Divergencias en torno al concepto de funcionalismo en la historia del Diseño. Primera Escuela de Chicago, Bauhaus y HfG Hochschule für Gestaltung

Abstract

The relationship between the concepts of form and function ran through the entire history of Design and production, from ancient times to the present. This relationship was debated in design disciplines in the 19th and 20th centuries, to the point of originating a current called functionalism, as a theory and methodology in constant reformulation. Functionalism appears in the history of design as a fundamental concept, because it condensed ideological-political debates around the social function of projectation. These debates spanned the pedagogical, productive and constructive spheres, from the United States to the Soviet Union, at least from 1900 to 1980. However, not all functional design is functionalist. Functionalism is conceived here as a historical-conceptual delimitation, detached from the Great Functional Tradition —of a timeless nature— that brought together principles, values and models of a theoretical and procedural nature. Hence, the conceptualizations of three representative schools are relieved and contrasted: First Chicago School (1885-1915 approx.); Bauhaus (1919-1933); and HfG Ulm (1953-1968), understood as primary sources, and his later critiques, understood as secondary sources. For this, the historiographic perspective of Conceptual History was adopted. From a historical and semantic point of view, the concept of functionalism operated as a record of past functional design experiences; in turn, it represented expectations for the future, by fostering social changes to equalize opportunities for use, habitat and new ways of communicating. Although in the history of Design and Architecture it appears associated with the phrase of Sullivan L.H. (1896), ‘form always follows function’, in this research it is shown that it is a construction of criticism, or owes its emergence to post-Bauhaus criticism. This shows its controversial character, due to its ethical-political contentions between liberal, social democratic and Marxist ideals.