Form and Function: Remarks on Art, Design and Architecture

by Horatio Greenough

This book offers sound advice to practitioners of all the arts, and sound reasoning to students of aesthetics. Stating his principles in the mid-nineteenth century, Greenough was three generations ahead of his time. He reads today like a progressive contemporary, and many an architect, artist, and student of art may benefit by what he has to say. It was Greenough, not Whitman, who first protested against meaningless ornamentation. It was Greenough, not Ruskin, who first expressed the idea that the buildings are art of a pepole express their morality. It was Greenough, no Le Corbusier who first said that buildings designed primarily for us "may be called machines." It was Greenough, not Louis Sullivan, who first enunciated the principle that, in architecture, form must follow function. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1947.

Genres: Architecture

Paperback

First published May 1, 1958

Reviews

[Kariem · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting but can’t hold up a solid argument for Beauty as a promise of Function nor, certainly, the inverse relation of function as a promise of beauty. References to Nature are ill conceived and their content long outdated. But Horatio is a genuine and honest Christian man

[D · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thought-provoking text.

"let us encourage experiment at the risk of license, rather than submit to an iron rule that begins by sacrificing reason, dignity and comfort."

Joyfully have the governing men of England, France and Germany beheld in the United States that policy which has denied all national education except for the purpose of war and trade.

The beautiful must be cultivated here, if we would avoid a chronic and sometimes an acute tightness of the money market.

Michelangelo in viewing Brunelleschi's Duomo:
"Better than thee, I cannot; like thee, I will not."

The result was the dome of St. Peter's.

Michelangelo 'took the responsibility,' as such men always will. He did it at his peril, as all men must. Implicit conformity to precedent obliterates and annihilates the individual; violation of it, not justified by theory, or by practical result, sets the individual on no enviable pedestal. A throne may become a pillory.

We forgot that though the country (USA) was young, yet the people were old.

The mind of this country has never been seriously applied to the subject of building.

I take that passions and interests are the great movers and steadiers of the social world, and that principles, like the bread on Sir John Falstaff's score, are an unconscionably small item.

Fame and money are to be had in plenty; not in going against the current, but in going with it. It is not difficult to conceive that the same state of the popular taste which makes the corrupted style please will render the reformed style tasteless. It is not possible to put artistic products to a test analogous to that which tries the ship and the carriage but by a lapse of time.

True it is that society always reserves a certain number of minds and eyes unpoisoned by the vogue of the hour, and in the sympathy of these must the artist often find his chief reward in life.