The battle to sell modernism to the American public began shortly after World War II, led to a considerable degree by the efforts of a number of European immigrants who proclaimed the virtues of practicality, the importance of design principles, and the merits of avant-garde thinking to their students and colleagues at design schools across the United States.
Trained as a painter and filmmaker in his native Hungary, György Kepes emigrated to the United States in 1937, and a year later became Director of the Color and Light Department at the Chicago Bauhaus, under the direction of László Moholy-Nagy. From 1946 to 1974, Kepes taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and in 1968 founded The MIT Center for Advanced Visual Studies. As author and editor of numerous books on art and perception, he has long been interested in examining how functional design, both in theory and practice, could benefit from a fusion of art and technology. In this essay, Kepes looks critically at the relationship between the utilitarian demands of functionalism and the humanitarian goals of “honest design.” It typifies the kind of analysis with which he is most often associated: a combination of creative, pragmatic, and psychological inquiry that lends itself brilliantly to the field of design scholarship. — JH
Today’s obsession for speed and quantity has profoundly influenced the ways in which we think and feel. Mass production and mass communication, with their characteristic standardized thoughts and vision, have overworked ideas, making of them exhausted stereotypes. We tend to mistake the slogan for truth, the formula for the living form, repetition of habit for cultural continuity. Inertia leads us to carry this dead body of lifeless thoughts around with us. To halt the depletion of the life of the words we use, of the ideas and purposes that guide us, we must constantly overhaul our mental equipment.
Redesign is needed not only in the spheres where we are vaguely aware of the intentional misuse and manipulation of words and ideas, as in political propaganda or the cheaper aspects of advertising. It is needed also in fields where we feel that we know what we are talking about, in our own profession. Here we must be doubly alert, for we lack the perspective that distance offers. I have been asked to write about function in design. The words “design” and “function” are prominent in our daily vocabulary. The coupled term, “functional design,” is accepted today as the core of professional activities that aim to shape man’s environmental values. The term “functional design” escaped the fate of other over-faceted terms?
What is then the purpose of man-made design? Is it sufficient to answer that the purpose of a building is shelter? the purpose of a chair to support the human body? of a book to permit its being read? Can these functions be understood only within the narrow radius of what we consider them to be, or do we need to inquire still further into the final and common root of all these purposes?
Louis Sullivan, whose work and writing became the guiding force of contemporary design thinking, was fully aware of the depth and range of the issues involved. He wrote those words as his own goal, “To make an architecture that fitted its function, a realistic architecture based on well-defined utilitarian need—that all practical demands of utility should be paramount as basis of planning and design; that no architectural dictum or tradition or superstition should stand in the way.” And he wrote, putting his own thought in a broader context, “Man perishing and probably was the only real background that gave distinction to works appearing on the foreground as separated things.” For him and for all of the great men who paved our way to a healthier thinking, it was always evident that design is not for design’s sake, that design is for man.
Everything that they conceived was considered in its implications to all the levels of existence of a human being. Although they fully recognized that straightforward thinking in physical and utilitarian terms is a necessary step in putting design on a healthy basis,they did not forget the elementary utilitarian functions and appearance of objects as all means and techniques are conditions only, not aims.
Man was in focus; but not man nor machines by and when. They aimed to satisfy his needs for comfort as a means to help him grow. And we may quote Sullivan again: “The fabricating of a virtue, a proud civilization, re in its faith in man, is lying to constitute the onward interest of the coming generations. It will begin to take a functional form out of the choice of choice, and the liberation of those instinctive truths in which are the roots of the creative being, and thereby the instincts which will serve the children and the children of the children, shall be a guide everywhere.”
Their work had a living fiber that connected technique and convenience with a living human core. For design that integrates life, function, emotion, function in terms of the material it uses, the structure it applies, and the form in which it is shaped. Designs which have their root in the heart of man, and not in his pocket, are......alive. Designs which grow organically with the calm dignity of honesty, not with the haste of a bad conscience, can only go and only develop when we are needed for human growth. They are functional in the truest meaning of the word.