It is an acknowledgement that architectural function is not some abstract problem about how to organise space and mass for an unspecified type of human being, but one that is determined by the all-too-evident constraints of everyday life for real, living individuals in the present circumstances of the developing world. Architecture is for Baker the outcome of a constant, vigilant sensitivity as to how to recognise the functions that it satisfies. Whilst Sullivan could not foresee how a sensitive functionalism might turn into an austere, often authoritarian modernist style, it is this rigid notion of modernism that the British born architect Laurie Baker has spent his fifty-year career in India opposing and subverting. Before right-angles, plate glass, concrete, steel and white walls became the signature style of international modernism, Sullivan was arguing for an architecture that refused any outward appearance or material solution that prejudged the practical resolution of the needs of a building’s users. Before the grandees of high modernism seized upon the idea and turned it into one-size-fits-all style, Sullivan’s ‘functionalist’ approach elaborated a fundamentally pragmatic and organic relationship between the outward appearance of a building and its given purpose.
It’s over a century since the American architect Louis Sullivan wrote these euphoric lines in his essay ‘The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered’, coining the formula that would become one of the most powerful slogans of modernist design and architecture in the 20th century.
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