Form Follows Function: Sullivan, Modernism and the Misunderstanding

Form follows function means that the form of a building or object should be determined by what it is to be used for. The phrase comes from the American architect Louis Sullivan, who in 1896 wrote “form ever follows function” in an essay on how tall office buildings should be designed. He did not mean that ornament was wrong; his own skyscrapers, such as the Wainwright Building, are richly decorated. He meant that form should grow out of the building’s purpose, like a plant or an animal. Modernism later turned the phrase into a motto against all decoration.

Facts

What Sullivan actually wrote

Sullivan was one of the architects in Chicago who, after the fire of 1871, built the first tall office buildings with steel frames and lifts. The problem he raised in his essay of 1896 was new: what should a building with ten or twenty identical office floors look like? There was no model in history. His answer was to look to nature. The eagle in flight, the apple blossom and the workhorse all have the form their lives require, he wrote, and so form ever follows function. It is a law.

For Sullivan, then, function was something large: not just the practical, but the building’s whole character and expression. A tall building should look tall, proud and soaring. Ornament was not forbidden, but part of how the building expressed its life. His ornament in terracotta and cast iron, with twining leaves and geometric patterns, is among the most beautiful in American architecture.

The skyscraper as a column

The idea can be seen in the Wainwright Building in St Louis, which Sullivan designed with Dankmar Adler in 1890–1891. The building is divided like a classical column: a base with shops and the entrance, a shaft of office floors and a capital with a frieze of terracotta ornament and a heavy cornice. The piers run unbroken through all the office floors and make the building vertical, while the spandrels between the windows are set back and filled with ornament.

The division follows the function: the ground floor is open to the street, the office floors resemble one another because the offices do, and the top floor housed the mechanical equipment. This is form following function in Sullivan’s sense, and at the same time a building full of decoration. The background is in the guide to the history of the skyscraper.

From Sullivan to Modernism

Sullivan’s best-known pupil was Frank Lloyd Wright, who worked in his office and called him his master. Wright thought the phrase was often misunderstood and said that form and function should be one. In Vienna Adolf Loos went further. In the lecture Ornament and Crime of 1910 he claimed that ornament was waste, and his building on Michaelerplatz, the Looshaus, was given smooth façades without window surrounds. Read more in the guide to Vienna 1900.

After the First World War form follows function became the motto of Modernism. Walter Gropius built the Bauhaus building in Dessau in 1925–1926 with glass façades and a plan in which every part was given the form its use required. Le Corbusier wrote that the house is a machine for living in. In Sweden the idea broke through with the Stockholm Exhibition of 1930, and the following year Gunnar Asplund and five co-authors published the manifesto Acceptera. How it looked in practice is shown by the guide to Functionalism, and the philosophical background by the aesthetics of Modernism in the art section.

The misunderstanding

As a slogan the phrase was simplified. It came to mean that a building should be as simple and practical as possible, and that everything not needed was unworthy. But the function of a building is seldom merely practical. A church should create solemnity, a town hall represent a city and a home be pleasant to live in. Sullivan’s own concept embraced all of this.

The criticism came in the 1960s. Robert Venturi answered Mies van der Rohe’s “less is more” with “less is a bore” in the book Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture of 1966, and his house for his mother in Philadelphia became a manifesto for an architecture that is allowed to be ambiguous and to tell a story. Peter Blake published a book in 1977 entitled Form Follows Fiasco. Postmodernism, which you can read about in the guide to Postmodern architecture, wanted to give buildings their meaning and symbolism back.

Form follows function in design

The phrase became just as important in design. At the Bauhaus designers were trained to start from material, manufacture and use, and after the Second World War the Ulm School and the company Braun carried the idea on. Dieter Rams summed it up in the words “weniger, aber besser”, less but better. The phrase is explained in the design section’s glossary, and the ideas in the guides to the Bauhaus and Dieter Rams.

Today form follows function is often used as a simple rule for good design: remove what is not needed. It is a good rule, but Sullivan’s question was larger. He wanted to know what a new kind of building was and how it could be given a form as self-evident as an eagle’s wings.

The phrase in brief

Exercise

Who formulated the phrase form follows function?