Word: functionalists
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...took on new strength. Like a townsman let loose in the mountains, I made myself drunk with the open spaces, and my astonished eye could hardly take in the wealth and variety of the scene.” Until the very end of his life, he battled base functionalist explanations for society in favor of grander, more overarching constructions...
Sullivan (1856-1924) was America's first great modern architect. It's a curious twist of fate that, having written hundreds of thousands of words about architecture, he should be known to most people today by one phrase: "Form follows function." It became the motto of all functionalist designers, but it doesn't represent Sullivan's own ideas at all. He wasn't antidecoration. He was, rather, one of the greatest designers of decorative detail, in an age that excelled in it. But he insisted on the primacy of the main masses. Both this and the love of inventive detail...
Says Barnes: "We wanted the visitor to remember painting in space, sculpture against sky and a sense of continuous flow, a sense of going somewhere." Barnes, 68, studied with Bauhaus Leaders Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer at Harvard, and has kept faith with their nononsense, functionalist International Style. His new 43-story IBM building in Manhattan, for all its green granite elegance, carries this style to an absurdly defiant extreme. His Dallas museum, on the other hand, is a joy precisely because at a time of architectural razzle-dazzle, it is so endearingly simple. It is thoughtfully and beautifully designed...
Bauhaus furniture had to wait for decades before going into production-and then those uncomfortable "functionalist" chairs, designed to mortify the flesh of worshipers in the church of absolute form suffered the bizarre irony of becoming expensive status symbols for corporate lobbies. No worker's bottom would ever touch them...
...unbuilt showpieces, like Hilbersei-mer's high-rise city or Le Corbusier's ville mdieuse, are detached and scary: vast tower blocks, broad relentless avenues, a crushing regimentation. The idealism of the functionalist heroes (Mies especially) has the perfect internal unity of farce. It belonged to the same order of ideas as Albert Speer's designs for Hitler-a totalitarianism of structure. But they linger on paper as the dream architecture of the 20th century. Because these termitaries were never built, they could not be destroyed _ Robert Hughes