The architect who coined 'form follows function' covered his buildings in ornament.
Louis Sullivan wrote the phrase in 1896, and modernists turned it into a war cry against decoration. But Sullivan's own Chicago buildings erupted with lush ironwork and terracotta vines. What he actually wrote was more poetic, and his assistant Frank Lloyd Wright thought the slogan was only half right.
Louis Sullivan coined the maxim in an 1896 article, 'The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered', written as the steel-framed skyscraper was being born in Chicago. A new kind of building needed a new rule: if its shape wasn't going to come from the old pattern books, its purpose should decide it. His actual words were 'form ever follows function', embedded in a rhapsody about eagles, apple blossom, work-horses and drifting clouds: a law, he said, of all things organic and inorganic, admitting no exception.
The idea is older than the phrase. It is often wrongly credited to the American sculptor Horatio Greenough. A monk, Carlo Lodoli, had argued in the 18th century that in architecture only what has a definite function should be shown, and Sullivan himself traced the core idea back to the Roman writer Vitruvius, who said buildings must be solid, useful and beautiful.
After the 1930s, modernists took the slogan to mean that ornament was superfluous, alongside Adolf Loos's 1910 lecture 'Ornament and Crime'. Yet Sullivan never designed that way at the height of his career. His plain masses were punctuated with exuberant Art Nouveau and Celtic-inspired decoration in iron and terracotta, most famously the writhing green ironwork over the entrance of the Carson, Pirie, Scott store in Chicago. Frank Lloyd Wright, once Sullivan's assistant, preferred 'form and function are one'.
In product design the principle runs into commerce. Industrial designers such as Raymond Loewy grappled with it; his 'MAYA' rule, Most Advanced Yet Acceptable, admitted that people must also be ready to accept a design. Applied ruthlessly, the principle might reduce a teapot or screwdriver to one optimal form, leaving nothing to differentiate brands, and make products so durable nobody buys replacements.
Source: Wikipedia — Form follows function · Text summarised from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
