This has been quoted, used and abused so much that it has become wafer thin. (50 million results in Google.)
According to Wikipedia Louis Sullivan “borrowed” the quote from Horatio Greenough. Sullivan actually said: “Form ever follows function.” However, an Italian Jesuit monk Carlo Lodoli seemed to have laid the foundation for the Modernist credo in 1750 and Greenough while in Italy might have stumbled onto it.
Frank Lloyd Wright must have been in one of his many naughty moods when he proclaimed that: “Form follows function – that has been misunderstood. Form and function should be one, joined in a spiritual union. ”
Form follows function has, from Lodoli onwards, been a reaction against ornamentation, an attempt to express beauty in its purest and most simple, naked form. Adolf Loos wrote in 1906 an articel called “Ornament and Crime” in which he proclaimed that it was a waste of effort to add decoration to any product and that the decoration would soon be out of style. The machine aesthetics of the early 20th century dreamed of pure beauty freed from ornamentation. After all, Le Corbusier called decorative arts ‘the final spasm of a predictable death’, although when Le Corbusier talked about the beauty of mass manufactured goods, he wrongly used a hand-made Bugatti as an example of machine made aesthetics.
According to Reyner Banham Form follows function was an “empty jingle”, I could not agree more. It is not that I proclaim to abandon the credo, I think we should try to forget it. A scene in Fawlty Towers comes to my mind, Basil Fawlty is having car problems and decides to beat his car with a branch for letting him down. This is a scene from the late 70’s, when cheap cars such as the one Fawlty is driving had the tendancy to breakdown any moment. A Simca was said to start rusting in the show room.
Today, cars, even the cheapest ones start, anytime and they don’t rust. The technical functionality of the cars have been driven to such a perfection that we can forget about function and instead focus on design not as an expression of a function, but as an expression of an expression, self-expression. We buy cars, or any other products as a way of expressing ourselves. (more about this later).