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: •