Buildings are not just art—they are the places people live in, work in, and experience every day. True functionalism combines utility and beauty for the people who use it most.
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. 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 hold functionalism to blame 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.
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.
The idea that we should reject aesthetics completely and care only about function
In normal English, being functional just means getting something done. That could involve anything from keeping a roof above one’s head to wowing viewers with spellbinding beauty. But in modern architectural theory, functionalism is usually understood as the idea that architects should aim principally at what philosophers would call nonaesthetic function: functions other than beauty.
Two arguments can be given for setting aside aesthetic goals in architecture. The first says we should never attempt to pursue aesthetic goals in buildings, the second that only by pursuing pure utilitarian goals can we create beauty. Neither argument is persuasive.
The first argument says that beauty is not valuable enough for architects to pursue. According to this view, beauty is a distraction from more deserving goals, something frivolous or even harmful. Someone who accepts this argument is an anti-aesthetic functionalist.
I am not sure many people would seriously accept this argument. (I know of just one who would.) On the other hand, people often say things that imply that architects should not value beauty, even if they would retreat to a more moderate view if pressed. So, it is worthwhile to take a moment to say why this extreme form of functionalism should be rejected.
There are, of course, circumstances in which it is reasonable to sacrifice beauty to more urgent needs – the need for housing in a strained postwar economy, for example. Taken as an idea that is meant to apply irrespective of circumstance, however, anti-aesthetic functionalism faces two important objections.
First, beauty is sometimes the very instrument that achieves some nonaesthetic goal. For example, there is some evidence that more attractive buildings have beneficial effects on health and a higher sales value. Ugly buildings, by contrast, are at risk of being shunned, neglected, and finally demolished to make way for something more marketable, in what can be an extremely wasteful process. The Robin Hood Gardens housing estate, discussed below, is a classic example. Frequently, as Victor Hugo writes, ‘the beautiful is as useful as the useful’. For this reason, one cannot consistently prioritize nonaesthetic goals at the expense of beauty.
Secondly, even setting aside its purely functional benefits, beauty is itself a kind of function in architecture. One function of any surface or object that we look at is to please us aesthetically. People want aesthetically pleasing buildings and, where circumstances allow, it is a good thing to try to meet people’s wants, though of course people sometimes disagree about exactly what qualifies as aesthetically pleasing. Under times of strain, it might be necessary to forgo good design, in the same way that it can be necessary to ration eggs and butter in wartime. But there is no good reason to do so if it is cheap to achieve.
For two reasons, then, the idea that architects should not value beauty is a nonstarter. We can’t consistently prioritize nonaesthetic goals at the expense of beauty and we wouldn’t want to if we could.
Prioritizing functionality because functionality itself is beautiful
There is a second argument for prioritizing nonaesthetic functions in architecture that, unlike the first, acknowledges the value of beauty. This second argument says that it is by aiming at nonaesthetic goals that one achieves aesthetic success. So while beauty is important, it should be sought indirectly, by creating functional buildings.
Take the sight of a panther leaping. What we find beautiful in this spectacle – the efficient use of nerve and sinew, the harmony of multiple limbs acting as one – none of this exists because it is beautiful. It evolved for practical ends: ultimately, reproductive success. And yet, beauty arises as an indirect outcome.
So too, this second argument says, with architecture. The vaulted ceilings of Gothic cathedrals, for example, exist to distribute the weight of a roof. And yet, in this practical function, they achieve considerable beauty.
Some of the early functionalist buildings of Adolf Loos or Ludwig Mies van der Rohe are also both popular and beautiful. And yet, it is at least asserted that they achieve this beauty through pursuing nonaesthetic goals. We can also see this effect in suspension bridges, arched bridges, airplanes, seaships, and Victorian trainsheds, among many other things.
This second argument leads to a view that acknowledges the value of beauty insofar as it can be achieved indirectly, by aiming at nonaesthetic goals.
It is often assumed that this is what the ‘father of skyscrapers’, Louis Sullivan intended when he wrote that ‘form follows function’. In fact, Sullivan had something else in mind, to which I return in a moment.
Adolf Loos’s 1908 diatribe, ‘Ornament and Crime’, provides a better example. Loos insists that elements that lack a nonaesthetic function only detract from a building’s beauty – at least for cultivated onlookers. (Loos’s essay also contains some bizarre material about ‘spiritual strength’ and ‘cultural degeneracy’ that will surprise anyone who associates modernist architecture with progressive politics.) Another example of the view that architects should focus on nonaesthetic function as a means for achieving beauty indirectly is Le Corbusier’s 1923 Towards an Architecture, which is heavily influenced by Loos.
The view I am attributing to Loos and Le Corbusier contains a genuine insight: efficient achievement of nonaesthetic goals often is beautiful. But it also contains an important oversight: pursuing nonaesthetic goals is plainly not the only good way of achieving beauty.
The fact is that gothic vaults only very imprecisely serve the needs of engineering. And the flat roofs of early modernist houses are often less practical for keeping off the weather than the old-fashioned pitched roof. These examples are beautiful despite a certain degree of impracticality.
Then there is the obvious fact that great beauty is often achieved by elements that do not even pretend to have some immediate practical purpose. The exquisite geometrical patterns of Islamic tile art, for instance, do not help keep walls up or weather out. And yet their beauty is rightly regarded as extremely valuable.
So, insofar as functionalism is the view that architects should focus on nonaesthetic goals only, either because beauty does not matter or as the only good means to achieve beauty, functionalism is a waste of time.
Function and aspect perception
There is an important insight in functionalism that is less often appreciated, however. An insight that helps make sense of some contemporary responses to the built environment, including the divergence in taste between the general public and specialists.
When Sullivan wrote that form follows function, he did not mean that a highly functional building will be beautiful. He meant that the function of a building, and its component parts, determines what kind of form will make it beautiful. This brings us closer to the understanding of function that motivated Albert Kahn when he built glass-and-steel factory buildings yet Tudor private houses.
Sullivan was thinking about the then-novel problem of making a tall office block attractive. He concluded that, rather than adapting the existing forms of squatter buildings, we should come up with a design that plays to the strength of loftiness.
In elaborating his view, Sullivan makes some questionable claims. For example, he asserts that every story above the ground floor and beneath the attic of a tall office building serves the same purpose and must, therefore, look identical. That sounds a little extreme. However, Sullivan’s basic point, that the function of a building determines the form we should choose to make it beautiful, can be developed in another, more fruitful direction.
It will be useful to begin with a comment from the American aesthetician Kendall Walton’s article ‘Categories of Art’. Academic aesthetics is little read outside of universities, so readers are unlikely to have encountered this work unless they have taken a class in aesthetics at university. But in Anglo-American aesthetics since the Second World War, it is probably one of the ten most widely read texts.
A marble bust of a Roman emperor seems to us to resemble a man with, say, an aquiline nose, a wrinkled brow, and an expression of grim determination . . . But why don’t we say that it resembles and represents a perpetually motionless man, of uniform (marble) color, who is severed at the chest? It is similar to such a man, it seems, and much more so than to a normally colored, mobile, and whole man. But we are not struck by the former similarity when we see the bust, obvious though it is on reflection.
Walton draws our attention to a surprising fact. Without thinking about it, we experience the bust as resembling a grim-faced emperor, but not as resembling a marble-colored man severed at the chest.
The explanation, Walton argues, is that contextual and historical factors prompt us to experience this artwork as belonging to a certain genre, that of Roman busts, and this transforms our experience of it.
Walton develops a detailed theory of how history, context and genre interact to generate our experience of artworks. For present purposes, however, it is enough to recognize that context can prompt very different experiences of the exact same object.
In other words, artistic context can cause shifts in aspect perception, the phenomenon illustrated by the duck-rabbit illusion, made famous by the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein.
Here are some examples involving architecture.
Orson Welles’s cinematization of Franz Kafka’s The Trial is aesthetically brilliant, in part because of the buildings it features. While watching the film, viewers enjoy looking at those buildings. And yet, many viewers would dislike looking at the very same buildings if they lived near them.
An inverse case is the postwar Southeast London development of Thamesmead. Thamesmead strikes many as painfully ugly, but viewed as the scenery of a dystopian tragedy, it could be a work of sublime brilliance.
Though this observation might sound flippant, it is not intended as such. There really is a valuable aesthetic experience to be had by viewing the buildings of Thamesmead as a film set. If you were a location scout for a dystopian tragedy, you might take one look at Thamesmead and be flooded by the sense that it looks perfect. This is, in fact, how various filming locations in The Trial were chosen, and how Thamesmead became the backdrop to Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange.
Consider next Dover Castle.
There is not much to distinguish this building from the most drab and blocky brutalism. And yet, those who loathe brutalism may have an entirely different perception of the medieval castle – one saturated with romance and heroism.
Take, finally, the Haus der Kunst in Munich.
Out of context, many will find this building austerely impressive. It is, after all, an example of what, at the time, was an international style, appreciated the world over. Viewed as Nazi Germany’s first major architectural project, however, the same forms strike us as cold, unyielding, overbearing, and deeply ominous.
Context makes a great difference to our appreciation of architecture – to the experience we have when we view it.
Moreover, it seems clear that divergent yet equally valid aesthetic experiences of the very same buildings can result from viewing them in different contexts. And those contexts can even be fictional or imaginary, as when we view Thamesmead as movie scenery.
Furthermore, audiences bring much of the relevant context with them, in their past experience, background knowledge, and imaginative impulses. This fact goes some way toward explaining the divergence between professional and lay architectural taste.
As I mentioned at the start of this essay, there exists evidence for a design disconnect involving a strong preference for traditional styles among non–design specialists and a preference for new styles among design specialists. For example, in a 1987 study by David Halpern, architecture students and other students rated the attractiveness of unfamiliar buildings. The two groups expressed directly opposing views. In Halpern’s words, ‘the architects all agreed with one another as to which buildings were attractive, and the non-architects all agreed with one another as to which buildings were attractive, but there was almost no correspondence between the two sets of preferences.’ Subsequent studies have replicated Halpern’s results.
The reason for the design disconnect is partly that people steeped in the recent history and theory of architecture bring an enormous amount of context to bear on the buildings they appreciate. It should be no surprise that this transforms their experience. Take, for example, the Kunsthaus Graz.
Many find this building exceptionally ugly. And yet a jury of art world grandees unanimously chose the design from more than 100 proposals because of the way in which it ‘evades current architectural interpretations’.
It is possible that this consensus arose out of a shared aesthetic experience that depends on a knowledge of contemporary architectural theory that most of us lack. Maybe the appalled response of lay viewers would strike the jury members in the same way as someone who sees the bust of Julius Caesar and says, ‘That’s ridiculous, the rest of his body has been sliced off but he hasn’t noticed!’
If so, this ought to diffuse some of the incomprehension felt by nonspecialists at the kind of buildings that are celebrated in the architecture profession. It should also dispel the sense that those who disagree with one’s aesthetic judgements are necessarily being perverse or disingenuous.
This ecumenical lesson is one positive outcome of recognizing how context affects our experience of buildings. It does not, however, yield much practical guidance on how we should build. It is here that it is useful to return to functionalism.
True functionalism
At its core, functionalism draws our attention to an important difference between architecture and many other artforms. When it comes to paintings, sculptures, novels, plays, and symphonies, for example, the function of the artwork, its principal goal, simply is to be appreciated as an artwork.
By contrast, with rare exceptions, buildings have a nonaesthetic function. Houses, though they are not machines, are in fact for living in. Offices and factories serve as places of work. Transportation hubs facilitate movement. Libraries, museums, and theaters provide spaces for cultural and intellectual engagement. Each of these practical functions provides a context in which the building is typically viewed by the people who live in and around it.
Seen as the set of a dystopian tragedy, Thamesmead is a work of brilliance. The experience of Thamesmead as such has real aesthetic value. But it substitutes an imaginary function for the real function of the buildings in question. As such, this is not the experience that most people looking at Thamesmead will have most of the time.
The lesson we should take from functionalism is that, while there are unlimited contexts, real and imaginary, in which a building can legitimately be viewed, there is usually some functional context that should take precedence when deciding what to build. The functional context is simply the context created by the purpose of the building. It should take precedence when deciding what to build because it is the context in which the most important stakeholders – those who live and work in and around the building – will ordinarily see it.
This makes architecture very different from other art forms. There is no functional context of a symphony, because we do not produce symphonies to perform some nonaesthetic function, like serving as a home, workplace, or similar, and then, incidentally, appreciate how they sound.
Crucially, insofar as the general public are not steeped in the recent history and theory of architecture, this will not be part of the functional context of most buildings.
Where questions arise about the kind of buildings we should construct, therefore, it is not enough to ask whether the building is beautiful when viewed in some real or imagined context. Neither should we ask whether it is beautiful when viewed in the context of the history and theory of architecture – that is, when viewed by experts.
Rather, we should ask whether a building is beautiful when viewed in the context created by its nonaesthetic function. ‘Sure’, we might say, ‘this hospital can be seen as a witty riposte to Gropius’s comments on standardization, but is it also a pleasant place for an ordinary person to convalesce?’ ‘Certainly, this housing estate has an awesome grandeur, when we view it as a monument to the machine age, but does it also work as a home for human beings?’
There will be certain exceptions to this rule. Occasionally, a building has no practical function beyond aesthetic appreciation. The follies that ornament the gardens of stately homes, for example, might as well be treated as sculptures of buildings – perhaps they are, really, sculptures of buildings.
There will also be cases where some historical context takes precedence over aesthetic effect. We do not preserve the Haus der Kunst because it makes a beautiful art gallery, but because it serves as a salutary reminder of the atrocities of recent history.
And, sometimes, the aesthetic value of a building when viewed under the gaze of experts, as a contribution to the history and theory of architecture, will be so great that it is reasonable to let this outweigh the interests of those who lack the relevant expertise. (Perhaps this is true of the Kunsthaus Graz?)
Even so, the general rule is that the context created by the practical function of a building is the most relevant for evaluating it aesthetically. For it is this context that will play the principal role in determining the aesthetic effect the building has on most of its viewers. Often, this will mean favoring styles that the general public like over those favored by design professionals.
Properly applied, this lesson would save us from many errors. Take, for example, Robin Hood Gardens, London. As with much brutalist architecture, viewed as an artwork, and with the right kind of aesthetic attitude, this housing estate has much to offer. There is something thrilling about the rough exterior and relentless repetition of cells – something of what Immanuel Kant called the ‘mathematical sublime’, a sense of awe, akin to terror, but enjoyed from safety.
Unlike a painting, symphony, or film set, however, Robin Hood Gardens is not just an artwork. It has the practical function of providing housing for real people. Viewed in this context, as the place one has to return to after work, spend one’s leisure hours, or raise one’s children, the same structure strikes most people as oppressive, ugly, and depressing. From the functionalist perspective I am advocating, it was a mistake to build Robin Hood Gardens, and that is why it is now being pulled down.
Planners should take heed. It often happens that an unpopular building is approved on the basis of its innovative design when seen in the context of architectural history and theory – Montparnasse Tower, Boston City Hall, or the Scottish Parliament for example. We should be wary of such arguments, for they are based on an experience of the building that most stakeholders will not share. Hence the controversial nature of the buildings listed.
Architects should also be mindful of these observations. In an article for the Royal Academy, Ron Arad laments the fact that ‘architects have to sell their ideas and reasons to planners on committees who, although less educated and qualified than them, have the last say’. In Arad’s opinion, the world would be a better place if they abolished planning and left design decisions to the experts.
According to the kind of functionalism I am defending, Arad’s grounds for dissatisfaction are mistaken. Architects may be more educated than planners, but it does not follow that they are better qualified to decide what should be built. On the contrary, architectural training can have a tendency to disqualify someone from making such decisions on their own. As Sullivan himself says:
The tall office building should not, must not, be made a field for the display of architectural knowledge… Too much learning in this instance is fully as dangerous, as obnoxious, as too little learning.
Planners should not be intimidated by architects’ superior education and expertise into approving designs they find unconvincing.The specialized tastes of design professionals are legitimate and the aesthetic experiences they give rise to authentic. But where those tastes diverge from the wider population, we should allow the practical function of a building to determine whose preferences to take most into account. Paradoxically, this will often mean rejecting the kind of structure that has come to be associated with the term functionalist.