The Function of Form - Softcover

Farshid Moussave; Harvard GSD

Softcover

ISBN 10: 8496954730 ISBN 13: 9788496954731

Publisher: Actar Publishers, 2009

Synopsis

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. Look inside: http://issuu.com/actar/docs/fof/

About this title

Product Description

Paperback. Pub Date: November 2009 Pages: 384 in Publisher: Actar and the Harvard Graduate School of Design The Function of Structure explores the production of singular affects through systems that relate form and content This is an essential graphic manual on structural systems and their capacity to produce a variety of forms. Extracting their base geometric unit. a wide range of historical projects from the Medieval to the present are used as systems to proliferate different forms. The book distinguishes tessellation from modulation as a type of flexible system for producing complex repetition through diverse parts. The research presented aims to move architectural experiments away from 'mechanistic' notions of systems for re-producing forms. to 'machinic' notions of systems that determine how parts of an architectural problem interrelate and multiply. This open nature of...

Review

A thought-provoking account of the challenges facing the 21st century built environment, and an enlivened awareness of the wider possibilities of architectural form. --Archidose

A must-have for any designer, The Function of Form makes for a tremendous resource as a reference when investigating possible forms/structural systems for a given project allowing readers to quickly compare spatial quality and affects of various systems, while also providing reasonably in-depth explanations as to how these qualities are achieved by the different systems. --Amnp

Here is one (book) that is thoughful, useful, and only incidentally related to Ms. Moussavi's practice.  Yet it is about architecture.  The book is ostensibly a survey of distinct structural spanning systems, all of which contain repetitive structural members and variations on their arrangement, scale, or shape. --Tropolism

Edition details

• Publisher: Actar Publishers
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 8496954730
• ISBN 13: 9788496954731
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 520