Word: functionalists
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...this parade of exquisitely designed objects, from lamps to ashtrays to such inviting modular sofas as Mario Bellini's "Chameleon" cushion system (see color page), it is apparent that the functionalist concerns of the Bauhaus are receding. Some emphasis has shifted to furniture as dream or fetish or ikon. Thus Gae Aulenti designs a variable bookcase/shelf/sleeping-platform unit that, glittering in vermilion fiber glass, resembles a Mayan sacrificial altar; while Sottsass's red ceramic vase has the archaic look of a ziggurat...
...Anglo-American criticisms of structural anthropology attack the nature of its evidence. Levi-Strauss's most energetic critic, David Maybury-Lewis, points to inconsistencies, even manipulations of traditional ethnographic data to fit the structural schema. But Levi-Strauss would argue the definitions of social fact must be reevaluated. The functionalist anthropologist's notion that social fact is simply observable social action is too narrow. Structural anthropology expands the definition by trying to observe societies at both their conscious and unconscious levels...
...hard to imagine a young architect setting out to imitate Johnson. He is an architect of sensibility, not polemics, and his work has no discernible core of aesthetic theory. It is all taste, exemplary in its detailing and finesse of decision. Though he was trained in the strict, functionalist idiom of Mies and Gropius, Johnson believes such purism "is winding up its days." "Structural honesty," he declared in 1961, "seems to me one of the great bugaboos that we should free ourselves from very quickly...
...devotees of the more nativistic Continental psychologies should beware of immediately hailing James as a compatriot. He has had too much influence upon rival schools. Although James's own eclecticism and boundary-bursting originality preclude classification, many of his students eventually became leaders of the American functionalist movement. And tinges of behaviorism can even be spotted in some of his most famous doctrines...
...along with the new, perches himself on a stub-legged Indian chair in the house he designed for himself in Venice, Calif. His dining room (background] is furnished with his prize-winning 1944 chair. And, his black leather chair near by frankly owes a great deal to the Victorian functionalist, William Morris. The leather cushions have built-in wrinkles, Eames concedes, "but that is a clue that spells comfort to come, like a well-used first-baseman's mitt...