Form Follows Function
A saying from the 20th century bauhaus movement that valued function over ornament and standardization.
An idea that in some respects was just a secular rediscovery of 19th century Shaker theology that rejected ornament and status signaling.
As someone who’s been studying design the shaker’s proto-modernist constraint driven simplicity is fascinating. An engineer can do brilliant work, but such work is only ever a 9 to 5 job. While for the Shakers, design and craft was their way of life, a calling they undertook with religious gusto. But nobody understood the value of such until until the 20th century functionalism movement came about with such ideas as: form is determined by use; ornament is unnecessary or dishonest; design should emerge from constraints, not style.
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Only after this framework existed could people look back and say: “the shakers were already doing this 100+ years earlier”.
However, in some ways the Shakers were even more rigid than 20th century design philosophy.
“Don’t make something unless it is both necessary and useful.”
In modernism: many chair designs; many interpretations of “minimal”; style differences between designers; ego imbued in the artifact. While for the Shakers however: the individual does not have authority to redesign objects freely; craft must carry no personal signature, no stylistic identity nor shall the object reveal the maker. Even major Shaker innovations were never patented (a detail that complicates historical attribution). In summary, Craft was not a vehicle for personal expression because the Shaker’s communal life required a suppression of individual variation.
I some respects, I do consider Shaker design philosophy to be superior. So much so, as a believer in principles for navigating the unknown, I do wonder if reinventing interior lighting would be seen as a violation. However, the Shaker design philosophy is fundamentally a constraint driven process.
