The Architecture of Use

Aesthetics and Function in Architectural Design

Stephen Grabow, Kent Spreckelmeyer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781135016456
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Arquitectura
• Subtopic: Arquitectura general

By analyzing ten examples of buildings that embody the human experience at an extraordinary level, this book clarifies the central importance of the role of function in architecture as a generative force in determining built form. Using familiar twentieth-century buildings as case studies, the authors present these from a new perspective, based on their functional design concepts. Here Grabow and Spreckelmeyer expand the definition of human use to that of an art form by re-evaluating these buildings from an aesthetic and ecological view of function.

Each building is described from the point of view of a major functional concept or idea of human use which then spreads out and influences the spatial organization, built form and structure. In doing so each building is presented as an exemplar that reaches beyond the pragmatic concerns of a narrow program and demonstrates how functional concepts can inspire great design, evoke archetypal human experience and help us to understand how architecture embodies the deeper purposes and meanings of everyday life.

Chapter 1 Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9780203758137-1

1.1 Thomas Cole, The Architect's Dream (1840)

1.2 Brinkman & Van der Vlugt, Van Nelle Factory, Rotterdam

At the end of the nineteenth century, the challenges facing the field of architecture were so deep that by the first decade of the next century, a new paradigm had emerged. Although the rise of modern architecture is often attributed to the invention and fascination for new building materials, new structural techniques, and new methods of construction associated with the early machine age, it was actually the changes in human activity brought on by industrialization that necessitated those inventions. Many of the buildings in which modern architecture was first expressed—such as large factories and warehouses, train stations and tall office buildings—did not even exist prior to the Industrial Revolution. Likewise, a host of social, economic, and environmental problems gave rise to the profession’s need to create a better world for the mass of people crowded into the industrial city.

The Legacy of Functionalism

Human use—or function—has always been a fundamental determinant of architectural form, but in the first decades of the twentieth century, the truthful adaptation of a building’s form to its purpose had become the principal idea with which the early proponents of modern architecture criticized the technical and aesthetic foundations of the prevailing, neoclassical paradigm. Consequently, modern architecture—especially the so-called international style associated with the Bauhaus—became identified with “functionalism.” Edward De Zurko, in his now-classic Origins of Functionalist Theory, defines functionalism as those theories of architecture “which make adaptation of form to purpose the basic guiding principle of design and the principal yardstick by which to measure the excellence or the beauty of architecture.”¹ Although this idea is closely associated with the modern movement, De Zurko reveals not only its antique origins (in Plato and Aristotle, philosophically, and in Vitruvius and Alberti, artistically) but its historical persistence as well (in Aquinas, Bacon, Goethe, and Ruskin to Sullivan, Wright, Le Corbusier, Gropius, and the Bauhaus).

Functionalism in the twentieth century, however, because of its attachment to industrialization—and to mechanical analogies—was open to early criticism. Lewis Mumford, in 1921, criticized early modern buildings for possessing only the “visual illusion of functionalism without achieving a truly functional architecture.”² Then, referring to some of the kitchen research done in Frankfurt in the late 1920s, he attacked the narrow, mechanistic definition of function derived from the industrial assembly line. Mumford, however, accepted functionalism as a basic design principle; his complaint was with the narrowness of its concerns. “It means,” he said, “that the time has come to integrate objective functions with subjective functions: to balance off mechanical facilities with biological needs, social commitments, and personal values.”³

More recently, Stanford Anderson has argued that the functionalism of modern architecture is perhaps a “myth”—that, at most, modern buildings are only metaphors of functionality; that is, they tell stories about function by using industrial details that allude to mechanical precision and efficiency.⁴ In this he agrees with William Curtis, who, in his survey of Modern Architecture since 1900, claims that the “myth of functionalism” derives from the fact that functions alone do not generate architectural form; rather, they can only be translated into form and space through the screen of style.⁵ In the case of modern architecture, the international style consisted of symbolic forms derived from industrial aesthetics, including mechanical principles of composition such as simple geometrical shapes, perfection of surfaces, and modular proportions.⁶ Even Christopher Alexander, who in the 1960s and 1970s probed into the functional origins of a building’s form more deeply than perhaps any theorist, concluded that functional expression alone could not account for the generative power of architectural form—rather, that a building’s functional requirements are only the embodiment of a deeper, more fundamental geometrical order that unites structure and function into an aesthetic whole.⁷

The critique of functionalism is thus threefold: first, that a building based purely on programmatic requirements—such as that espoused by only the most radical functionalists such as Hannes Meyer of the Bauhaus—is a rather jejune formulation of architectural design; second, that functional expression can easily lapse into symbolism without actually satisfying human needs and requirements; and, third, that even when programmatic requirements are fulfilled, it is often within a narrow, mechanistic view of function.

After the Second World War, this so-called metaphorical functionalism, as Curtis observed, became easily absorbed into the mainstream of mass consumerist values. “Functionalist discipline,” he says, “became confused with the instrumental purposes of real estate … and what had started as an alternative dream was absorbed by an all too dreary status quo.”⁸ In part, this can be attributed to the economic success of modern building technologies and the degree to which these processes served the narrow interests of developers, governmental bureaucracies, and industrialists. Simply put, early modern buildings were cheap to build, easy to regulate, and facile to replicate. This simplicity translated into an aesthetic sterility and monotony that quickly became the symbol of the modern movement. Stripped-down and flimsy versions of Le Corbusier’s vertical neighborhoods have become blights in every city in the world. Healthcare factories have replaced Alvar Aalto’s vision of healing machines, and contemporary architects struggle to convert them into places for human caring and comfort. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s commercial high-rise has become both a totem of capitalist success as well as a hermetic container for the corporate workforce. And finally, Walter Gropius’s vision of rational urban planning and cooperative design processes has become ossified in the language of building codes and zoning ordinances.

Going after the Avant-Garde

Today, postmodern, deconstructivist, and avant-garde theorists and practitioners reject the functionalist premise of modern architecture—indeed, of modernism itself—on the grounds that it celebrated cold efficiency, rational organization, and an aesthetic of inhuman machinery in the service of a “bland and uniform technocracy” of corporate capitalism.⁹ In a wild swing of the pendulum, contemporary architectural thought, as Juhani Pallasmaa has observed, has become predicated on pushing aside the functional and utilitarian dimension of architectural form in favor of a sweeping cultural critique, “rather than a response to a social commission”:

The architecture and art of the closing decade of the second millennium have become so self-referential, so concerned with their own existence and self-definition that today art seems to be about works of art instead of being about the world, and architecture about buildings, not about life. Both deal more with the philosophical issues of representation than with their contents. The functional and utilitarian dimension of architecture has been pushed aside.¹⁰

Many avant-garde buildings share the visual characteristics of fragmented, fractured, colliding forms that ostensibly reflect society’s increasing fragmentation, violence, and disorder. Its proponents disavow the so-called rationalism of early modernism (and its continuing influence on the established order) as obsolete and irrelevant in a world of increasing change, complexity, and uncertainty. In addition, their political gripe with modernism is that its chief practitioners—architects including Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, and the successors of the international style—ended up celebrating corporate capitalism under the guise of functionality and industrial-age hygiene. And whatever the modernists revered in their attempt to reconcile art and industrialization—above all, order, modular coordination, hierarchy, Platonic geometry, unity, and harmony—the avant-garde rejects as an outmoded nineteenth-century ideal that results in dead, white boxes. By contrast, their forms are described by critics and publicists as bold, challenging, provocative, dynamic, and explosive. They evoke uneasiness, impermanence, displacement, and restlessness in the observer, and above all, they are visually arresting. Their stand-out appearance in the urban landscape is unprecedented. Buildings such as the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao and the Jewish Museum in Berlin have become major tourist attractions. They illustrate what Pallasmaa calls the “ocular bias” of contemporary culture, in which visual appeal has become the dominant criterion of judgment.¹¹ Of course, visual appeal is a fundamental property of good architecture—the venusitas in Vitruvius’s triad of commodity, firmness, and delight, but gratuitous ocular stimulation at the expense of a meaningful functional parti has become endemic at a deeper, cultural level.

Consider the apparently critical and popular success of avant-garde buildings: they would seem to vindicate the claims of their proponents—that they capture and embrace the spirit of the times. But if one looks closely enough at the irregular shapes, jagged edges, colliding forms, dynamic spaces, and other motifs that constitute much of the visual appeal of avant-garde architecture, the culture of corporate capitalism is just below the surface. Under the influence of commercial advertising—the means by which capital permeates the cultural reality—the avant-garde has been assimilated by the established order at the aesthetic level. The forms of their buildings have become visual analogs of the commercial values that permeate the culture that they claim to reflect. Although the unfolding of this phenomenon was predicted by the philosopher Herbert Marcuse in the 1960s, it is nevertheless astonishing to realize how quickly and easily it has come about. In One-Dimensional Man (1964), he argued that advanced industrial societies absorb the antagonistic content of contemporary art and assimilate its aesthetic forms through mass media and advertising. In fact, if we examine the aesthetic content of contemporary commercial advertising, we find a high degree of isomorphic correspondence with avant-garde architecture. Recent trends in advertising, for example, reveal a shift of emphasis away from product information and towards the use of visual imagery associated with the product.¹² These images promote what some critics call “commodity fetishism” and a consciousness that falsely invests the products with socially desirable traits by associating them with certain lifestyles, symbolic values, and pleasures. In addition, the aesthetic devices used in these images—such as the “molding of sensuality”—are designed to stimulate in the onlooker the desire to possess and the impulse to buy, whether implicitly or overtly.¹³

The incorporation of sensual isomorphs into non-sensual objects to achieve subliminal identification with sexual gratification is perhaps the most blatant example of “commodity aesthetics.” We see it displayed in the use of sensually curving shapes and the so-called pulsating or thrusting spatial dynamics of avant-garde architecture that critics and students perceive as “hot” and “creative.” Unfortunately, many similar notions of creativity in both commercial advertising and avant-garde architecture are equally inane. Examples include such ubiquitous equations as: never-seen-before equals innovation; new is better than old; breaking rules equals independence while order equals repression; change is good; bigger is better, and bigger-than-life is better still; difference equals individuality while similarity equals conformity (rather than community); exaggeration is preferable to restraint; speed and excitement equals being fully alive while slow and poignant is like dying. Notions like these are advertising strategies designed to sell more new products, yet they also bear a striking correspondence to the statements and qualities evoked by avant-garde designers, critics, and publicists.

For example, since the desire to catch the viewer’s attention in order to sell more products is the hidden force behind the cultural emphasis ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface: The Art of Use
• Foreword: The Use of Art
• Chapter 1 Introduction
• Chapter 2 The Architecture of Health: The Paimio Sanatorium
• Chapter 3 The Shape of Work: The Larkin Office Building
• Chapter 4 Homo Ludens: The Amsterdam Orphanage
• Chapter 5 The Form of Commerce: The National Farmers' Bank
• Chapter 6 The Structure of Memory: The Trenton Bath House1
• Chapter 7 The Function of Wisdom_ Mount Angel Abbey Library
• Chapter 8 An Architecture for Liberal Religion: Unity Temple
• Chapter 9 Street-Corner Musicians: The Berlin Philharmonie
• Chapter 10 Pictures at an Exhibition: The Louisiana Museum
• Chapter 11 Community and Privacy: Siedlung Halen
• Chapter 12 Conclusion
• Acknowledgments
• Bibliography
• Illustration Credits
• Index