ABSTRACT
Architectural Theory of Modernism presents an overview of the discourse on function-form concepts from the beginnings, in the eighteenth century, to its peak in high modernism. Architects had already appropriated this term in the eighteenth century, and in the twentieth century in particular they quite consciously employed it when pursuing very different, even contradictory, goals. Studies of functionalism in architectural theory often begin with a look at etymology. They explain that function comes from the Latin functio, which means performance. Beside etymology, natural history and biology were also often cited by the architectural theorists when it was about the declaration of the architectural concept of function. Benninghoff offers an illuminating definition of functional. Something is functional if 'it contributes to preserving the higher system'. In twentieth-century sociology, the ideas of function and functionalism became extraordinarily powerful, at the very same time as the word 'functionalism' was becoming established in architecture, that is, in the early 1930s.
