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an essay on the subject by John Clark

By Mike A. Mense FAIA Member Emeritus posted 12-17-2014 09:49 PM

  
Form Follows Function
“It is the pervading law of all things organic and inorganic,
Of all things physical and metaphysical,
Of all things human, and all things super-human,
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.”
---Louis H. Sullivan
I was reminded again today, while reviewing a project designed from the outside in, and in which the mechanical, plumbing, and structural systems were all awkwardly configured and misaligned, how unique the Chicago perspective on architectural design is. This project annoyed me because it strayed so far from everything I’ve come to value about good architectural design from my Chicago based background. Chicago architecture, at its best, sees architecture as the interrelationship of aesthetics, structure, mechanical systems, and often the environment. In 1896 Louis Sullivan wrote, “Form ever follows function. This is the law.” This saying, which he derived from Vitruvius by way of Horatio Greenough, has been repeated so often that it is now a design cliché. Sullivan’s apprentice Frank Lloyd Wright refined it, saying “Form and Function are One.” How a building functions is governed as much by its form as its form is governed by function: Both are simultaneous, and have equal emphasis. He also said, anticipating Le Corbusier by more than two decades, “The tall modern office building is the machine pure and simple.” A building has to function efficiently to be effective architecture.
What this has meant, going back to the architects of the First Chicago School, is an architecture that tries to take into account and unify a building’s aesthetics with how it is constructed, how it functions, and how it is experienced. Architects of the First Chicago School such as Burnham and Root, Adler and Sullivan, were “master builders”: They handled construction for large buildings directly, with a “clerk of the works” operating from their offices, tendering contracts to subcontractors. There were no general contractors. Architects knew how to build. Since they were so intimately involved in building construction, they were constantly designing new technical improvements.
Wright arose from this tradition. Though he became a paragon of it, his early advanced designs such as for air conditioning, integrated lighting, radiant slabs, cantilevered wall hung toilets, were very much in keeping with this tradition. His 1901 lecture at Hull House, “The Art and Craft of the Machine,” embraced the artistic potential of the machine: “The Machine is Intellect mastering the drudgery of earth that the plastic art may live; that the margin of leisure and strength by which man's life upon the earth can be made beautiful, may immeasurably widen; its function ultimately to emancipate human expression!”
In this same early essay Wright also anticipated a school that taught artists to use machinery, and in doing so he anticipated the Bauhaus: “I will go further and say what I believe to be true, that not one educational institution in America has as yet attempted to forge the connecting link between Science and Art by training the artist to his actual tools, or, by a process of nature-study that develops in him the power of independent thought, fitting to him to use them properly.” Because industrial fabrication for construction elements such as metal extrusions favored simple forms, straight lines and right angles, the aesthetic of Wright, of the Bauhaus, and of modern architects favored them as well. To a great extent this aesthetic of “Form Follows Industrialization” is still with us.
The construction clarity of the architecture of the First Chicago School anticipated the Second Chicago School’s further fusing form and function. Mies van der Rohe’s arrival in Chicago during the 1940s rekindled Chicago’s construction-based aesthetics. In a very real sense the best postwar Bauhaus buildings were built in Chicago, rather than in Germany, by practitioners like Betrand Goldberg, who had trained at the Bauhaus; and by Mies van der Rohe, who was the best of its architectural teachers, as well as by his students and followers who learned from him in Chicago.
Yet there was one area of function that, from a contemporary perspective, was largely overlooked. Few of these early practitioners were concerned with the environment and sustainability. Those who were included Sullivan, who took climatic and environmental considerations into account, though perhaps more in his writings than his design; as well as his protégé Wright; and the Keck brothers, who pioneered passive solar design and natural cooling. But in this era of cheap energy, modern architects like Mies frequently built with uninsulated steel; and with intentionally rudimentary mechanical systems, so that structural clarity and expression could be better afforded.
Buckminster Fuller, the visionary architect-engineer who also lived for a time in Chicago, became an early critic of the International Style as being more concerned with form than function. Fuller considered function broadly, and was among the first to consider environmental effect and ecology: “Shelter means the instrumental safety and the service of ecology and economics combined.” This blending of architecture, economics and ecology, written in the thirties, placed Fuller at least half a century in advance of a movement that seeks to reconcile architectural design with resource conservation and efficiency, and the conservation of material and energy. This is a movement that opposes design entropy and “Form for Form’s Sake,” and that has tremendous urgency today.
Fuller’s aesthetic is one that enhanced structural and material integrity through resource conservation. “Ecology” comes from the Greek oikos, or home: Fuller viewed the earth holistically as humanity’s home, and was among the first concerned with adapting contemporary construction techniques with sustainable resource use. Working to enclose maximum volume with minimum material, and to do more with less, Fuller was fond of asking, “How much does your building weigh?” His famous geodesic domes favor the geometries found in natural forms such as bubbles, crystals, and honeycombs.
Though weight itself is no guaranty of sustainability, it can be an indicator. Advances in fabrication through computer technology, including 3D Printing, now make it possible to use material more effectively. Concrete for example is a material with no inherent form: It can be molded into any shape. Construction economics have normally favored rectangular forms, so in a sense “form has followed formwork.” A more effective concrete beam shape would be one that follows the stresses along a beam, so that it would more resemble a bone or a natural object than a rectangular element. Now, with computer enhanced fabrication, as these more expressive shapes become more prevalent, architecture will become more informed with the beauty of natural physics, in which “Form Follows Nature.” This will lead to a new aesthetic maturity. As Alvar Aalto once wrote, “…the profoundest feature in architecture is a variety and growth reminiscent of natural life. I should like to say that in the end this is the only real style in architecture.”
John W. Clark, Chicago December 2014
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