A beautiful product triggers positive emotions that inform your judgment of its usability. The product does not necessarily function better, but you perceive it as functioning better because of its looks. You can define aesthetics in many ways, but it comes down to connecting thought, emotion and beauty. How something looks affects us emotionally and influences what we think about it.
Does a website have a single function? The function of a blog is to communicate information. It might also be a means to deliver advertising or to generate leads to sell a service. An e-commerce website also communicates information. It also exists to sell products. Obviously not.
At the start of this post, I described the well-known scenario in which you gather requirements from a client and then proceed to design the website. Some no doubt are. How many pages will the website have?
Will the content need to be updated often? Is a shopping cart needed? What are the goals of the website in the context of the overall goals of the business?
Better questions seek to define what success looks like for the website. Should the e-commerce website serve to generate leads to draw people into the physical store. Will all of those pages help drive sales, or are some plain fluff? Define your success criteria first. Think of our clock example. Will success come from function or aesthetics. What would make your website successful? What is most critical to achieve that success. There could be any number of reasons why something exists, from chance to some broad aesthetic value and anything in between.
An object can exist for reasons other than function. Mother Ann Lee — , founder of the Shaker movement in America, proposed another idea. These forces could be functional or could be aesthetic, spiritual, communal or random. Form evolves from the holistic forces of the project—audience needs, client desires, ethical obligations, aesthetic inclinations, material properties, cultural presuppositions, and yes, functional requirements. The form evolves from the holistic forces of the project—audience needs, client desires, ethical obligations, aesthetic inclinations, material properties, cultural presuppositions, and yes, functional requirements.
Not at all. Beauty often does come from function. A building should not look like a boat or a magazine. Each has a different function, and that function helps to define what makes it successful.
Pure function may not be the most important factor of success. Focus on the relative importance of both form and function as based on your criteria for success when making design decisions.
Balance form and function as needed, while letting success criteria guide your decisions. It was the spirit animating the mass and flowing from it, and it expressed the individuality of the building. He embraced the use of modern materials and promoted the steel-framed office building — the skyscraper.
Early skyscrapers resembled wedding cakes; a series of stacked layers. The problem of the tall office building is one of the most stupendous, one of the most magnificent opportunities that the Lord of Nature in His beneficence has ever offered to the proud spirit of man.
He also considered the location of the building and designed it to reflect the local culture and industry. Although Sullivan incorporated ornamentation and decoration in his designs, others rejected this as superficial.
Many of these also embraced modernism and extreme simplicity; eliminating anything that was considered extraneous or distracting. Some designers adopted the philosophy that artistic decoration was not consistent with modern forms. More dependable steel being made by the Bessemer process could be used for posts and beams. The strength of a steel framework allowed buildings to be taller without needing thick walls and flying buttresses. This framework was revolutionary, and Chicago School architects knew the world had changed.
The U. Tall buildings' major use—office work, a byproduct of the Industrial Revolution —was a new function in need of a new urban architecture. Sullivan understood both the magnitude of this historical change in architecture and the possibility that beauty may be left behind in the rush to be the tallest and the newest.
He set out to define principles of design in his essay, " The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered," published the same year as the Prudential Guaranty Building rose tall in Buffalo. Sullivan's legacy—besides instilling ideas in his young apprentice, Frank Lloyd Wright —was to document a design philosophy for multi-use buildings. Sullivan put his beliefs into words, ideas that continue to be discussed and debated today. Sullivan suggests that the exterior "shell" of the skyscraper should change in appearance to reflect interior functions.
If this new organic architectural form was to be part of natural beauty, the building's facade should change as each interior function changes. Common interior areas by function included mechanical utility rooms below grade, commercial areas in the lower floors, mid-story offices, and a top attic area generally used for storage and ventilation. Sullivan's description of office space may have been organic and natural at first, but decades later many people mocked and ultimately rejected what they thought was Sullivan's dehumanization, which he also expressed in " The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered":.
The birth of "the office" was a profound event in American history, a milestone that affects us even today. It's not surprising, then, that Sullivan's phrase "form follows function" has echoed through the ages, sometimes as an explanation, often as a solution, but always as a design idea expounded by one architect in the 19th century.
Sullivan was a mentor to Wright, his young draftsman, who never forgot Sullivan's lessons. So happy birthday, Mr. Countless design students are glad you were born. Happy birthday, Louis Henry Sullivan.
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