Form and Function

This book offers sound advice to practitioners of all the arts, and sound reasoning to students of aesthetics. Stating his principles in the mid-nineteenth century, Greenough was three generations ahead of his time. He reads today like a progressive contemporary, and many an architect, artist, and student of art may benefit by what he has to say.   It was Greenough, not Whitman, who first protested against meaningless ornamentation. It was Greenough, not Ruskin, who first expressed the idea that the buildings are art of a pepole express their morality. It was Greenough, no Le Corbusier who first said that buildings designed primarily for us "may be called machines." It was Greenough, not Louis Sullivan, who first enunciated the principle that, in architecture, form must follow function.

Many titles in the Voices Revived program are also newly available as ebooks, offered at a discounted price to support wider access to scholarly work.