October 15, 2002

Form or Function?

For the past two weeks, I've been watching a two-part PBS documentary on Frank Lloyd Wright. Wright, probably America's greatest architect, created some beautiful buildings: Fallingwater, Johnson Wax, and the Guggenheim. Two themes kept popping up as commentators discussed Wrights work. If you lived or worked in a Wright creation, you had to subordinate yourself to the architect's vision. Wright's primary concern was often not the needs of the humans who inhabited his structures. And, for all their beauty, these buildings often had a number of flaws: the roofs leaked, cantilevers sagged, and so on.

Can this be a metaphor for web design? We often focus on beauty over the user and the functionality of the site. For all of my appreciation of Wright's work (and other examples of design), I think I come down in the function over form camp. Sarah Horton, author of the Web Style Guide, has more in a Boxes and Arrows article on the subject: Beauty is Only Screen Deep.