life is recognizable in its expression”, or – as he puts it in the next sentence – that “form ever follows function.”. It is only after having illustrated the alleged working of this law in nature, that Sullivan returns to his suggested solution of the tall office building, introducing it with the following outburst (already quoted in 1896 SULLIVAN (1)): “Shall we, then, daily violate this law in our art? Are we so decadent, so imbecile, so utterly weak of eyesight, that we cannot perceive this truth so simple, so very simple? Is it indeed a truth so transparent that we see through it but not see it? Is it really then, a very marvelous thing, or is it rather so commonplace, so everyday, so near a thing to us, that we cannot perceive that the shape, form, outward expression, design or whatever we may choose, of the tall office building should in the very nature of things follow the functions of the building, and that where function does not change, the form is not to change?”

c2: Did people understand? The claim that people understood that form ever followed function when they saw Sullivan’s buildings may be something of an overstatement, at least in view of the fact that before Sullivan published his Autobiography in 1924 the maxim was hardly remembered even among American architects (not to speak about ‘people’) and that it became a catchword among the American architects only in the 1930s, probably after the first Sullivan biography was published in 1935; cf. Morrison 1971. On being able to read the ‘function’ from the appearance of buildings or products which were allegedly results of the FFF-formula, see 1986 LARSEN: c1; see also 1966 NORBERG-SCHULZ: c1.•

1993 a) JULIER

Guy Julier: PEVSNER ESTABLISHED THE FFF-CANON

“Design is ... seen as a 20th-c. development, and the dominance of the Modern Movement during the same period has shaped perceptions of its practice. A seminal text which helped to form this view is Nikolaus Pevsner’s Pioneers of the Modern Movement (1936). It traced a linear, progressive perception of art history; a steady development of architectural style, based on the work and aspirations of individual architects and designers, from the historicism of William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement to the ‘machine aesthetic’ of Walter Gropius and the Modern Movement. In this book Pevsner established the canon of ‘form follows function’ as the governing design ideology of the 20th c.” (11)

Julier, Guy. “Introduction”. In: Julier, Guy. The Thames and Hudson Encyclopaedia of 20th Century Design and Designers. London: Thames and Hudson, 1993.

COMMENTS TO 1993 JULIER

c1: Pevsner established the canon - without employing the canonic phrase. See 1936 PEVSNER: c1. •

1993 b) JULIER

Guy Julier: INFLUENCE OF EXTERNAL FACTORS

“In 1896 [Sullivan] published an essay in which he coined the maxim, ‘form follows function’. He was referring to an object’s appearance and the ways in which it was governed by external factors, particularly physical and climatic ones.” (86)

Julier, Guy. “Functionalism”. In: Julier, Guy. The Thames and Hudson Encyclopaedia of 20th Century Design and Designers. London: Thames and Hudson, 1993.

COMMENTS TO 1993 JULIER

c1: External - or intrinsic factors? Julier is right in underlining that Sullivan was referring to the objects appearance; many writers have mistakenly argued that it was the functional performance of the object, rather than its form, that was upper on his mind. It is, however, imprecise to say that the FFF-formula referred to the “ways in which it was governed by external factors, particularly physical and climatic ones” Rather, the FFF-formula suggested intrinsic, inherent factors, as the decisively formative ones, as Sullivan’s sentence "It is my belief that it is of the very essence of every problem that it contains and suggests its own solution.” (cf. Sullivan 1947: 203) suggested. What that meant practically in terms of design process, nobody ever knew: it could probably be said to include, somehow, the external factors, but Sullivan’s stress was on the internal, the intrinsic, the inherent, the innate. •

1993 LAMBERT

Susan Lambert: REFINED AND ALLITERATED

“It is the ‘law’ itself ‘form ever follows function’, refined in his later writings to the alliterated maxim ‘form follows function’, for which Sullivan is responsible.” (7)

Lambert, Susan. Form Follows Function? Design in the 20th Century. London: Victoria & Albert Museum, 1993.

COMMENTS TO 1993 LAMBERT

c1: Adler did the refining. It seems to have been Sullivan’s former partner Dankmar Adler with whom Sullivan fell out at approximately the time of publishing the article on “The Tall Office Building..” who unwittingly refined the originally four-word sentence; see 1896 ADLER and 1963 BLAKE.

c2: Barking up the wrong tree. Lambert’s well-written and well-illustrated book is one of very few publications devoted explicitly to the FFF-formula, therefore an extended comment may be called for. The book discusses the 20th century design against the backdrop of the claim that ‘form in architecture and product design is derived solely from practical functions’ (book’s blurb). The book is full of incisive observations, and the refutation of the quoted claim is convincing; Lambert shows persuasively that there were many other considerations, apart from the practical one, which went into designing the objects in our century – including the modernist objects – considerations without which it would be impossible to understand why artefacts look the way they look (the argumentation reminds of Grinten 1960). But if taken as an argument against the FFF-formula itself the book seems to have been barking up an entirely wrong tree: Although functionalists did use the FFF-formula to explain why their own designs looked the way they looked, the formula was neither launched nor meant as an explanation principle: FFF-formula was a design imperative, a prescription, a program, a vision of how things were to be designed. It was not an explanation of how any man-made form was arrived at – but how any form was to be arrived at, and how natural, ‘functional’ forms were arrived at. It was above all other things as a recipe for ‘natural’ or ‘functional’ forms that the FFF-formula fascinated architects and designers alike. The book unfortunately ignores the building blocks of this vision of such natural or functional forms. Lambert takes for example entirely for granted the modernist claim that a new epoch demands a new style of its own, ‘appropriate to modern life’ (a claim which is but the FFF-formula writ large: ‘style follows epoch’). Above all other things, she never attempts to unpack the notion of function, the very source of the linguistic acrobatics of modernist designers and critics. The book’s failure to discuss the basically anti-commonsense, metaphysical nature of the FFF-formula makes in the end the whole effort of functionalists somewhat incomprehensible: were they a bunch of half-wits who couldn’t see what was obvious to everybody else? Lambert did a very good demolition job on a common sense level. But since the core of functionalism was placed on a metaphysical level, and not on the common sense level, the core problem was missed. As a consequence, and paradoxically, for a committed functionalist the book would hardly constitute a refutation of the FFF-formula. On the contrary, it would read as an evidence that one must go on in pursuit of that fascinating vision of objective design. –– For more comments on the distinction between FFF-formula as an explanatory device and a design principle, see 1953 GOMBRICH: c1, 1962 GIEDION: c1, 1962 JANSON: c1, 1976 GOMBRICH: c1, 1982 JANSON: c2, 1986 FORTY: c1, 1986. On the notion of design metaphysics, see 1896 SULLIVAN: c7. •

1993 McDERMOTT

Catherine McDermott: A RATIONAL APPROACH TO DESIGN

1993 McDERMOTT (1) “ The Modern Movement describes a group of architects and designers who set about creating a new aesthetic for the 20th century, an aesthetic which for most of its practitioners was no mere style but an article of faith. The key feature of Modernism was a spirit of rationalism and objectivity that provided a sharp cut-off point from the 19th century and its obsessions with style revivals and decoration. Modernism, unlike the Arts and Crafts Movement, believed in the city as the future for all, made possible by the new inventions and products of the Machine Age. Another key concept of Modernism was ‘Form follows Function’, a slogan that reflects the movement’s rational, ordered, Modernist approach to design.” (13)

1993 McDERMOTT (2) [Entry] “FUNCTIONALISM: The theory of functional design. It refers to objects designed solely for practical use without any ornamentation or decoration. The word itself appears frequently in Modernism and one of its basic tenets is the theory that ‘form follows function’. Functionalism is therefore part of the rational, ordered Modernist approach to design. Its aims and objectives were clearly expressed by the Ulm school of design and the work of its best-known student, Dieter Rams, for the German company Braun. In the 1960s Functionalism was challenged by the new priorities of Pop, and later by the diverse approaches of Post-Modernism. These movements argued that Functionalism was too narrow an approach to design; it ignored the social meanings individuals give to objects and it played down the creative individualist nature of the designer. In opposition to this, Functionalism is regarded as not merely a style but a deeply felt commitment to order and progress.” (104)

McDermott, Catherine. Essential Design. London: Bloomsbury, 1993.

COMMENTS TO 1993 MCDERMOTT

(1-2) c1: Unrecognizable. Even if one takes into consideration the difference in the British and the Continental usage of the term functionalism (Modernism seems to be the British synonym for Functionalism) it is still difficult to recognize any known design philosophy professed in the 20th century behind the above definition. Admittedly Hitchcock and Johnson insinuated in 1932 that functionalism was a theory of design for “solely practical use”, and they made Hannes Meyer the chief representative of that kind of functionalism. But this was a tactical interpretation (cf. Michl 1996). McDermott seems to repeat this insinuation after the Americans, (add Pevsner’s - and Read’s (?) claims!!!) but she presents it now as a straight-face characterization of functionalism, and updates it by choosing, of all people Dieter Rams its representative. This is, however, gravely misleading: Rams’ designs for Braun, although “without ornamentation or decoration”, are known for their exquisite minimalist aesthetic; they can by no means be said to be designed “solely practical use”. The polehcujici circumstance is of course that Deiter Rams hmself always claimed that he was a functionalist) Furthermore it is difficult to understand from such description of functionalism how the ‘functional’ approach to design can ever result in a style, or ever be regarded as style – as the author suggests at the end of the article. -- For a similar problem of an urecognizable definition of functionalism, see 1991 PEVSNER & c1.

c2: Developments in architectural theory ignored? That such a central problem of design in this century has been treated in this cursory, not to say careless manner, of all places in an expert handbook on the subject, published in today’s world lingua franca, in a country that has been leading the field of design history, and by a person who is advertised at the back of the book as “a past Chairperson of the British Design History Society”, is both disappointing and disconcerting. Perhaps it suggests a weak point in the constitution of the new discipline of design history, which has come into its own during the past 20 years or so, with Great Britain in the lead. It their eagerness to make the new discipline an autonomous entity different from both art history and architectural history, the design historians seem to cut themselves off from closer contact with developments in architectural history and theory. It is there that the subject of functionalism has been explored much more extensively that it has ever been in the design circles. This is not surprising, after all, since it was within architecture that functionalist theory of design was developed: there is no functionalist theory of design existing independently of the functionalist theory of architecture. The intentional (and understandable) isolation from the neighboring disciplines dictated by the fear of compromising the newly won autonomy of one’s new field, has been a problem not only among historians of design but also among industrial designers themselves, who tend to feel they enhance the autonomy of their profession by not mixing with the neighboring lot. •

1993 OWEN

Charles L. Owen: GREENOUGH’S IMMORTAL DIRECTIVE

“ Modernism emerged from the turmoil of the 19th century. With it, Horatio Greenough’s immortal directive of the early 1800’s became edict: Form follows Function. [here reference to Tuckerman ...] Considering the times, that charge was a call to arms.” (39)

Owen, Charles L. “[Design, Tool for the Future].” Temes de Disseny [Barcelona], no. 8, Abril (1993): 39-41.

COMMENTS TO 1993 OWEN

c1: One more Greenough attribution, this time dated “early 1800’s” (Greenough wrote in 1840s), and again without any reference to other supporting evidence. For other writers suggesting Greenough as the author of the FFF-formula, see 1896 SULLIVAN: c3. •

1993 PALLASMAA

Juhani Pallasmaa: ECOLOGICAL FUNCTIONALISM

"... one of the first writers to make function the criterion of form was the American sculptor Horatio Greenough, who had studied biology as well as sculpture. He published a series of papers in the mid-nineteenth century which formulated the new aesthetic of the machine and extended its application to all forms of beauty on the basis of Lamarck's biological theorem that form follows function. Greenough saw that his generalization applied to all organic and even man-made forms. Beauty was seen as 'the promise of function'. (...) Today ... I cannot imagine any other desirable view of the future than an ecologically adapted form of life where architecture returns to early Functionalist ideals derived from biology. Architecture will again take its root in its cultural and regional soil. This architecture could be called Ecological Functionalism. (...) Whereas function was dealt with primarily on a symbolical level in Modernism a metaphorical Functionalism will not be satisfactory in the ecological imperative of the twenty-first century. Functionalism has to be real operative Functionalism. (...) After the decades of affluence and abundance, architecture is likely to return to the aesthetics of necessity in which the elements of metaphorical expression and practical craft fuse into each other again; utility and beauty again united." (78-79)

Pallasmaa, J. 1993. “From Metaphorical to Ecological Functionalism: Re-Evaluating the Heroic Period to Modernism.” The Architectural Review 193 (1156):74-79.

COMMENTS TO 1993 PALLASMAA

c1: Back to ‘early functionalist ideals’? An example of how a questionable interpretation of the modernist past provides a ‘new’ groundwork for a neo-functionalist program. Pallasmaa asks for architecture where “The priority of representation will be replaced by the priority of performance.” (79) But is not the ideal of representation really lurking behind the ideal of performance all the same?

c3: Lamarck? The name of Lamarck is emerging all the time in the discussion of the FFF-formula, but (to my knowledge) there is no study which has documented the connection between Lamarck’s biological theories and the FFF-formula.

c3: ‘Symbolic’ interpretation of functionalism. Pallasmaa suggests, in a Banhamian manner that in modernism ‘function’ was ‘dealt with primarily on a symbolic level’. This has become a conventional, but far from satisfactory interpretation of functionalism. See 1986 BANHAM: c2. •

199? KIPNIS

Jeffrey Kipnis: “FUNCTION” IS A NAME FOR “A POSSIBILITY OF FORM”

"[Aphorism] 40: Form cannot follow function until function emerges as a possibility of form. After all no caveman ever set out to find a two-bedroom cave. The architectural 'functions' of the bedroom: privacy, comfort, fear, fantasy, and mystique were all learned as possibilities of form. (...)"

Kipnis, Jeffrey. In the Manor of Nietzsche: Aphorisms around and about Architecture, 199?

COMMENTS TO 199? KIPNIS

c1: The aphorism above is an edited and expanded version of Kipnis’ sentence “Form cannot follow function until function (including but not limited to use) has first emerged as a possibility of form,” quoted by Eisenman 1985: 197, n. 7. What Kipnis seems to be really saying in this expanded aphorism here is that form cannot follow function – simply because function emerges as a possibility of form, i.e. because form precedes function. In the second and third sentence he supports this suggestion by two rather cogent commonsense arguments. –– But why does he use the word ‘until’ rather than the straightforward word ‘because’? –– His use of the word ‘until’ suggests that in his opinion form does follow function after all. This intriguing suggestion that form can be said somehow to both precede and follow function, seems, on the face of it, to hold water. The suggestion appears to be a way of observing an essential sequence in the history of design: only when a particular use, or uses, of a form are established, will these established uses (i.e.’functions’) ‘demand’ employment of certain (established) forms; ‘stackableness’ of restaurant cups, for example, comes to be considered a function when the stackableness has become established; after all, ‘function’ as a term used in social and natural sciences, refers per definition to something established, i.e. repeatedly observed). –– But on closer inspection the mystique of Kipnis’ intriguing both-yes-and-no position appears to rests on a somewhat tricky use of the word ‘form’ in the first sentence of his aphorism. The word appears twice there. Kipnis’ dense sentence gives an impression of referring two times to one and the same form but on closer look he turns out to refer to two different forms: to a form that “cannot follow function”, and to a form from which “function emerges as a possibility”. (Here the absence of both indefinite and definite articles before both ‘form’ or ‘function’ adds significantly to the contrived mystique of the pronouncement). –– If we cave in to the first impression we will read the first sentence as meaning “A form cannot follow a function until the function emerges as a possibility of the mentioned form”. –– This interpretation, however, is obviously a logical nonsense, as one and the same form can hardly be claimed to both precede and follow function. What Kipnis seems to be really saying by his first sentence is that “A form cannot follow function until function emerges as a possibility of an earlier form.” If this is the meaning of the first sentence, then the statement is hardly as intriguing as it appears (aspires?) to be, because it really boils down to a pretty simple, though surprising, claim: what Kipnis says is that ‘form follows function’ should be read as meaning that forms follow precedent forms. In other words, to claim that forms follow functions is to claim that forms follow the forms from which the functions ‘emerged as a possibility’. If this interpretation of Kipnis’s first sentence is correct, he is really suggesting, very rightly in my view, that, historically, there are always two processes involved in the emergence of new forms: First, functions ‘follow’ existing forms (or, to put it differently: uses emerge from the possibilities offered by existing forms). Then, new forms, designed to fit better the already established uses, ‘follow’ the earlier forms associated with such uses; such new forms are really redesigned previous forms. (This is, incidentally, a conclusion suggested by Niels Diffrient in Green-Rutanen 1988, where he is quoted as saying: "When we know fully how an object performs for a person or group, how it effects lives on the short- and long-term and the direct and indirect environmental influences, then we can begin to sense how the form of the object might be more completely directed by function." ) –– It is in other words difficult to see any situation where the plain, unqualified sentence ‘form follows function’ can explain in any way the emergence of any given form a given form.

The problem with Kipnis’s interpretation is, however, that FFF-doctrine was basically a doctrine of preordained / foreordained forms. If we refuse to believe in such doctrine, there is no need to bother about the FFF-formula any longer, except for reasons illustrating why the belief in foreordained forms is unfeasible. It is a sentence which is singularly unfit to elucidate the nature of the design process, and should be dropped altogether.

Actual functioning: always linked to a form, a device, a solution.

Intended functioning: can be independent of a form, a device, a solution. [?]

See 1977 GOODMAN & C1-2.

1994 CHOATE

Roger Choate: DESIGN BRIEF

“For years [the outerwear manufacturer] Helly-Hansen of Norway chugged along unremarkably until it became more design-conscious. – After that, there was no turning back. Sales soared with the international launch of newly-designed lines. ‘It’s certainly paid off,’ says Design Manager Erik Joneid. An early design brief stressed the classical formula of ‘form follows function.’ In addition, ‘the customer must feel he’s getting sensibly designed gear that also looks good,’ he says.”

Choate, Roger. “[promotional article on design in Scandinavia].” Scanorama, April (1994): sine pag. Choate 1994

COMMENTS TO 1994 CHOATE

c1: ‘Promotionese’. FFF has been used for quite some time by manufacturers as an advertisement slogan suggesting that what is offered is a no-nonsense product with excellent performance and has a matter-of-factly look. In the above quotation it is unclear though whether the FFF-formula is taken to have a repercussion on the looks of products or not. It seems to be superficially self-evident, while at the same time suggesting an expert knowledge not quite accessible to the outsiders (including other less developed producers who apparently struggle for survival without comprehending the potential of that formula). As the formula pushes hundred, its original message about unity of utilitarian and aesthetic aspects of design seems to have become obscure. Compare this blunted awareness of the original meaning of the formula with the acuteness of the message contained in the promotional text accompanying presentation of Citroën DC-19 at the 11th Milan Trienale in 1957 (without employing the formula itself): “The car's shape was ... arrived at from purely technical requirements. It is nowadays no longer surprising to find beauty where there is only technical excellence. This is yet another illustration of a well-known fact: the search for a scientifically coherent solution is often rewarded, as if by miracle, by an unlooked for aesthetic success. And it is deeply satisfying, even on a moral level, to find an object exquisitely fit for its intended use is also beautiful to look at, and that functional efficiency is but an other road to beauty.” (cf. Silk 1984). –– The FFF-formula was used in a similar context in a 1995 advertisement text for the US automaker Chrysler, without any attempt to explain its meaning: “1995 Chrysler Concorde. Form follows function. It is a dictum revered by master architects and verified by their creations.” (from: <www.rossroy.com/Concorde/Architec.html>). –– Another promotionese, from a different advertisement, this time for the Eames films: “Design: charles and Ray Eames. This creative couple formed the consummate dyad relationship. (...) Building on the maxim ‘Form Follows Function’ from the Bauhaus movement, they created Zen-like simplicity with common wood and metal materials.” (from: <www.rc-videos.html>). –– More promotionese: “1996 Chevrolet Camaro: Camaro Interior. We believe that form follows function. So, every aspect of the Camaro interior was carefully designed with the end goal in mind. The dash. The seats. The console. All carefully engineered to deliver an undiminished driving experience.” (“Chevy Spot – Camaro Interior”: from: <www.chevrolet.com/car/a164.htm>). –– Further examples: “Ducati Style – “form follows function”. Beautiful, capable machines that are free of unnecessary ‘bells and whistles’”; from: <www.bellevue-suzuki.com/ducati.html>) [1996]. –– “Adidas Running. Runners are different. They differ in their mileage, weight, foot shape, their running style and the surface they run on. In no sport category is the design philosophy of ‘form follows function’ more critical. Adidas has segmented the market into four distinct categories to ensure, that the needs of all Runners are met.” (From: Internet - Adidas Running; 1995) –– “The NOKIA 101 Portable. Designed With The Belief That Form Follows Function. At just 9.7 ounces, the 101 is one of the lightest hand portables on the market, with a slim design that easily fits in your pocket.“ (From: <www.wimsey.com/Business/bizcards/pcoastcom/cellular/nokia101.html>) [1996]. –– “Founded in 1994, OnlineLABS has grown to become one of the premier full-service World Wide Web development companies. Companies choose OnlineLABS because we apply our unparalleled experience to create innovative and effective sites. Our Web site philosophy: • design sites where form follows function; • use the medium and its inherent capabilities to interact with your audience; • develop navigational tools that are intuitive; • design sites to be scalable to allow for future growth; • develop content that will be accessible and attractive through different platforms.” (From: “OnlineLABS: In Brief”: <www.onlinelabs.com/onlinelabs/general.htm>) [1995]. –– “[On designing] The BMW Website (...) It was critical to create a graphical look that would represent BMW's image and unique Bavarian heritage on-line. In many ways this can be summarized in the Bahausian philosophy of form follows function. We needed to maintain a very clean, uncluttered look; every graphical element had to have a purpose, yet still be aesthetically pleasing.” (The BMW Website; <www.bmw.ca>)” ––

A promotion and guarantee tag accompanying a furry jacket manufactured by the British company Karrimor says that “Karrimor have a product philosophy driven by function that ensures the products include only those features that are essential for the mounteneer.” (Still, the jacket sports finely balanced three color strata: off-white, light grey and dark grey -– or “limestone / pebble / grey”, as the tag has it.) –– For a comment on the alleged connection between the Bauhaus and the FFF-formula, see 1928 MOHOLY-NAGY: c1. For more ‘promotionese’, see 1990 PERIÄINEN, and 1993 DOWNIE;) •

1994 JOHNSON

Paul-Alan Johnson: RISING AND FALLING FROM FAVOR

"There are few maxims with the force of 'moral law' in architecture that categorically require obedience. Those that have become law were accepted only for a time as the core of everyday design parlance in the studio, atelier, or office. 'Form follows function' and Mies' 'less is more' are two dictums that were to rise and then fall from favor." (201)

Johnson, Paul-Alan. The Theory of Architecture: Concepts, Themes, & Practices. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1994.

COMMENTS TO 1994 JOHNSON

c1: •

1994 SHEPHEARD

Paul Shepheard: HAS FORM ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO DO WITH FUNCTION?

“(...) The last man, most cheerful of them all, plays his poker games with his deadpan, beaming face. ‘Form has absolutely nothing to do with function whatsoever,’ he says, thinking of course, of the modernist maxim saying the opposite, form follows function. He says it to wind people up, of course, but what does it make him sound like, a creationist? Has he ever heard of Darwin? The trouble with discrediting old rubbish is, you just make more rubbish doing it.“ (16)

Shepheard, P. What Is Architecture? An Essay on Landscapes, Buildings, and Machines. Cambridge. Mass., London, England: The MIT Press, 1994.

COMMENTS TO 1994 SHEPHEARD

c1: The problem with criticizing FFF, beside the danger of creating more rubbish, is that one tends to create more misunderstandings. In one particular sense the man with the deadpan, beaming face (Leon Krier, or perhaps Bernard Tschumi?) is no doubt right: form has absolutely nothing to do with function whatsoever; but unless that particular sense is explained the statement seems to be outrageously wrong. That there is a connection between what an object does and how it looks no observers of things can deny: neither can makers and designers of things deny that what they want a thing to do has a bearing on how it is going to look, even if we talk in a purely utilitarian sense. But the FFF-formula argued for much more than existence of a connection between ‘function’ and form: it claimed that there is a necessary connection between the two – necessary in the sense that there is an only possible, an only right or an only ‘truthful’ functional solution – and therefore, at the same time, an only possible formal solution. It is in this sense that form has absolutely nothing to do with function – unless, of course, one happens to be a believer in the functionalist design metaphysics. George Kubler expressed a similar idea in his claim about an elementary dichotomy between use and beauty: "Although a common gradient connects use and beauty, the two are irreducibly different: no tool can be fully explained as a work of art, nor vice versa. A tool is always intrinsically simple, however elaborate its mechanism may be, but a work of art, which is a complex of many stages and levels of crisscrossed intentions, is always intrinsically complicated, however simple its effect may seem." (Kubler 1962: 11) •

1994 WOODFIELD

Richard Woodfield: FOR GOMBRICH FORM FOLLOWS PURPOSE

"For Gombrich, perception of form could not be divorced from perception of meaning. Recognizing that pictures mediated experience of their created world [?], he emphasized the necessity of understanding the nature of that mediation and the function of imagery at the time that it was produced: form followed function. Riegl had simply failed to recognize the changed representational function of pictorial art in late antiquity. In the art of classical antiquity, imagery was created in which the viewer was expected to assume the role of a spectator in a scene in which he had an imaginary presence. (...) By contrast, in the art of late antiquity the purpose of visual imagery was quite different as the visual arts had changed their place within the overall cultural framework; their role had changed from 'showing' to 'telling'."

Woodfield, Richard. “Gombrich, formalism and the description of works of art.” The British Journal of Aesthetics 34, no. 2 (1994): 134ff.

COMMENTS TO 1994 WOODFIELD

c1: The paradox is that for Gombrich, as Woodfield argues [?] in his article the ‘form follows function’ was an anti-formalist battle cry - while functionalism itself was a formalist one.

1995 HAUFFE

Thomas Hauffe: FFF INSPIRED

DEUTSCHER WERKBUND AND BAUHAUS

(obs! NORSK !!!) [?]

"[Sullivan] regnes som en av fedrene til moderne arkitektur, og en teoretik banebryter for funksjonalismen. Fra ham stammer det ofte misforståtte slagordet 'Form follows function'. Denne grunnleggende idéen inspirerte funksjonalismens eksponenter fra Deutsche Werkbund til Bauhaus og Høyskolen for formgivning i Ulm helt opp til 70-årene." (58)

Hauffe, Thomas. Design. Tr. T. og B.-L. Øygard, Cappelens Kulturguider. Oslo: Cappelens kulturguider, 1996 (1995).

COMMENTS TO 1995 HAUFFE

c1: KNOWN AT THE BAUHAUS? The last sentence can be read either straightforwardly as suggesting that members of both the Deutscher Werkbund and the Bauhaus were familiar with the phrase. Understood in this way the sentence is very probably wrong. But due to its vagueness the sentence allows also for a safer claim: it was really familiarity with the idea behind the phrase rather than with the phrase itself which inspired both institutions. There is no doubt that the idea did inspire both of these German institutions. See 1928 MOHOLY-NAGY & c1. •

c2: Misunderstoodism. On the idea that FFF was misunderstood, see

1996 BLETTER

Rosemarie Haag Bletter: DISTINCTLY UTILITARIAN ETHICS

"Sullivan's dictum 'form follows function,' stated first 1888, employed two components of Greenough's functionalism. Its Lamarckian organicism is the most evident, and disregarding Greenough's mechanical analogy, Sullivan gave the ethical aspect of functionalism greater importance. Although initially indebted to Transcendentalism as much as to Greenough, Sullivan came under influence of Chicago School pragmatic realism and John Dewey's utilitarian instrumentalism in the 1890s. These philosophies assumed a complex interrelationship between human thought and action and the environment. (...) -- The distinctly utilitarian ethics of 'form follows function' do not seem to have - on the surface at least - a direct relationship (11)

Bletter, Rosemarie Haag. “Introduction [to Adof Behne's book The Modern Functional Building].” I Adof Behne, The Modern Functional Building, 1-83. Santa Monica, Ca.: The Getty Institute, 1996.

COMMENTS TO 1996 BLETTER

c1: Shockingly dilletant discussion of FFF, with wrong first date, no references to recent Sullivan-literature; no attempt to unpack the notion of function.

Bletter speaks about influence of 'natural selection' in connection with Greenough! (Just as Giedion 1962 I: 15 speaks about influence of darwinism in connection with Semper's stay in London 1949-1952(?))

•

1996 OWEN

William Owen: ANOTHER FUNCTIONALIST CONCEIT – OR A ‘PROMOTIONESE’?

"... the gun is acclaimed as a pure receptacle of the modernist ideal, as an utterly functional instrument unsullied by the corruptions of style, fashion or status. Designed for killing, a gun must work. Its performance overrides all other considerations. This is one of the many gun myths, and like all myths it contains a germ of truth. Gun people think like this, too. They go so far as to quote Louis Sullivan: 'Form follows function,' says Guns & Weapons for Law Enforcement magazine of a popular European import, the SIG Sauer P220 pistol. Advertisements saying 'Choose wisely, live longer' reinforce the message that gun purchase is a matter of survival, not of social status. (...) Yet this might be just another functionalist conceit that doesn't stand up to scrutiny, for the simple reason that the gun, being a catastrophic instrument of maximum force, is a deterrent. Use constitutes failure and invites retaliation. A gun must therefore signify its threat by making a fetish of its own functionality. The first law of gun design is that a gun must look like a gun, which means cold, hard and ugly." (56)

Owen, William. “Design for killing.” I.D. Magazine (September/October, 1996): 54-61.

COMMENTS TO 1996 OWEN

c1: The FFF-formula used in connection with a gun advertisement is perhaps more an example of the ‘promotionese’ encountered earlier than an example of “a functionalist conceit”. The formula is obviously is employed to sell a no-nonsense product claimed to perform well, with a matter-of-factly look. During the last two decades or so the FFF-formula has been used more and more as an openly promotional slogan selling the aesthetics of mater-of-factness. For the notion of ‘promotionese’ see 1994 CHOATE: c1. •

1997 NORBERG-SCHULZ

Christian Norberg-Schulz: NOT ONLY BANAL CAUSALITY

OBS!!! NORSK!!!

“Det er min overbevisning at hovedårsaken til arkitekturens svake stilling idag, er at arkitektene selv har sviktet den del av faget som er deres egen domene: den arkitektoniske form. Dette skylles blant annet at 'form' er blitt oppfattet konvensjonelt snarere enn fenomenologisk, og at forholdet melom fortid og nåtid ikke er forstått. Selvsagt er enhver form både teknisk og funksjonelt betinget, men den er også noe i seg selv; noe som upresist er blitt betegnet som 'uttrykksmiddel' eller en del av et 'formspråk'. Slagordet @form follows function@ er imidlertid utilstrekkelig, også fordi @follows aldri er blitt riktig forstått. Hvis det oppfatttes som å samle, åpner det seg en forståelse som går utover den banale kausalitet. Når vi løser en oppgave samler vi situasjonens funksjoner (kvaliteter) i en 'passende' form, på basis av fagets grunnprinsipper. 'Prinsipp' betyr 'opprinnelse', og det var nettopp modernismens målsetning å gjenerobre det opprinnelige. En slik gjenerobring forutsetter den fenomenologiske forståelse som Merlau-Ponty gjør seg til talsmann for når han sier at 'persipere er å gjenoppdage en verden man allerede har'. Dette betyr imidlertid ikke at vi har til rådighet et arsenal av ferdige typer, slik post-modernistene mente, men at tilstedeværelsen omfatter generelle prinsipper som gjør det mulig å skape stadig nye synteser av kvalitativt forskjellige bestanddeler. Å oppfatte faget på denne måten er ikke 'fundamentalisme', men 'integrert, åpen arkitekturteori'." (87) [trans.! ?]

Norberg-Schulz, Christian. Øye og hånd: Essays og artikler - Ny rekke. Oslo: Gyldendal, 1997.

COMMENTS TO 1997 NORBERG-SCHULZ

c1: Although FFF-formula can be construed to mean a causal sequence, the wording, as the original context suggests, refers rather to pre-scientific notin of foreordained forms (...)

•

1997 WOODHAM

Jonathan M. Woodham: CAN BE SEEN AS SUPPORTING THE MUTHESIAN VIEW OF DESIGN

"The adage so often associated with modernism, 'form follows function' can be seen as the culmination of the acrimonious 'Standardization Debate' which took place between Henry van de Velde and Hermann Muthesius at the Deutscher Werkbund congress of 1914, when Muthesius' commitment to @Typisierung@ (standardization), based on economic as well as aesthetic grounds, was opposed by those who felt that this restricted the creativity of the individual designer." (35)

Woodham, Jonathan M. Twentieth-Century Design. Oxford New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.

COMMENTS TO 1997 WOODHAM

c1: Well, perhaps it could in the sense that it spread in Europe, but the debate took place in 1914 or before, while the slogan was not in public use before early 1930s - reaching Europe only in late 1930s.

•

1998 GLEINGER

Andrea Gleinger: THONET’S NR. 14 AS MANIFESTATION OF FFF

"The highest degree of formal reduction as a result of the division of labor and industrial production on one hand, and the transformation of elementary material characteristics and utilization functions on the other, allowed the chair No. 14 to become a causal manifestation of what occupied design practitioners and theoreticians the most by the end of the 19th century: the search for an agreement between material and technology, between form and function, that found its paradigmatic expression in Louis Sullivan’s axion ‘form follows function.’” (43)

Gleininger, Andrea. The Chair No. 14 by Michael Thonet. Frankfurt am Main: Verlag form, 1998.

COMMENTS TO 1998 GLEINGER

c1: 14-09-00: Well - a rhetoric conclusion of an essays or a sentence which is supposed to make sense? Why should this chair, of all of Thonets production be considered his magnum opus? Was it a resukt of any search at all? Was there any ideology behind the chair al all?

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