Form follows function " Louis Sulli

Form follows function " Louis Sullivan's battle cry of the 1880's and 1890's, was followed by Frank Lloyd Wright’s “Form and function are one. " But semantically, all the statements from Horatio Greenough to the German Bauhaus are meaningless. The concept that what works well will of necessity look well, has been the lame excuse for all the sterile, operating-room-like furniture and implements of the twenties and thirties. A dining table of the period might have a top, well- proportioned in glistening white marble, the legs carefully nurtured for maximum strength with minimum materials in gleaming stainless steel. And the first reaction on encountering such a table is to lie down on it and have your appendix extracted. Nothing about the table says: " Dine off me. " The International Style and the New Objectivity have let us down rather badly in terms of human value. Le Corbusier ' s house as the machine for living in and the packing crate houses evolved in the Dutch De Stijl movements reflect a perversion of aesthetics and utility.