Functionalism and Naive Materialis
in American Architecture
Alan Mather
I.
IN
THE UNITED STATES,
the wo•k of designing buildings has, for
the most part, reached such a depth of spiritlessness and poverty
of imagination, that any structure which displays some influence
of art draws an abnormal amount of attention to itself. It is a ruth–
less utilitarianism which seems to peer from the tens of thousands
of windows ranged to vanishing points along the brick culverts
which form our streets. Yet, the general architectural scene is not
all in ·one piece. It is the purpose of this article to disentangle
naive materialism from functionalism: the former being an expres–
sion of capitalism, and the latter, of scientific method, in
architectur~.
Functionalism consists in discovering the special character–
istics of a group of people and then of designing a building so
closely fitted to those group peculiarities as to create a new and
socially expressive form or architectural type. It is Darwinism in
architecture. Indeed, Louis Sullivan, one of the first to give expres–
sion to it as an idea, was a Darwinist.
Naive materialism is a severely forced, perhaps pathological
attempt to deny importance to immaterial facts of consciousness.
It is a natural part of the capitalism which abstracts isolated
qualities of each individual to meet its special needs- and forgets
the rest. The movement of business toward minute division of labor
has pushed its way beyond the walls of the factory and into any
part of our culture which has a relation, no matter how remote, to
profit-making. Architecture has not escaped its influence. Business
enterprise, concerned with reducing incidental costs of production
now rationalizes housing into neat shelves whereon to set the work–
ing population in its non-working hours. Just as it exploits one or
two simple movements of each worker on an assembly line, so does
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