The first of these paradigms is the blend of form and function, which is an aspect of any design for a practical item. Form is simply the shape of an item, while function is the use to which the item is put. The two can be blended anywhere along the continuum from perfect marriage to absolute disconnect. In many circles, good design is when you have the marriage, regardless of how it looks. The rule is applied that “form follows function,” which means that, first, you figure out what the item is supposed to do, and then you design the item to do that thing that it is supposed to do. A well-designed item does the job it is supposed to do well, which is different from a merely good-looking item, which may be pleasing to the eye, but is also crappy at doing the job for which the item is intended. Presumably a well-designed item, because of its success at doing its job, is inherently attractive regardless of what it looks like, but that may be stretching things. For whatever reason, we are pleased by good design, as we perceive it, and we seek it out when we can.
You may like the look of the velocipede (I think it’s on blades, running on ice, no less) but you’d probably prefer to take your racing chances in something a little more sporty. Of course, if you were heading into the mountains, you might prefer this:
On a much simpler level, consider this:
Nothing really does the job better. This is one sleek little sucker, eh? This design goes back, apparently, to around 1890.
People have worked on designing the better
On the other hand, there’s items like this (it's not showing in my edit, so you may have to click on the link):
You may feel a need for a flashdrive with a sake bottle décor, but the function of the item, something portable to stick into a USB port, is not supported by the addition of rice wine. We’re looking for size of memory, speed, portability combined with access (which is why many flashdrives are on key chains or lanyards). We’re just not looking for whatever it is that is associated with a bottle of sake. The value of this drive, absent its ability to hold X amount of megabytes, is in something other than the inherent success of its design. Of course, if it actually is a little bottle of sake, maybe it’s more valuable than I’m giving it credit for.
Anyhow, design is a big subject, and it covers much more than only architecture. But buildings are designed, and therefore factor in some combination of form and function. You design an art museum different from your design of an automobile factory or a hotel or a shopping mall. They are all big buildings, but they are all different, with different goals. Insofar as your designs for the one overlap with your designs for the other, you are at best becoming multifunctional, although more likely you threaten to become dysfunctional. It depends on the mix. Mostly, if you’re designing one of these buildings, that’s what you are designing, and you try to make it do the job for which it’s intended. In architecture, if form follows function, then these buildings are going to be radically different from one another. I can’t imagine a better way to understand the form/function concept in architecture than to consider it for these different buildings. This is not oversimplification but merely straightforwardness, although the subject as a whole is not quite this simple. But grasp the concept here, and you’ve got the nub of it.
And that’s the first paradigm. The second paradigm is specific to architecture, and especially relevant in the age of the post-dialectic. (I can see you wagging your tail in anticipation…)
Architecture is a balance of two elements. One is an art form—sculpture; the other is a practical science—engineering. It has ever been thus, from the first building ever to be erected. It was a physical shape, existing in space—a sculpture—and it needed to maintain its physical integrity—engineering. In other words, it had to look like something, and it had to exist. You could conceivably apply these ideas to a cave, but why bother? Let’s apply them instead to basic old classical architecture. Buildings have a certain look, for instance the columnar structures of ancient Greece, that answer to a strict and clear sense of the aesthetic, and at the same time, the walls (or the columns) have to be able to hold up the ceiling. The building has to stand up, and it has to look good. Pick your period, pick your aesthetic, and it’s always the same: the building has to stand up, and it has to look good. If it fails on either of those counts, it fails as architecture. And one of those counts is sculpture, the art of creating three-dimensional objects, and the other is engineering, the science of having those three-dimensional objects not break or fall apart. Whether we’re talking about putting domes on top of cathedrals or building elaborate gothic walls buttressed by cement struts or building igloos or wikiups or mosques or bridges, it’s always the same, the balance of sculpture and engineering.
So you’re saying, well, wait a minute, that’s not exactly sculpture (which means, of course, that you are at least agreeing with the engineering side of the equation). Michelangelo’s David is sculpture; the Santa Maria del Fiore (the church down the road from David with the big dome) is something else altogether. Okay, sure. The point is not that architecture is sculpture, but that architecture is an art form that combines sculpture and engineering inextricably. You could say that architecture also includes painting, in that we paint our buildings, but painting like that isn’t painting like Monet, whereas imagining three-dimensional structures in space is three-dimensional structures in space and the only difference is degree, whether they’re statues or buildings. Only the scale is different, with exceptions like the Statue of Liberty, which may be the perfect example of an object that paradigmatically combines sculpture and engineering, given the literal nature of what the statue is and how it was made. Think of the Eiffel Tower: Is that a sculpture? Architecture? An example of pure engineering? Obviously we would argue that it is architecture, and accept that it combines elements of both sculpture and engineering, in a way as paradigmatically as the Statue of Liberty, but in a different combination. (As a footnote, Monsieur Eiffel built the metal structure that holds the Statue up, if you’re ever in need of a trivia question.) Further examples of architecture that seems sculptural: the Taj Mahal, the Pyramids, the Washington Monument. It is a trip from these to, say, the Empire State Building, but you can at least see how the trip might happen, once you start thinking along these lines.
What keeps architecture from only being that balance of sculpture and engineering is the function of architecture, the use a building is put to. To some extent engineering is inherent in all sculpture, but not all sculpture is of buildings. So at some point in the architectural continuum of design aesthetics and design practicality—or as I’m calling them sculpture and engineering—the architect (or critic) must factor in the purpose of the building. I guess one could imagine a model where architecture comprises three aspects—sculpture, engineering and functionality—but as I see it the functionality is inherent in the design, and not a separate issue, and therefore inherent to some variable extent in both the sculpture and the engineering. I’m willing to concede that there are many other ways of looking at this. But looking at it this way allows us to understand postmodern architecture, and that’s my point here.
As I’ve said in the past, postmodern architecture is the architecture that comes after the modernist period of architecture, where modernist is represented by such buildings as the UN or the Seagrams Building, devolving eventually into the bland glass box held up by steel frameworks at whatever height you wish to build. Once the modernist idea goes away, with its complete urban vision, what happens next? Add to that question, what do you do when your materials pretty much allow you to do anything you want? For the first time in history, architects have the tools to design almost anything. There’s no longer the issues like wondering if these walls will hold up this dome, of unattainable heights or breadths. Contemporary materials and computer-aided design allow for almost anything conceivable that doesn’t break the immutable laws of physics. How do you design a building when you can design it to look like anything you want it to look like? It has been said that great art is the overcoming of limitations; what happens when art has no limitations?
The first big thing that happens is engineering for the purpose of efficiency. Or put another way, Green buildings. Buildings that don’t overuse resources, that are amenable to human use, that don’t harm the environment. No building can be built today that is not held accountable to these ideas. A non-Green building will be marked as a bad building, a morally or ethically incorrect building, or at the very least an example of bad architecture. Architects must factor environmental issues into their designs.
Secondly, the freedom of materials drives design into a much more pure form of sculpture. The Hadid and Gehry and Ando buildings couldn’t be better examples of sculpture as architecture. That’s exactly what these people are up to.
When does contemporary design go over the line from sculpture to engineering? I gather it is something of an insult to the soul of an architect to accuse him or her of favoring engineering over sculpture, or to dismiss work as mere engineering. I am fascinated by Santiago Calatrava ever since the Met had an exhibit on him. Check him out at his website. He actually makes sculptures. But are his buildings feats of sculpture, or engineering? Both, obviously. But so some extent, his literal sculptures are also feats of engineering, and his engineering is scultping. It all becomes something of a blur, and rightly so. If we could pull out these elements and label them clearly, the subject would be sooooo boring.
Anyhow, all of this is just noodling on my part. You can put together your own paradigms for understanding things. One thing is for certain, though. When you study architecture, or any art, the more you read, the less you seem to find in the way of academic agreement among those you are reading. Orthodoxy is hard to find, and probably not worth much. I am probably foolish to create my own orthodoxy, but what else do I have to do with my spare time?
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