Organic Architecture: From ›Form follows Function‹To ›Form and Function is One

Form follows function is one of the most famous precepts of modern architecture. It symbolizes modern architecture’s ascendancy and its decline – the former when Louis Sullivan wrote in 1896, »Form ever follows function […] this is the law«, and the latter when Robert Venturi turned away from modern functionalism, writing in 1966, »We no longer argue over the primacy of form or function« Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959) was one of the many architects, critics, and theorists either of the Modern era. Late in his life, in a 1953 essay entitled The Language of Organic Architecture, Wright defended the idea that form follows function, not out of a debt to Louis Sullivan – his former employer and mentor, but because of the idea’s place within Wright’s own architectural theories. The purpose of this paper is to reassess the modernist principle that form follows function by putting it in the context of Wright’s organic architecture. Wright‘s writings and selected buildings show us two key areas in which Wright advanced Sullivan‘s original idea of spatial organization and modern architectural aesthetics. The first is a building’s interior-exterior relationship and form, and the second is structural function and form. Wright’s methods were rich and uniquely new ways to relate a building‘s function with its form. In the first case, Wright‘s idea of the room itself or the within illustrates the importance of principal interior space in determining the Architectural character throughout a building. In the second case, through the idea of continuity, Wright proposed that horizontal and vertical structural elements sculpturally merge with one another so that post-and-beam construction disappears. Through an appraisal of these two methods, we may begin to come to terms with one of architecture’s most famous principles and we may reevaluate its validity today. Does form follow function? Sullivan provides the Introductory answers to this question and Wright extends those answers into a fuller discussion.

کلیدواژه ها:

organic architecture ، form ، function ، architectural theories