Overheard at Lem's:
As a side note, my teacher used to make chairs that were art and which were never meant to be sat in.What happened to form ever follows function?
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. ~Louis SullivanThat's a powerful notion, and I'd say it holds for all of chemistry too, being that chemical structure and function are so entwined.* But the obvious question is which comes first. I mean, things evolve and mutations happen (form changes) and functional changes follow (function or disfunction).
I'm not trying to diss your beautiful piece of work, Sixty; I'm just struck by how your chair's actual function challenges its form. But is the chair not gorgeous to behold itself? As an imaginary chair?
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*The chemistry term of art "functional group" refers to an interchangeable group of atoms which have a specific function.
22 comments:
It's probably true that a beautiful object can be made whose form does not follow its function. But the eye is likely to tire of such a rule breaker rather quickly. Often such objects are striking rather than beautiful. Who's that architect, very famous, who makes buildings with undulating walls? He did an art museum in Spain, Bilboa I think. An arresting building. But will it become a classic? Or something people will secretly want torn down at some point? Ya know the Barcelona chair? Clearly a case of form follows function. And an instant classic.
Frank Gehry, that's his name.
That Sullivan could turn a phrase. Here's the paragraph immediately preceding the one I quoted:
Whether it be the sweeping eagle in his flight, or the open apple-blossom, the toiling work- horse, the blithe swan, the branching oak, the winding stream at its base, the drifting clouds, over all the coursing sun, form ever follows function, and this is the law. Where function does not change form does not change. The granite rocks, the ever-brooding hills, remain for ages; the lightning lives, comes into shape, and dies in a twinkling.
Do you know whose mentor Sullivan was?
I never sat in an Eames chair. I had a pair of Wassily chairs, black leather and chrome. Looked good, hell to sit in. Tom Wolfe in "From Bauhaus to Our house" dissed architects making chairs for that reason. Frank Lloyd Wright made uncomfortable furniture, ugly cars too. I hope Gehry never designs chairs, you'd probably keep falling off them.
"Do you know whose mentor Sullivan was?"
William Cullen Bryant?
I've always had trouble with that phrase, form follows function. Couldn't quite wrap my head around it.
FORM follows FUNCTION. The function of a chair is to be sat upon. An Adirondack chair can be a hella uncomfortable chair. Especially to a little kit in shorts.
William Cullen Bryant?
That's not wright.
An Adirondack chair can be a hella uncomfortable chair.
The Adirondack chair is designed for older farts wearing trousers and long skirts.
And then there's the first world problem of overweight guests sitting on delicate froo-froo chairs. Hostesses then wright into an etiquette advice columnist for a solution to their dilemma.
Two score Wongs don't make a Wright.
I have spent way too many years looking at art, furniture, architecture and the like, and I read all I can about those subjects all the time. What do I know? I know that I know nothing. I think someone said that once.
I once asked my close personal friend Tom Wolfe who his favorite architect currently working (this was a few years ago) and he said without hesitation "Michael Graves". Now I like Graves' work just fine, but at that time I was reading everything I could find on Frank Gehry. I like Gehry's work and like the engineering that goes into his buildings, plus the fact that he uses CATIA to translate his drawings into blueprints for fabrication. Cool, if nerdy, stuff.
Anyhoo, to lay out my particular gripes - Frank Lloyd Wright was a peculiar little fellow, and I feel bad about that Lincoln. Falling Water is also known as Rising Mildew, and it was so poorly engineered it had to be deconstructed and reengineered from the ground up.
I am opposed to Adirondack chairs, on general principles, but here are some that aren't terrible.
My brother had an Eames chair - it wasn't bad.
Some of Louis Sullivan's buildings were breathtaking. Gorgeous. He was a genius.
I will stop here, it is late, and needs must retire for the evening.
Richard Nickel, Sullivan superfan, died trying to preserve as much as he could.
I was just thinking about demolition today. I used to do some and it is darned dangerous work. That's a rough way to go right there.
Deborah said "I've always had trouble with that phrase, form follows function. Couldn't quite wrap my head around it."
I'm that way with the Scriptural admonishment "Pride goeth before fall."
Does it mean that when you are haughty with pride, your fall is imminent, or does it mean that when you lack pride in what you do, you will fall (fail).
From Free Play, Improvisation in Life and Art, by Stephen Nachmanovitch:
Keith Johnson, who left the directorship of one of the big London theaters to found the Loose Moose Improvisational Theatre in Calgary, invented this exercise for bringing a group of ten or twenty actors into samadhi (a state of absorbed, selfless, absolute concentration--entranced and alert at the same time):
1. Everyone keep eyes popped open and round, as big as possible
2. Everyone, (on signal) march around the room and point at any and every object and shout as loudly as possible the wrong name for it (call a rug a bus, call a chandelier a dog, and so on.
3. Go! Fifteen to twenty seconds of this chaos is plenty. Suddenly everything looks fresh as can be; all our habitual overlays of interpretation and conceptualization are removed from the objects and people in front of us. This is very much like what people report of psychedelic state induced by drugs, a very pure awareness of things-in-themselves but it is much less costly to the physiology.
Wouldn't form follow function if the chair's design provided a place for the mind to take a break--for the eyes to visually travel around the lines and curves without the brain immediately categorizing or dismissing what was seen a chair or a place to sit; but cause it to pause instead to wonder what it might be for and how it came to be, and whether it is pleasing or not, functional or not, useful or not?
In other words, what if it served as an invitation to pause in the naming, take a break and play with a notion rather than immediately view or use the chair as a place for plunking?
The lines reminded me of the shape of a treble clef and which led to the thought (privately held) of using two different sized wood circles inlaid on a wooden seat. Other's thoughts included caning, trivet work, ironic needlepoint, and pig parts, with a 2nd post on the subject leading to more comments. All of that from a chair with an out-of-the-ordinary form that didn't let the eyes or brain the check out for a nap.
@MamaM: Perhaps Sixty could name the piece "trouble cleft" (acknowledging the split).
My suggestion for the piece's name is "Geistiger Stuhl." By that I mean "intellectual chair." But you could play on the Gheist/ghost etymology by posing a life sized Hunan skeleton seated in the chair.
Hunan = human
"Wouldn't form follow function if the chair's design provided a place for the mind to take a break--for the eyes to visually travel around the lines and curves without the brain immediately categorizing or dismissing what was seen a chair or a place to sit; but cause it to pause instead to wonder what it might be for and how it came to be, and whether it is pleasing or not, functional or not, useful or not?
In other words, what if it served as an invitation to pause in the naming, take a break and play with a notion rather than immediately view or use the chair as a place for plunking?"
Well said, Mama. I like that naming exercise, too.
Chick, sorry to go pedantic, but it's pride goeth before destruction, a haughty countenance before a fall.
Which is contradictory to Ecclesiastes, which says the wicked profit, and are not caught, etc. I guess both extremes are implied tendencies, and not absolutes.
EugeneP in his "highly idiomatic translation" The Message (1993) takes it in this direction: First pride, then the crash—the bigger the ego, the harder the fall.
How I see it: The ego is to serve our true self, or soul as we pass through this mortal coil, yet it tends to inflate and take on a life of its own, resulting in pride. In death, the body and ego both are left behind.
chickelit: I see the word play you engage in as improv, along with the cherbits (similar to Trooper's song in CVS)
I recently learned this, which I'm still musing on:
A strong offer or invite extended in improv can be met in four ways, with::
-- A strong No! (a definite decline)
-- A No, but... (which is a hesitant Yes)
-- A Yes, but...(which contains a No)
-- A Yes! And...(a positive with a plus--all in, present, and ready)
When Sixty showed us his physical "Yes, And" response to a chair idea in curved wood, there were several "Yes! And..." responses offered up in return.
Trooper's CVS song: Yes, I hear your lame offer of a background song to pacify/entertain me, recognized it as such and am now going to kick it up a notch and return it to you!
To paraphrase the old hymn, I want to stand on the rock where Trooper stood, and part the line at the CVS, where Pharaoh's army got drowned, nah, that doesn't work...
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