The purpose of a building is how it looks
True functionalism combines utility and beauty
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Apple completed its $5 billion, 2.8 million square foot headquarters in 2017. A CNBC piece at the time commented that, ‘as with any Apple product, its shape would be determined by its function’. The architects Herzog & de Meuron completed their comparably modest $600 million ‘Jenga Tower’ the same year. A leading design magazine praised this building as a ‘successful combination of far-out urban fantasy and pragmatic machine-à-habiter’.
These remarks are about two major building projects of the last decade. But their language is emblematic of an architectural tradition more than 100 years old. The comments allude, respectively, to Louis Sullivan’s claim that the form of a building should follow its function, and to Le Corbusier’s assertion that a house is a machine for living in, statements that have become synonymous with the architectural tradition known as functionalism.
Funtionalism is a design philosophy that emphasizes the purpose of a building or structure. This could mean many things, but in modern architecture, functionalism has generally meant prioritizing utility, efficiency, and convenience for the user; minimizing ornamentation; and preferring modern materials and technologies.
Functionalism dominated the architecture of the twentieth century and its staples, from commercial glass towers to prefabricated schools and prisons, are still produced in great quantities.1 And functionalist terminology can be found everywhere in architectural discourse today. For example, a profile of Norman Foster’s Tower 425 Park Avenue states that ‘the tower’s form is a pure expression of its function’. Bjarke Ingels calls projects such as his Manhattan supertall The Spiral ‘pragmatic utopias’. And Carol Ross Barney describes the Aerospace Communications Facility she designed for NASA as ‘unabashedly pragmatic . . . a building that’s driven by its function’.
The built environment of the modern world is overwhelmingly functionalist. For many, this is a bad thing. In their widely read article ‘Why You Hate Contemporary Architecture’, Adrian Rennix and Nathan J Robinson blame functionalism for making modern towns and cities deeply ugly. Readers – with the exception of architects and other design professionals – tended to agree. This is what researchers call the ’design disconnect’: according to visual preference surveys, most people favor traditional architecture and dislike new styles whereas design professionals have the opposite preferences.2
It might seem that functionalism is an idea bound to alienate people from their built environment. But if we look more closely at the history of architecture, the picture becomes less clear. The great Detroit architect Albert Kahn is often seen as a functionalist, believing that the form and character of a building should be determined by its function. But he interpreted this wildly differently from the modernists. Kahn built glass-and-steel factories, Renaissance libraries, Deco office blocks, classical civic buildings, and Tudor private houses. He chose these diverse and aesthetically rich forms because he regarded them as appropriate to each building’s function.
The key question is how the idea of a building’s function is understood. There are indeed influential understandings of function that generate the harsh and inhumane version of functionalism with which we are so familiar. But they are also misunderstandings. Plug the right understanding of function into functionalism – for example, that a house is a nice place to live, an office an efficient place to work, and a pub a cozy place to drink – and a powerful and valuable theory of architecture emerges that deserves our renewed attention.
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Ralph S Weir is a philosopher at the University of Lincoln and the University of Oxford.
These architectural mainstays can claim descent from the functionalist pioneers Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Jean Prouvé respectively.
For a comprehensive overview, see Nicholas Boys Smith’s Heart in the Right Street. Reviews of older and more recent research by Robert Adam and by Francisco Contreras Chávez and David Milner can be read in Architectural preferences in the UK, published on the Works in Progress blog and Architecture for Architects? published in New Design Ideas Vol. 3 respectively. See also Policy Exchange’s surveys on public support for traditional hospital design and civic architecture.
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