The picket fence There was a fence with spaces you could look through if you wanted to. An architect who saw this thing stood there one summer evening. Took out the spaces with great care and built a castle in the air. The fence was utterly dumbfounded, each post stood there with nothing round it. Christian Morgenstern, The Art of Looking Sideways www.andrew.cmu.edu spacearchitectureabsurdity
The minimum condition When a device is so designed that its component parts are only just strong enough to get the intended result without danger of failure, we may say it is in its minimum condition. I suspect that the functionalists sometimes meant by functional design simply design aimed at the minimum condition for a device. In that case 'form should follow function' would mean that every system should be in its minimum condition, thus having certain limitations imposed on its form. David Pye, The Nature and Aesthetics of Design Form follows function functionconstraintsdesignminimalism