Function and Form: Shifts in Modernist Architects' Design Thinking

2015

Since the so-called »type-debate« at the 1914 Werkbund Exhibition in Cologne – on individual versus standardized types – the discussion about turning Function into Form has been an important topic in Architectural Theory. The aim of this contribution is to trace the historic shifts in the relationship between Function and Form: First, how Functional Thinking was turned into an Art Form; second, how Functional Analysis was applied to design and production processes; third, how Architectural Function was used as a social or political argument. A comparison of the different aspects of the relationship between Function and Form may not only shed new light on the creative process in Modern Architecture. Looking at the historic shifts driving this re-evaluation of values – from Art to Science and Politics – may also serve as a stepstone towards a new poetic rethinking of the relationship of Function and Form that contemporary values may require.

2019

While the history of form debates from the debates on the relationship between form and function in architecture goes back to long ago, the definition of function is thought to have been expanded from the principle of “form follows function”(Sullivan, 1896), which is found in most of the twentieth century modern architectural theories. Particularly Louis Sullivan's article in 1896, the slogan “form follows function” (Banham, 1960), which was thought to be expressed for the first time, turned into a paradigm of design, and brought about the same critique of opposing architecture that developed at the end of the century. In the historical process, the emergence of this slogan reveals that the rise of Sullivan high office buildings and their similar formal and design features are the natural result of the functional data of the building. But Sullivan's belief may be more consistent with the Digital Age; form and function will require the expression that follows human needs and behaviors.

2017

The most dominant dialectical succession of architectural thinking during the 20 th Century was between form and function. The latter of these two modern ways of architectural thinking is based on the results of Carnapian Neopositivism. The keywords of this philosophical school, that are empiricism, logic, verification, unity of language and science, could still be applied to interpreting modern architecture. I will explain the antecedents and the first connection between analytic philosophy and architecture, and some characteristic points of their influence during the 20 th Century: the triumph of function over form as analogous to triumph of analytic philosophy over metaphysics. After the theoretic grounding of the form-function debate, I am going to focus first on the characteristic appearance of form: the Facadism of Socialist Realism in the architecture of East-Central Europe. Second, I will explain that architectural tendencies of classical modernism did not disappear in this ...

South African Journal of Art History, 2012

The contradiction between form and function should be seen as an important element in architecture. Modernist functionalism prioritized the necessity that form is seen as a consequence of function, adapting Louis Sullivan’s credo that “form follows function,” although Sullivan was not talking about the functional requirements of a building in relation to its form - he was talking about relationships in nature and the creative process. Nevertheless, architecture needs to be understood beyond the formula of “form follows function.” This is not to deny the importance of functionalism in architecture, or to deny that there is a necessary relation between form and function in architecture, but only to reveal that the contradiction between form and function also plays an important role in architecture.

ARCHTHEO’15 IX. THEORY AND HISTORY OF ARCHITECTURE CONFERENCE PROCEEDINGS, 2015

This paper presents a review of the form-matter duality in architecture. It takes its cue from the observation that two attitudes towards design prevail in contemporary architectural theory and practice: Design is commonly understood either as the creation and composition of autonomous shapes (known as 'form') or as the elaboration of materials' intrinsic qualities. In the former approach, material qualities are overlooked in favor of the ‘form’ that is imposed by the designer. Materials are treated as passive substance that is given shape and definition through design. The given profile typically results from the individual ‘style’ of the architect, reflecting his ‘aesthetic’ preferences, or from the technical means that he relies on to produce ‘forms,’ such as computer software. The latter approach, on the other hand, is based on the assumption that materials possess certain intrinsic and unchanging properties that inform their “correct” use, regardless of the circumstances of a project. Expressed as the ‘nature’ of the material, these inherent properties are considered to be the sole determinant of the appearance of a construction. The form-or-matter alternative that many contemporary architects abide by is in fact a recent expression of a well-established division in architecture, the roots of which can be traced back to the sixteenth century. This paper inquires into the precedents of the current divided understanding and explores its various expressions in modern and contemporary architecture, with greater focus on the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries where choosing forms or following the logic of matter gradually became established as the primary concerns of design. The aim of the paper is to track the historical background of a current issue in architecture by showing the connections between historically disparate and seemingly unrelated works. Doing so, it demonstrates that as antithetical as they may seem, the formalist and the materialist approaches indeed express a shared attitude towards design. In both, the object of design is considered a self-contained, autonomous entity —informed by either the material's (so-called) nature or the architects' style, yet emancipated from all other situational references.

2021

Problem statement: Form is a fundamental concept in the discourse of architecture that has been affected by the evolutions of architectural thinking. The non-systematic accumulation of form concepts results in ambiguity in contemporary discourse. On the other side, disregarding the dynamic nature of form, and poor identification of the factors influencing its evolution, and its application domains have made form a frozen concept and have reduced its effectiveness in responding to today’s architectural issues. Research objectives: this paper concentrates on clarifying and organizing the diverse concepts of the form. Besides a theoretical framework is provided to guarantee the conceptual dynamism of the form. Research method: Present research is conducted based on Foucault’s genealogy approach. First, the original conditions of the first appearance of form in philosophical thinking are examined, then based on the results obtained, is referred to revolutionary theories of architecture....

German Studies Review, 1994

A history of modem architecture can follow two distinct paths. First is the path of the object: an analysis of the historical origins of the things and events themselves. Second is the path of the subject: an analysis of the more intangible and shifting historicity of the concepts and categories by which we attempt to understand objects and events. This study analyzes the reciprocity of subject/object relations in modern architecture. Subjectivity constitutes the categories of possible experience, objectivity is what is experienced; and architecture resides in the both domains. The particular dialectic of subject and object treated here is that which emerges in the buildings, projects, and writings of Hannes Meyer and Ludwig Hilberseimer, each of whom, in different ways, brings himself face-to-face with the threatening problems posed by modernity to bourgeois humanism and the sovereignty of its modes of artistic production and reception. My thesis is that a perceptual shift, which I call posthumanism, can be detected within the work of these figures. Posthumanism is the consciousness and conscious response, whether with applause, resignation, or regret. to the threatened norm of psychological autonomomy and individualism. Each of these architects produced a body of work that delineates precise social agendas as well as aesthetic preferences and offers architectures that would be adequate to the posthumanist social orders envisioned. The study draws on established and emergent analyses in critical theory, in particular those of the Frankfurt School and of certain poststructuralist thinkers. It attempts to demonstrate that many of the experiments by these architects previously relegated by the critical-historical establishment to reductive versions of functionalism or Sachlichkeit can be more fruitfully explained within a framework of positions indicative of the changed status of the subject and the ways the subject is variously constituted by the different architectures.

8th Mediterranean Congress of Aesthetics, 2021

Our research focuses on architectural design and its close examination in the contemporary post-alphabetic era. According to the interpretive scheme suggested by Vilém Flusser, the evolution of writing is divided into three periods, each of which corresponds to a specific different type of thinking: pre-alphabetic era – mythical thinking, alphabetic era – linear thinking, post-alphabetic era – digital thinking. Any significant change to the fields of the written form of thinking, any significant change to the structure of retaining-the-meaning-in-signs, redefines the aesthetics of an era and always affects the basic principles and terms of architectural design. Our research refers mainly to the 1980s, when the history of architecture and writing took a decisive turn. The basic reasons of this turn were the emergence and fast spread of digital media, networks and personal computers, as well as of the computer aided design software. Moreover, during the same period, the dominant strategies of Deconstruction intended to abolish, as far as architecture is concerned, the recognizable classes, the typological catalogues and the compositional processes. During the turmoil of the above changes, Peter Eisenman declared the end of the centuries-old dominant aesthetics of the classical, an aesthetics that managed to remain active up until Late Modernism. We suggest that this aesthetics brought forth, [hervorbringen] while also being brought forth by, an evolving, yet invariable in its general principles, linear- alphabetic thinking. In architecture, the familiarity of this linear thinking was presented as a certain familiarity of dwelling. By exploring the architectural design after the end of the aesthetics of the classical towards the consolidation of a post-alphabetic type of retaining-the-meaning, now expressed through digital items, we study the new boundaries, delimited as they are by a multitude of unfamiliar elements, of architectural design in the domain of the contemporary digital media.