“Function” is a basic term in architectural discourse that is often used by architects for rhetorical purposes to justify their formal choices.In the early years of the 20th century, Chicago architect Louis Sullivan popularized the phrase 'form ever follows function' to capture his belief that a building's size, massing, spatial grammar and other characteristics should be driven solely by the function of the building. The implication is that if the functional aspects are satisfied, architectural../MORE

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“Function” is a basic term in architectural discourse that is often used by architects for rhetorical purposes to justify their formal choices.In the early years of the 20th century, Chicago architect Louis Sullivan popularized the phrase 'form ever follows function' to capture his belief that a building's size, massing, spatial grammar and other characteristics should be driven solely by the function of the building. The implication is that if the functional aspects are satisfied, architectural beauty would naturally and necessarily follow.Among early modernists the vulgar use of the term “functional” developed as a reaction to the ornamented styles of the 19th Cent. But it also became a pejorative term associated with the most bald and brutal ways to cover space, like cheap commercial buildings and sheds,Functionalist architects claim to design utilitarian structures in which the interior program dictates the outward form, without regard to such traditional devices as axial symmetry and classical proportions. From an engineer's point of view there is a particular attraction in the idea that beauty may be almost guaranteed when the form of an object is particularly well adapted to a rigidly defined set of objectives and constraints. However, as Edward de Zurko (1957) has pointed out, the labels of 'functionalism' and 'fitness for purpose' have been linked with a vast range of characteristics from mechanical efficiency, logic, originality, and biological form, to order, morality, personal fulfillment, and symbolism.