B is for Bauhaus, Y is for YouTube: Designing the Modern World from A to Z (2015)

Functionalism is a quite remarkably persistent idea that simply refuses to lie down and die. As a pragmatic proposition, it’s unarguable that design begins with a systematic exploration of practical requirements. But functionalism is also a philosophical idea about the nature of things, one that is more complex and less useful than the old slogan ‘Form follows function’ would suggest.

The belief that a close enough scrutiny of the technical purposes of an object provides everything that is needed to dictate its shape had become as much an aesthetic as a practical question long before the term ‘functionalism’ was first coined. It is a view of the world that suggests not only the means with which to achieve efficiency, but also the conviction that perfect efficiency is the route to visual perfection. It is an echo of the teachings of Plato and his belief in ideal form. It reflects the marketing pitch of the Roman architect Vitruvius, with his guiding principles of firmness, commodity and delight. Vitruvius’ ideas were delivered to the English-speaking world through a translation made by England’s ambassador to Venice, Sir Henry Wotton, who was to become notorious for suggesting somewhat ambiguously that an ambassador was ‘an honest man whose role was to lie abroad for the good of his country’.

Mao Tse-tung is alleged to have said something much like Vitruvius of his plans for rebuilding Beijing. ‘Utility, Economy and, if possible,’ as he put it, ‘Beauty,’ were his priorities while demolishing the city’s walls and toying with the destruction of the imperial palace. And at a poetic level, the functionalist ideal recalls John Keats’s lines in Ode to a Grecian Urn that ‘ “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” - that is all/Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’ Keats’s words are a reminder that the functional ideal may be more aesthetic than utilitarian.

We are accustomed to the idea that there is beauty to be found in the craftsman-made object, honed, tested and perfected over generations to produce the optimal response to a physical and material demand: the Norwegian wooden ski, the steel blade from Toledo, a Korean celadon vase. But it is a kind of beauty that can also be found in high technology: in aircraft wings, suspension bridges and carbon-fibrebodied Formula One racing cars.

The idea of formal values growing out of technical discipline in a kind of Darwinian evolution has continually been put forward by theorists and critics. Le Corbusier, for example, filled his polemical book Vers une architecture with images of grain silos shown side by side with photographs of the Parthenon, alongside biplanes and motorcars, suggesting that they shared the same pursuit of unadorned simplicity, truth to materials, and the frank expression of the optimum solutions to structural demands. Of course, the reality is rather different. As Le Corbusier would have known, the classical Greeks used a gaudy palette of colours to paint their temples. There is evidence to suggest that he doctored his photographs of grain silos in the Midwest to edit out the decorative flourishes and the historical memories that were used to soften the utilitarianism of their structures in the interests of making his case more forcefully.

The specific formulation ‘Form follows function’ became the mantra for modernity in the early part of the twentieth century, in the form of the pseudo-scientific religion of functionalism. The words, near enough, were first coined by the Chicago architect Louis Sullivan. In his 1896 article ‘The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered’ Sullivan wrote:

It is the pervading law of all things organic and inorganic, of all things physical and metaphysical, of all things human and all things superhuman, of all true manifestations of the head, of the heart, of the soul, that the life is recognizable in its expression, that form ever follows function. This is the law.

Clearly it was a law that left a mark on Sullivan’s most famous employee, Frank Lloyd Wright, and its traces are visible in the architect Louis Kahn’s mystical injunction to architects to ask of a brick what it wants to be, a perception that shaped his scheme for Bangladesh’s Parliament building and the Kimbell Art Museum in Texas.

Using the metaphor of the machine, and the analogy of the scientific method, the modernists purported to eliminate the sentimental and the irrational from their work. They tried to make design as objective a process as possible. They created a language for design characterized by simplified forms and smooth surfaces that seemed to suggest mechanical production. The rhetorical message carried by design became as important as its substance. As a propagandist Le Corbusier had the brilliant insight to describe the house as a machine for living in. With that single sentence he provided the means for architects and designers to posture as engineers and scientists. In the process, he took what had been essentially poetic or metaphorical ideas and made them into the basis for a method of design that brought with it the promise of optimal outcomes. Functionalists made objects that took the proposition of the machine at face value: they believed that an object that appeared rational actually was so.

Futurists, who celebrated the beauty of war, fell in love with the imagery and the rhetoric of the machine, particularly and obscenely so with what they had described as the beauty of the machine gun and the flowers of blood that it caused to blossom. They were somewhat less interested in the efficiency with which machines actually performed.

To ask what is the function of a chair, or a spoon, without thinking about the idea of ritual or of the social hierarchy that objects are used to express, is to take only the narrowest and most literal view of purpose. A better question to ask would require the consideration of a more complex and more detailed set of functional attributes for an object. What is the function of a chair intended for a room to be used by a child is a question that is not likely to have the same answer as the question what is the function of a chair to be used for the negotiating session of a peace treaty, or in a parliament. The function of a spoon intended to be used as a wedding gift is not the same as the function of a spoon designed to be used to measure out a dose of oral penicillin, even if they share the same name and the same basic elements. An understanding of the imperative of price is crucial. To design a chair that is intended to sell for $50 demands an entirely different set of responses and solutions to one designed to sell for $500 or $5,000.

The functions of a sword or of a suit of armour were often not the ostensible ones of combat. They had a more self-conscious purpose as demonstrations of prestige or heritage or authority. Despite the rhetoric of functionalism, close exploration of purpose, and what is sometimes described as ergonomics (the flawed science of usability), is not enough by itself to provide a framework for creating a charismatic object.

This is even more true now than it was in the first decades of the last century, when modernism was still being codified. In what was called the machine age, useful objects still had moving parts that could be either locked into pure sculptural forms to suggest the image of the machine, or put on show as a kind of spectacle. They provided a point of departure for understanding the relationship of each part of a mechanism to the whole.

Since then, the digitalization of almost every product category has stripped away the mechanical attributes of many objects. A typewriter or an adding machine depended on the skilful manipulation of mechanical levers. A laptop takes on the role of a typewriter; a digital camera replaces an analogue camera based on film, and need not depend on moving parts. These artefacts could be said to have the same purpose or function. But they cannot be designed in the same way. Chips and circuit boards do not impact on the form of an object and the configuration of its component parts in the same way that levers, switches and valves do. The priorities, and the underlying processes of designing a digital object, are different from those that shaped its mechanical equivalent. The transition between them is one of the most revealing moments in understanding the nature of an object. Paradoxically, the two may end up looking much like each other because of the visual associations certain forms have with certain artefacts, which have become ideal forms, or archetypes.

The Polaroid SX-70 was the camera that marked the most sophisticated and the most ingenious as well as the most seductive high-water mark of the analogue world. It is a world that, save for such isolated survivors as the mechanical wristwatch, and the more robust category of the automobile and the domestic appliance, is fading away, leaving little behind but nostalgia, as evidenced by the diehard enthusiasts for vinyl record pressings, printed books and negative film on celluloid.

The SX-70, first manufactured in 1972, was designed by Henry Dreyfuss’s firm, one of the pioneers of industrial design in America, which thirty-five years earlier had been responsible for streamlining the steam locomotives that hauled the 20th Century Limited for the New York Central Railroad. The camera was a beautiful object, with an intricate folding mechanism that recalled the bellows lens housings of early models. In its closed position, it had something of the quality of a cigar case, with a brushed-metal finish and leather panels. Pull it open, and the viewfinder clicked into position and the mirrors inside showed you the image through the lens that the Polaroid film, lying flat on the base of the camera, would capture.

Push the button on the front of the machine, and the shutter opened up to deliver a carefully measured dose of light, and then closed again. Seconds later, the film was excreted through the mechanism. As it passed through the camera, the chemicals that would develop and fix the image in less than a minute, contained in a thin pouch running across the bottom of each Polaroid cartridge, were smeared across the film’s surface. A wafer-thin paper rectangle was ejected out into the open air, to the accompaniment of a satisfying whoosh. The image started to appear almost at once, and in a matter of seconds the surface of the plasticized paper would go from milky opacity to pin-sharp, full-colour clarity.

Against a background in which photography had been a painfully long-drawn-out process that began with the opening of the cardboard box in which the celluloid film came packaged in a foil wrapper to keep it safe from direct sunlight, and threading the films through the sprockets inside the camera, a Polaroid camera was more than a conjuring trick - it was magic.

A pack of Polaroid film was like a pre-prepared battlefield dressing. It made the process of photography almost instant, and, of course, entirely addictive. To hear the click and the whoosh, to detonate that button, and feel the play of it as you depressed it, and then to see the image materialize, at first like a faint and mysterious echo of the face of Jesus on the Turin shroud, and then to crystallize into a fully realized photograph with depth and colour range, produced an overwhelming urge to see the magic repeated. Yielding to the urge, you had to use more and more of the extremely expensive instant film. Photography had become a temporary epiphany.

This was the closest that analogue technology had ever come to delivering the weightlessness and the dematerialized qualities of digitalization. It removed so many of the technical steps, and the waiting, even though it still depended on physical, chemical and mechanical processes. But it also produced an enormous amount of waste as a by-product of the process - boxes, paper, foil, chemicals - that ended as landfill. Within a decade it was all over. The digital world had triumphed, and it left designers looking for a new way to understand their task.

When digitalization had transformed virtually every product category, it became much harder to maintain the fiction of functionalism. There are precious few moving parts in a laptop and most of the design effort goes into the circuit boards, which remain invisible. These elements are in the hands of people who would not be understood as form-giving designers in the sense that the Bauhaus would have recognized. When you see a fly-through of the inside of an iPhone, you find yourself inside what feels very much like a form of micro-city planning, with urban blocks, boulevards and multilevel circulation routes, but it does not provide an industrial designer who is trying to give the object a form much of a clue as to what kind of object these particular elements are bringing into being. Miniaturization means that the circuits are the least likely element to be the determining factor in shaping an object.

Without these clues, designers fall back on archetypes to find a direction for their work. It is what happened with the camera just before, during and after the digital revolution. The format of the single-lens reflex camera evolved over the years. It was based on the size of the film, on the intricacies of a shutter that needed to be moved aside mechanically to allow silver nitrate film to be exposed to light for precisely the right length of time, and it needed a viewfinder that allowed you to look through the lens to see what the image that was about to be exposed on the film would look like.

How would a new user learn how to operate this intricate and complex piece of machinery if they had never seen one before? He or she would need visual clues to signal which button was the shutter, which lever advanced the film, and, indeed, to suggest what the object was intended to be used for in the first place. Did it look like a camera? Did it communicate anything about where to pick it up, and how to operate it?

The format of the analogue camera became an archetype in order to demonstrate how the new digital cameras worked and to remind us what they did. A camera based on particular mechanical and technical issues came to define what cameras with entirely different technologies would look like. They needed to look like a camera because that is what cameras have always looked like. Photography is no longer based on a chemical process, film, or its exposure to light. It does not depend on shining controlled amounts of light through the celluloid, through another lens and on to photosensitive paper.

The idea of digitalization makes all of these processes fall away. There is no need for a viewfinder when it is possible to use a screen that shows exactly what the receptors in the camera will record when a button is pressed. There is no need for a shutter, although, as we know, every mobile phone in the world has been equipped with the sound of one and, in the case of the first generation iPhone at least, a visual simulacrum too. There is no need for a physical focus process, no need for a lever to advance the film. The image a digital camera captures is instantly transmitted to the photographer’s laptop now, to be checked and manipulated.

How were designers to respond to all this? A camera that uses pixels rather than film could have been styled to look like almost anything. At first, some manufacturers, especially those with no previous experience in the field, looked to establish entirely new forms to signal just how much had changed. Some took on the shapes that had once been associated with cine cameras. Other manufacturers ended up with digital cameras that looked like miniature rocket launchers, or telescopes. Luigi Colani proposed cameras that took on the organic form of sea creatures.

And all of these ideas about cameras needed to find new ways to communicate with their users about how to operate them. But very quickly, many digital cameras started to look exactly as single-lens reflex cameras had always done, the same size, the same configuration of controls, because they were communicating what they were doing even if there was no mechanical justification for the message they were projecting. Digitalization allows for a more direct interaction between subject and photographer. It has become more difficult for the camera to serve as a barrier or an alibi.

The camera has just about survived as an object, even as the boundary between moving and still pictures has evaporated. The distinctive form of the television set has not. An object shaped by the need to accommodate a cathode ray tube, firing electrons in a vacuum tube, does not make any sense when the picture is digitized, and so the television was reduced to a flat screen, and all that is left to the designer is to tidy up the edges. It has taken longer to find a way to accommodate flat screens to the domestic environment. Hanging them like pictures on the wall with a dangling power cord is somehow too intrusive.

The impact of digitalization in many areas of technology has been to diminish the traditional role of the designer as a sculptural shape-maker. Design has turned into something that involves a sequence of images on a flat screen, and developing a logical way to move through them.

It is a change that has forced designers to explore other approaches to design, to look at the ways that design can be used to communicate the purpose and the meaning of an object, rather than to treat design primarily as a question of solving mechanical and technical problems.

There is, however, one area of design where the idea of objective analysis on the functional model has maintained its grip. To ask about how an object can be made and used in ways that will minimize energy consumption and carbon emissions has allowed a new generation to rediscover the moral certainty of functionalism.

In one sense, the issue of green design might be regarded as an almost nostalgic hankering to find a way to approach design as it once was. Rather than focusing on what an object does, and the connection between its moving parts and its operation, the idea of ecology as a generator of form has given designers the chance to analyse energy performance, embodied carbon, and all the rest, with the implied promise that if it is green it will also be good design. It’s a reassuringly familiar formulation, but barely an adequate one. It is an approach that still leaves too many questions unanswered. What, for example, about the concept of embedded carbon? Converting the entire world to driving electric cars, if this means replacing every existing car and scrapping the entire petrol distribution network, may make no sense. Soldiering on in thirty-year-old Volkswagens for another five years rather than buying new electric cars may make more sense. If we all had electric cars, we might, provided that the electricity was all generated by nuclear power, be reducing the carbon emissions caused by driving. But achieving an all-electric future would have massive carbon emission implications. Frugal energy consumption and recyclability may be desirable attributes, but they are no more the entire story of design than any other version of functionalism.

When I found myself buying a new laptop every eighteen months and a new mobile phone every six months, and when each new generation product has a power cord you can’t use with the last I began to feel queasy about the prospect, even as a non-green. But then I also began to think about what I really had in my hand with a fourth-generation iPhone. This was a replacement for a telephone, a music system, a camera, an emailer, a library and a GPS. Think of all the things that it has done away with: the film, the chemicals to process the film, the paper on which the prints are made, the record players, the vinyl, the factories in which the vinyl is made, the shops in which they are sold, the carbon footprint that visiting that shop entailed. There is no way yet to be definitive. Millions of iPhones are acquired and discarded every year. They have to be fed by the strip mining of lithium needed for their batteries - life expectancy of remaining sources is estimated at another forty years. The toxic by-products of dumping exhausted batteries in landfill are being addressed. But we still simply don’t really know enough to understand the balance between the resources consumed by disposability and the resources saved by the versatility of appliances rendered immaterial by digitalization. In the 1960s, the critic Reyner Banham, the pop artists and the architect Peter Cook dreamed of an utterly guilt-free, liberated disposable future, unmonumental and unmaterialistic. It is just possible that Apple and Steve Jobs have given it to us.