Actar and the Harvard Graduate School of Design are pleased to announce the forthcoming release of The Function of Form, edited by Professor Farshid Moussavi with Daniel Lopez, Garrick Ambrose, Ben Fortunato, Ryan Ludwig, and Ahmadreza Schricker, following her seminars at the GSD.
The Function of Form proposes a new theory of form based on repetition and differentiation. Moving architecture away from the essentialism that has dominated our relationship to the environment, it argues that broadening our idea of materialty to embrace both the physical and the non-physical enables built form to incorporate the multiplicity of causes and elements that characterize our increasingly complex environment. This also allows function in built forms to be conceptualized, not as downward causation, but as a transversal process operating across multiple inputs, aligning it with the way function is understood in mathematics, biology or computer science. Identifying tessellation as a transversal function that facilitates reciprocal interactions between forms and their constituent parts as well as their context, the Function of Form presents an inventory of these parts, or material systems, including sensorial desires as well as productive and technical concerns, and analyzes the ways they can be tessellated to produce novel forms. It shows how a transversal process can be used to repeat and combine these material systems, in different ways, into singular hybrid assemblages which address multiple concerns and transmit different sensations and affects. Such an approach liberates forms from single causes, identities or meanings, allowing them to address the differences within contemporary culture as well as other urgent concerns.
Farshid Moussavi GSD profile >>