Form follows function
In 1896, Sullivan coined the phrase in an article titled The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered,[4] though he later attributed the core idea to the Roman architect, engineer, and author Marcus Vitruvius Pollio, who first asserted in his book De architectura that a structure must exhibit the three qualities of firmness, commodity, and delight — that is, it must be solid, useful, and beautiful.
The full quote is:[6] Whether it be the sweeping eagle in his flight, or the open apple-blossom, the toiling work-horse, the blithe swan, the branching oak, the winding stream at its base, the drifting clouds, over all the coursing sun, form ever follows function, and this is the law.
Sullivan developed the shape of the tall steel skyscraper in late 19th-century Chicago at a moment in which technology, taste and economic forces converged and made it necessary to break with established styles.
He celebrated efficient plumbing and industrial artifacts like corn silos and steel water towers as examples of functional design.
Indeed, while his buildings could be spare and crisp in their principal masses, he often punctuated their plain surfaces with eruptions of lush Art Nouveau and Celtic Revival decorations, usually cast in iron or terracotta, and ranging from organic forms like vines and ivy, to more geometric designs, and interlace, inspired by his Irish design heritage.
Probably the most famous example is the writhing green ironwork that covers the entrance canopies of the Carson, Pirie, Scott and Company Building on South State Street in Chicago.
If the design of an automobile conforms to its function—for instance, the Fiat Multipla's shape, which is partly due to the desire to sit six people in two rows—then its form is said to follow its function.
[12] One episode in the history of the inherent conflict between functional design and the demands of the marketplace took place in 1935, after the introduction of the streamlined Chrysler Airflow, when the American auto industry temporarily halted attempts to introduce optimal aerodynamic forms into mass manufacture.
Subsequently, drag coefficient has become both a marketing tool and a means of improving the sale-ability of a car by reducing its fuel consumption, slightly, and increasing its top speed, markedly.
The American industrial designers of the 1930s and 1940s like Raymond Loewy, Norman Bel Geddes and Henry Dreyfuss grappled with the inherent contradictions of "form follows function" as they redesigned blenders and locomotives and duplicating machines for mass-market consumption.
[citation needed] Some simple single-purpose objects like screwdrivers and pencils and teapots might be reducible to a single optimal form, precluding product differentiation.
[14] It has been argued that the structure and internal quality attributes of a working, non-trivial software artifact will represent first and foremost the engineering requirements of its construction, with the influence of process being marginal, if any.
This stands in conflict with Conway's law,[citation needed] which states from a social point of view that "form follows organization".
