The Function of Form

As the result of a two year research seminar with the students of Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, and in collaboration with Actar in Barcelona, Daniel López-Pérez co-edited The Function of Form (Actar, 2010) with Farshid Moussavi, an essential graphic manual on structural systems and their capacity to produce a variety of forms.

In The Function of Form, internationally acclaimed architect, Farshid Moussavi, provides a provocative critique of the historically opposing relationship between function and form to reveal the contradiction at the heart of modernism. We need to move away from the definition of function as utility, she argues, to align it with how function is defined in mathematics, biology or music. Form, on the other hand, should be considered not only in the way buildings are produced, but also how they perform sensorially. Function and form, considered together in architecture, stand in opposition to the dualism which defined our approach to the built environment throughout the twentieth century. This book provides a thought-provoking account of the challenges facing the 21st century built environment, and an enlivened awareness of the wider possibilities of architectural form.

https://www.amazon.com/Function-Form-Farshid-Moussavi/dp/8496954730

Team: Farshid Moussavi with Daniel Lopez-Perez and Garrick Ambrose, Ben Fortunato, Ryan Ludwig, Ahmadreza Schricker.