form follows function, and then what?
The slogan is older than the school and vaguer than it sounds. What it actually asks of a chair, a button and a poster.
Louis Sullivan wrote the line in 1896, in an essay about how to design a tall office building. Form ever follows function, he said, and he meant something closer to botany than to engineering: the shape of a thing grows out of what it is for, the way an oak is the shape of being an oak.
The Bauhaus never adopted the sentence as a motto. It did not need to; everything the school taught pointed the same way. Gropius wanted the workshops to make objects that could be mass produced, Breuer wanted a chair that weighed almost nothing, Brandt wanted a teapot that poured cleanly. The slogan arrived later, when people needed a short name for what those things had in common.
what the sentence does not say
It does not say that function is the only thing. Sullivan's own buildings are wrapped in cast-iron foliage. The sentence was never an argument against beauty; it was an argument about where beauty should come from. Proportion, rhythm and color are not added to a working object afterwards. They are how the eye finds its way around it, and finding your way is a use.
It also does not say that the function is obvious. Most of the work is in the first step: saying, in one sentence, what the thing is for. A chair is for sitting at a table for an hour. A save button is for ending an edit without losing it. A tab bar is for knowing where you are and getting to the two other places. Get that sentence wrong and the most rigorous form in the world follows the wrong thing.
the three moves
- Start with the use. Write it down before you draw. If you cannot say it in one sentence, you have two things, not one.
- Let the use pick the shape. Breuer needed a club chair that was light to lift and cheap to make. Bent steel tube, the stuff of bicycle handlebars, gave him a frame in one continuous line, and stretched fabric gave him a seat with nothing to stuff. Nothing on that chair is there for any reason except holding a person up.
- Keep the proof visible. You should be able to look at the object and read what it does. A button looks pressable because it is a box with a verb in it, not because it has a bevel. A field looks fillable because it is an empty box with a label above it.
in werkstatt
The primary button is 48 pixels tall because a fingertip needs about that much room. Its label is a verb because its function is an action. It is red when it is the one thing to do on a screen, because priority is part of function too: a screen that lets you do one thing should look like it. The tab bar has three items because that is how many places a thumb can reach without thinking, and it is 64 pixels tall because an icon and a word need the room.
The hover state turns yellow. That is function as well. Feedback is a use: the hand asks whether it has arrived, and the color answers.
the test
For anything you draw, ask what would change if it were removed. If the answer is nothing, it was decoration and it goes. If the answer is that the thing would work worse, it was function and it stays. The hard cases are the ones that make the object work better for a person rather than for a machine: the margin that lets the eye rest, the yellow that confirms a touch. Those stay too. A person is part of the function.
where it goes wrong
The slogan gets used as an excuse. Function first becomes ugly first, and then ugly only, with the sentence held up as a shield. The school's answer was to refuse the split. The glass wall at Dessau lights the workshops and is also the most beautiful thing on the building, and those are not two facts about it. They are one.
Form follows function is not a style. It is an order of operations: use, then shape, then proof. Do them in that order and the result will look like werkstatt. Do them in another order and it will look like decoration, even if the shapes are the same.