Forms

Definition (Reference Books)
Definition (John Dewey)
Definition (George Santayana)
Definition (S. P. F. Humphreys-Owen)

Shape, form, space (Richard L. Shadrin)
Art and form (Herbert Read)
Design and form (Christopher Alexander)
Context and form (Christopher Alexander)
Fit context/form (Christopher Alexander)
Objects and form (John Dewey)

Gestalt (Reference Books)
Gestalt and pregnance (Ludwig van Bertalanffy)

Function and form (Richard Neutra)
Function and form (Susan Lambert)
Materials and form (Susan Lambert)
Materials and form (Paul Jacques Grillo)
Morphogenesis (Manfred Eigen and Ruthild Winkler)

Definition

Reference Books

The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (Third Edition, First Edition 1983)
“noun :
   -   1. The visible aspect of a thing; now usu. shape, configuration.
   -   5. The particular mode in which a thing exists or manifests itself.
   -   7. A model, type or pattern.
   - 10. Manner, method, way (of doing anything).
   - 12. A set or fixed order of words.
verb :
   -   1. To give form or shape to; to fashion, mould.
   -   3. To place in order, arrange. Also to embody, organize into.
   -   4. To construct, frame; to bring into existence, produce.
       4b. To frame in the mind, conceive; to imagine.
   -   6. To go to make up, to compose.”

Books

[1979, First Published 1934] John Dewey, Art as Experience
“Form is arrived at whenever a stable, even, though moving, equilibrium is reached.” (p. 14)
“... form is not found exclusively in objects labelled works of art.
Wherever perception has not been blunted and perverted, there is an inevitable tendency to arrange events and objects with reference to the demands of complete and unified perception. Form is a character of every experience that is an experience." (p. 137)
"Form may then be defined as the operation of forces that carry the experience of an event, object, scene, and situation to its own integral fulfilment.” (p. 137)

[1955, First Published 1896] George Santayana, The Sense of Beauty
“A form is an aggregation, it must have elements, and the manner in which the elements are combined constitutes the character of the form.” (Part III, § 23, p. 61)

[1951] S. P. F. Humphreys-Owen in Lancelot Law Whyte (editor), Aspects of Form
“The word ‘form’ in this article will refer to the shapes of material objects, the arrangement in space of groups of them, and the arrangement in space of their component parts.” (p. 8)

Shape, form, space

[1992] Richard L. Shadrin, Design & Drawing
- “Shape is the element that describes what happens when a line crosses over itself. Once you enclose a two-dimensional space, you have constructed a shape of length and width.” (p. 98)
- “Form is the three-dimensional representation of shape.” “A form has weight and takes up space.” (p. 100)
- “Space is the area displaced by a shape or form.” (p. 102)

Art and form

[1964, First Edition 1931] Herbert Read, The Meaning of Art
“The form of a work of art is nothing more than its shape, the arrangement of its parts, its visible aspect. There is form as soon as there is shape, as soon as there are two or more parts together to make an arrangement.” (p. 28)
“Form does not imply regularity, or symmetry, or any kind of fixed proportion. We speak of the form of an athlete, and we mean very much the same when we speak of the form of a work of art. An athlete is in good form when he carries no superfluous flesh; when his muscles are strong, his carriage good, his movements economical. We might say the same of a statue or a picture.” (p. 28)
“We can ... divide the forms which successful works of art achieve into two types, one which may be called architectural, or architectonic, the other symbolic, abstract or absolute.” (p. 47)

Design and form

[1994, First Edition 1964] Christopher Alexander, Notes on the Synthesis of Form
“The ultimate object of design is form.” (p. 15)
“... physical clarity cannot be achieved in a form until there is first some programmatic clarity in the designer’s mind and actions; and that for this to be possible, in turn, the designer must first trace his design problem to its earliest functional origins and be able to find some sort of pattern in them.” (p. 15)
“... every design problem begins with an effort to achieve fitness between two entities: the form in question and its context. The form is the solution to the problem; the context defines the problem.” (p. 15)
“If the ensemble is a truckdriver plus a traffic sign, the graphic design of the sign must fit the demands made on it by the driver’s eye.” (p. 16)

Context and form

[1994, First Edition 1964] Christopher Alexander, Notes on the Synthesis of Form
“The form is a part of the world over which we have control, and which we decide to shape while leaving the rest of the world as it is. The context is that part of the world which puts demands on this form; anything in the world that makes demands of the form is context. Fitness is a relation of mutual acceptability between these two. In a problem of design, we want to satisfy the mutual demands which the two make on one another. We want to put the context and the form into effortless contact or frictionless coexistence.” (pp. 18-19)
“What does make design a problem in real world cases is that we are trying to make a diagram for forces whose field we do not understand.
Understanding the field of the context and inventing a form to fit it are really two aspects of the same process.” (p. 21)

Fit context/form

[1994, First Edition 1964] Christopher Alexander, Notes on the Synthesis of Form
“We should always expect to see the process of achieving good fit between two entities as a negative process of neutralizing the incongruities, or irritants, or forces, which cause misfit.” (p. 24)
“We are searching for some kind of harmony between two intangibles: a form which we have not yet designed, and a context which we cannot properly describe. The only reason we have for thinking that there must be some kind of fit between them is that we can detect incongruities, or negative instances of it. The incongruities in an ensemble are the primary data of experience. If we agree to treat fit as the absence of misfits, and to use a list of those potential misfits which are most likely to occur as our criterion for fit, our theory will at least have the same nature as our intuitive conviction that there is a problem to be solved.” (pp. 26-27)
“Any state of affairs in the ensemble which derives from the interaction between form and context, and causes stress in the ensemble, is a misfit.” (p. 102)

Objects & form

[1979, First Published 1934] John Dewey, Art as Experience
“Objects of industrial art have form - that adapted to their special uses. These objects take on aesthetic form ... when the material is so arranged and adapted that it serves immediately the enrichment of the immediate experience of the one whose attentive perception is directed to it. No material can be adapted to an end, be it that of use as spoon or carpet, until raw materials have undergone a change that shapes the parts and that arranges these parts with reference to one another with a view to the purpose of the whole. Hence the object has form in a definitive sense. When this form is liberated from limitation to a specialized end and serves also the purposes of an immediate and vital experience, the form is aesthetic and not merely useful.” (Chapter VI, p. 116)

Gestalt

Reference Books

[1964] A Dictionary of the Social Sciences, Julius Gould and William L. Kolb eds.
“A gestalt is an organized entity or whole in which the parts, though distinguishable, are interdependent; they have certain characteristics produced by their inclusion in the whole and the whole has some characteristics belonging to none of the parts. The gestalt thus constitutes a ‘unit segregated from its surroundings,’ behaving according to certain laws of energy distribution. It is found throughout human behaviour as well as in physiological and physical events and is thus a fundamental aspect of scientific data.” (p. 287)

Gestalt and pregnance

[1960, First English Edition 1952] Ludwig van Bertalanffy, Problems of Life
“Gestalten are physical wholes developing according to dynamical laws.
The most important principle is that of pregnance, i.e., the tendency of gestalten to assume the simplest possible or most ‘significant’ forms.” (Chapter 6, p. 190)

Function and form

[1978, First Edition 1954] Richard Neutra, Survival through Design
“... at the end of nineteenth century functionalism undertook to establish an objective criterion of aesthetic judgement. It promised to supersede all arbitrary historical formalism in design. Yet Sullivan’s splendid rule of no exception, the principle ‘Form Follows Function’, unfortunately does not hold the handy answer to all problems of design motivation.” (p. 107)
“Thus, the functionalist slogan might often be neatly reversed: Appearance precedes and clearly seems to evoke an operational event. Function follows form. Form here is primary, a motivating force, as it has always seemed to old-fashioned aestheticists who listened to music or looked at jewellery.” (p. 116)

[1993] Susan Lambert, Form Follows Function?
“The maxim ‘form follows function’ suggests that function should be the decisive factor in the creation of form but in reality, it is, and should be dependent on many factors including the materials used to ‘form’ it and the method used to ‘form’ them.” (p. 31)

Materials and form

[1993] Susan Lambert, Form Follows Function?
“The idea that form should respect the characteristics of the material out of which it is formed has ... been a staple of Western design theory, also traceable to Vitruvius and reiterated with similar frequency thereafter. Popularised with the words ‘truth to materials’, paraphrased from the writings of, among others, the theorist John Ruskin and the designer William Morris, it has formed a refrain with ‘form follows function’ in the twentieth-century texts on design and, arguably, played an even more fundamental part in how design has been taught.” (p. 31)
“Many materials can take on a wealth of different forms naturally.” (p. 38)
“The pervasiveness of a particular type of form at any period across a huge range of materials, suggests that form frequently evolves independently of material and technique.” (p. 38)

[1975] Paul Jacques Grillo, Form, Function & Design
“... it is important that we should keep in mind the most subtle and powerful principle of all arts: the agreement between material and form, made as intimate and thorough as possible by the nature of things. The fusion of these two elements is the absolute aim of all great art. The simplest example is offered by poetry which cannot exist without the close association or the magic symbiosis of sound and meaning.” (p. 50)

Morphogenesis

[1983, First Edition Germany 1975] Manfred Eigen and Ruthild Winkler, Laws of the Game
“There are two fundamental principles of morphogenesis, a conservative one and a dissipative one. According to the first principle, structure and form result from an interaction of the conservative forces of attraction and repulsion. The subunits of the overall system, subject to the permanent action of these forces, assume stable spatial positions or move in stable orbits (as the planets do) around a focal point. This order is maintained without a dissipation of energy. Dissipative structures differ from conservative ones in being dynamic states of order that can be maintained only by means of a metabolism, i.e. a constant dissipation of energy.” (pp. 97-98)
“The problem of organic form can be understood only in terms of the interplay between the conservative and the dissipative principles. Dissipative processes direct and synchronize how information stored in conservative structures will be elicited from them and guarantee the functional effectiveness of that information.” (p. 101)

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