THE PSEUDO PROBLEM OF FORM AND FUNCTION

If you are an architect or have any connection to architecture in any way possible, you most likely have heard the saying that “form follows function” coined by Louis Sullivan in the twentieth century, and how the postmodernist Bernard Tschumi rewrites it as “form follows fiction”. both of these sayings have some sort of truth in them, I think the problem of form and function is not native to the architecture discipline and to some extent is a product of western civilization.
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Let us look at the historical context where these statements have been said and it will become clearer how these statements are merely product of their time, the modernists were facing the problem of ornaments and a lot of architects argue against the use of ornamentation in architecture for multiple reasons , a great deal of architects saw the new capabilities and possibilities that were not exploited, such as large-scale iron production, the development of the glass industry and the use of concrete, all of which were made possible by the Industrial Revolution, and despite all of these technological advances classical architecture was dominant in most of Europe and the united states with few exceptions, the use of classical orders have been criticized and considered to be a dishonest expression of the zeitgeist (spirit of the time), Some architects in particular Adolf loos in his book “ornament and crime” argues against ornament from a Marxist point of view that the extra work and effort that are spent in adding ornaments are kind of oppression by the bourgeoisie on the working class.

On the other hand, postmodernists start to show contemn with the rationality characterized by the work of the modernist and start to point out the bad side of modern architecture which is the reduction of architecture to the functional aspect only (functionalism), which is a quite reasonable objection, but the way they dealt with the problem is to throw rationality out of the window.
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To say that form follows function is another way of saying that a building should be designed according to its use, so if you design a chair, the final shape will be influenced by the fact that a chair will be used as an object to sit-on, but a chair is not only an object to sit-on you can use it to decorate your house too, what I am trying to say is that it’s absurd to divorce form from function because they are deeply integrated and saying that form follows function or fiction is an over-simplification of a complex issue.