The functionalist architecture marked the European architectural panorama of the twentieth century, and opened a theoretical debate about design in the United States. Born directly from modernism, represented a breakwaters between the architecture of the past and the newalways with a fixed look at adjusting and solving the challenges of its historical period.
What should govern in design: the form or function? Is the ornament necessary or an excess? Is architectural beauty inherent in the function or an addition imposed? These were some of the questions that functionalist architects began to ask and the answers caused that there are still defenders of this current.
For functionalist architecture, beauty would be the result of well -designed buildings according to its function.Marek omasta / Unspash.
The essence of functionalist architecture
The functionalist architecture He collapsed the typical recharged and even decorative aesthetic that for so many years governed the architectural world. As his name says, in Functionalism prevails the function on the formthat is, it was more important to make a building work according to the needs that conceived it, to be aesthetically canonical.
As if that were not enough, this style evolved from the iconic European modernism, governed by Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe; In this way, functionalism almost definitively eliminated ornaments, facadisms and all those elements that were not a direct consequence of the function. In other words, the soul and essence of functionalism was the architectural interior; The shell would be only an envelope, an aggregate in the background.
But, What does it mean to be functional and adapt the form? It is very simple to understand it with an example: if a school needed good lighting, the functionalist architect opened large windows regardless of that the design was affected on the facade, although always respecting a modulation given by the same industrial materials. It could be said that the ideology of functionalist architecture was purist. The architects trusted that beauty was an inevitable resultNot a superimposed creation.