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Form follows function is a principle of design associated with late 19th and early 20th century
architecture Architecture is the art and technique of designing and building, as distinguished from the skills associated with construction. It is both the process and the product of sketching, conceiving, planning, designing, and constructing building ...
and industrial design in general, which states that the shape of a building or object should primarily relate to its intended function or purpose.


Origins of the phrase

The architect
Louis Sullivan Louis Henry Sullivan (September 3, 1856 – April 14, 1924) was an American architect, and has been called a "father of skyscrapers" and "father of modernism". He was an influential architect of the Chicago School, a mentor to Frank Lloy ...
coined the
maxim Maxim or Maksim may refer to: Entertainment * ''Maxim'' (magazine), an international men's magazine ** ''Maxim'' (Australia), the Australian edition ** ''Maxim'' (India), the Indian edition *Maxim Radio, ''Maxim'' magazine's radio channel on Sir ...
, which resumes Viollet-le-Duc's théories : ''a rationally designed structure may not necessarily be beautiful but no building can be beautiful that does not have a rationally designed structure''. The maxim is often incorrectly attributed to the sculptor Horatio Greenough (18051852), whose thinking mostly predates the later functionalist approach to architecture. Greenough's writings were for a long time largely forgotten, and were rediscovered only in the 1930s. In 1947, a selection of his essays was published as ''Form and Function: Remarks on Art by Horatio Greenough''. Sullivan was Greenough's much younger compatriot and admired rationalist thinkers such as
Thoreau Henry David Thoreau (July 12, 1817May 6, 1862) was an American naturalist, essayist, poet, and philosopher. A leading transcendentalist, he is best known for his book ''Walden'', a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings, and hi ...
, Emerson, Whitman, and Melville, as well as Greenough himself. In 1896, Sullivan coined the phrase in an article titled ''The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered'', though he later attributed the core idea to the Roman architect, engineer, and author
Marcus Vitruvius Pollio Vitruvius (; c. 80–70 BC – after c. 15 BC) was a Roman architect and engineer during the 1st century BC, known for his multi-volume work entitled ''De architectura''. He originated the idea that all buildings should have three attribute ...
, who first asserted in his book '' De architectura'' that a structure must exhibit the three qualities of firmitas, utilitas, that is, it must be solid, useful, and beautiful. Sullivan actually wrote "form ever follows function", but the simpler and less emphatic phrase is more widely remembered. For Sullivan this was distilled wisdom, an aesthetic credo, the single "rule that shall permit of no exception". The full quote is:
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 the life is recognizable in its expression, that form ever follows function. ''This is the law.''
Sullivan developed the shape of the tall steel skyscraper in late 19th-century
Chicago (''City in a Garden''); I Will , image_map = , map_caption = Interactive Map of Chicago , coordinates = , coordinates_footnotes = , subdivision_type = Country , subdivision_name ...
at a moment in which technology, taste and economic forces converged and made it necessary to break with established styles. If the shape of the building was not going to be chosen out of the old pattern book, something had to determine form, and according to Sullivan it was going to be the purpose of the building. Thus, "form follows function", as opposed to "form follows precedent". Sullivan's assistant Frank Lloyd Wright adopted and professed the same principle in a slightly different form—perhaps because shaking off the old styles gave them more freedom and latitude.


Debate on the functionality of ornamentation

In 1908, the Austrian architect
Adolf Loos Adolf Franz Karl Viktor Maria Loos (; 10 December 1870 – 23 August 1933) was an Austrian and Czechoslovak architect, influential European theorist, and a polemicist of modern architecture. He was an inspiration to modernism and a widely- ...
wrote an allegorical essay titled "
Ornament and Crime "Ornament and Crime" is an essay and lecture by modernist architect Adolf Loos that criticizes ornament in useful objects. History Contrary to popular belief that it was composed in 1908, Adolf Loos first gave the lecture in 1910 at the Akadem ...
" in reaction to the elaborate ornament used by the Vienna Secession architects. Modernists adopted Loos's moralistic argument as well as Sullivan's maxim. Loos had worked as a carpenter in the USA. He celebrated efficient plumbing and industrial artifacts like corn silos and steel water towers as examples of functional design.


Application in different fields


Architecture

The phrase "form (ever) follows function" became a battle cry of Modernist architects after the 1930s. The credo was taken to imply that decorative elements, which architects call "ornament", were superfluous in modern buildings. However, Sullivan himself neither thought nor designed along such lines at the peak of his career. Indeed, while his buildings could be spare and crisp in their principal masses, he often punctuated their plain surfaces with eruptions of lush Art Nouveau and Celtic Revival decorations, usually cast in iron or terracotta, and ranging from organic forms like vines and ivy, to more geometric designs, and interlace, inspired by his Irish design heritage. Probably the most famous example is the writhing green ironwork that covers the entrance canopies of the Carson, Pirie, Scott and Company Building on South State Street in Chicago. These ornaments, often executed by the talented younger draftsman in Sullivan's employ, would eventually become Sullivan's trademark; to students of architecture, they are his instantly recognizable signature.


Product design

One episode in the history of the inherent conflict between functional design and the demands of the marketplace took place in 1935, after the introduction of the streamlined Chrysler Airflow, when the American auto industry temporarily halted attempts to introduce optimal aerodynamic forms into mass manufacture. Some car-makers thought aerodynamic efficiency would result in a single optimal auto-body shape, a "teardrop" shape, which would not be good for unit sales. General Motors adopted two different positions on streamlining, one meant for its internal engineering community, the other meant for its customers. Like the annual model year change, so-called aerodynamic styling is often meaningless in terms of technical performance. Subsequently,
drag coefficient In fluid dynamics, the drag coefficient (commonly denoted as: c_\mathrm, c_x or c_) is a dimensionless quantity that is used to quantify the drag or resistance of an object in a fluid environment, such as air or water. It is used in the drag e ...
has become both a marketing tool and a means of improving the sale-ability of a car by reducing its fuel consumption, slightly, and increasing its top speed, markedly. The American industrial designers of the 1930s and '40s like Raymond Loewy,
Norman Bel Geddes Norman Bel Geddes (born Norman Melancton Geddes; April 27, 1893 – May 8, 1958) was an American theatrical and industrial designer. Early life Bel Geddes was born Norman Melancton Geddes in Adrian, Michigan and was raised in New Philadelp ...
and Henry Dreyfuss grappled with the inherent contradictions of "form follows function" as they redesigned blenders and locomotives and duplicating machines for mass-market consumption. Loewy formulated his "MAYA" (Most Advanced Yet Acceptable) principle to express that product designs are bound by functional constraints of math and materials and logic, but their acceptance is constrained by social expectations. His advice was that for very new technologies, they should be made as familiar as possible, but for familiar technologies, they should be made surprising. By honestly applying "form follows function", industrial designers had the potential to put their clients out of business. Some simple single-purpose objects like screwdrivers and pencils and teapots might be reducible to a single optimal form, precluding
product differentiation In economics and marketing, product differentiation (or simply differentiation) is the process of distinguishing a product or service from others to make it more attractive to a particular target market. This involves differentiating it from co ...
. Some objects made too durable would prevent sales of replacements. (''cf.''
planned obsolescence In economics and industrial design, planned obsolescence (also called built-in obsolescence or premature obsolescence) is a policy of planning or designing a good (economics), product with an artificially limited Product lifetime, useful life o ...
) From the standpoint of functionality, some products are simply unnecessary.
Victor Papanek Victor Josef Papanek (22 November 1923 – 10 January 1998) was an Austrian-born American designer and educator, who became a strong advocate of the socially and ecologically responsible design of products, tools, and community infrastructures ...
(1923–1998) was one influential twentieth century designer and design philosopher who taught and wrote as a proponent of "form follows function."


Software engineering

It has been argued that the structure and internal quality attributes of a working, non-trivial software artifact will represent first and foremost the engineering requirements of its construction, with the influence of process being marginal, if any. This does not mean that process is irrelevant, but that processes compatible with an artifact's requirements lead to roughly similar results. The principle can also be applied to enterprise application architectures of modern business, where "function" encompasses the business processes which should be assisted by the enterprise architecture, or "form". If the architecture were to dictate how the business operates, then the business is likely to suffer from inflexibility and the inability to adapt to change. Service-oriented architecture enables an enterprise architect to rearrange the "form" of the architecture to meet the functional requirements of a business by adopting standards based communication protocols which enable interoperability. This stands in conflict with Conway's law, which states from a social point of view that "form follows organization". Furthermore, domain-driven design postulates that structure (
software architecture Software architecture is the fundamental structure of a software system and the discipline of creating such structures and systems. Each structure comprises software elements, relations among them, and properties of both elements and relations. ...
,
design pattern A design pattern is the re-usable form of a solution to a design problem. The idea was introduced by the architect Christopher Alexander and has been adapted for various other disciplines, particularly software engineering. The "Gang of Four" boo ...
,
implementation Implementation is the realization of an application, or execution of a plan, idea, model, design, specification, standard, algorithm, or policy. Industry-specific definitions Computer science In computer science, an implementation is a real ...
) should emerge from constraints of the modeled domain ( functional requirement). While "form" and "function" may be more or less explicit and invariant concepts to the many engineering doctrines,
metaprogramming Metaprogramming is a programming technique in which computer programs have the ability to treat other programs as their data. It means that a program can be designed to read, generate, analyze or transform other programs, and even modify itself ...
and the
functional programming In computer science, functional programming is a programming paradigm where programs are constructed by applying and composing functions. It is a declarative programming paradigm in which function definitions are trees of expressions that ...
paradigm lend themselves very well to explore, blur and invert the essence of those two concepts. The agile software development movement espouses techniques such as 'test driven development' in which the engineer begins with a minimum unit of user oriented functionality, creates an automated test for such and then implements the functionality and iterates, repeating this process. The result and argument for this discipline are that the structure or 'form' emerges from actual function and in fact because done organically, makes the project more adaptable long term as well of as higher quality because of the functional base of automated tests.


Automobile designing

If the design of an automobile conforms to its function—for instance the
Fiat Multipla The Fiat Multipla (Type 186) is a six-seater car produced by Italian automaker Fiat from 1998 to 2010. Based on the Bravo/Brava, the Multipla was shorter and wider than its rivals. It had two rows of three seats, where its compact MPV competit ...
's shape, which is partly due to the desire to sit six people in two rows—then its form is said to follow its function.


See also

* Truth to materials * Aesthetics *
Design science (methodology) Design science is a research paradigm focusing on the development and validation of prescriptive knowledge. Herbert Simon distinguished the natural sciences, concerned with explaining how things are, from design sciences which are concerned with ho ...
*
Separation of content and presentation Separation of content and presentation (or separation of content and style) is the separation of concerns design principle as applied to the authoring and presentation of content. Under this principle, visual and design aspects (presentation and s ...
* The Grammar of Ornament, Owen Jones (architect)
Proposition 1
*
User-centered design User-centered design (UCD) or user-driven development (UDD) is a framework of process (not restricted to interfaces or technologies) in which usability goals, user characteristics, environment, tasks and workflow of a product, service or proc ...


Notes and references


External links


"E. H. Gombrich’s adoption of the formula form follows function: A case of mistaken identity?"
by Jan Michl

by Roy Behrens {{DEFAULTSORT:Form Follows Style Aesthetics Architectural theory Industrial design Modernism