Ship of the Time. The Office Building and Functional Indetermination
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The development of the functional indetermination in the 20th-century architecture has a constant reference —not always assumed, though— in the office buildings, the less defined type of building functionally speaking. While Louis Sullivan stated his famous quotation “form follows function”, the tenet of the deterministic functionalism, he was devoted to develop the most free plants ever build so far. In the office buildings, the form cannot follow the function because the form becomes just dispensable. At the same time, the function cannot stem from the form, as the latter is seen as an empty container lacking any functional specificity. The emergence of the office building brought about an earthquake in the architectonic thought at the end of 19th century and starting 20th century. The readings of it allowed using new tools to operate other programs. Firstly in the hands of Mies van der Rohe, who introduced the ethereal space lacking any definition in most of the programs he worked in, after the experimental project for the skyscraper when beginning his career. Decades later, Rem Koolhaas, with the enterprise Office for Metropolitan Architecture, call the attention again to the freedom of the office plants in Chicago and reinterpreted it in several projects by the end of the 1980s. The paradigm of the office building lies in the fact that being taken as the inspiration model for the functional indetermination of the 20th-century architecture, it still remains as a valid program nowadays.
rascacielos, función, indeterminación, Sullivan, Mies, Koolhaasskyscrapers, function, indetermination, Sullivan, Mies, , Koolhaas
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