“Excuse me, sir. Please come with me inside.”
That was the reaction of a security guard while I stood on a Buffalo sidewalk, pointing my phone at a 19th‑century office building and taking lots of photos. Some very close up.
I must have looked like I was casing out the joint.
Suddenly, I was expecting an interrogation. What I got instead was an invitation to lose the next three hours in a museum I didn’t know existed, inside a skyscraper I thought I already understood.
More on that in a moment. First, let’s Meander into the 130th anniversary of “The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered” (1896).
If you’ve heard the phrase “Form follows function,” this is THE essay where Louis Sullivan’s thinking about form, function, and nature crystallized. His most famous dictum is usually taught to mean that the exterior should be a direct expression of the life happening inside.
While Sullivan was writing about the “skyscraper,” several takeaways landed hard for me as a designer of modern one-, two‑, and three‑story homes.
Somewhere along the way, I quietly turned that into “function comes first, aesthetics don’t matter,” and used it to justify designs that were efficient but pretty joyless. Was I the only one in the residential world doing that—hiding behind “form follows function” while producing houses that lacked any real character, then calling that “honesty”?
Frank Lloyd Wright, who worked for Sullivan, recast it as “form and function are one,” pushing back against the literal “function first, beauty later (maybe)” reading. And remember, Sullivan himself never stopped designing richly ornamented buildings. The Guaranty Building is drenched in organic terra cotta; whatever he meant, it wasn’t “skip the poetry.”
In the 1896 article, Sullivan actually writes “form ever follows function,” with ever italicized. He makes his case by pointing at nature:
Whether it be the sweeping eagle in his flight, or the open apple-blossom, the toiling workhorse, the blithe swan, the branching oak, the winding stream at its base, the drifting clouds, over all the coursing sun, form ever follows function, and this is the law. Where function does not change, form does not change. The granite rocks, the ever-brooding hills, remain for ages; the lightning lives, comes into shape, and dies in a twinkling.
He calls this “the pervading law of all things organic and inorganic, physical and metaphysical, human and superhuman.”
In plain English: in nature, the visible shape of things grows out of their inner life, and buildings ought to do the same. He’s not handing us a minimalist slogan; he’s asking whether we’re making buildings that feel like living organisms—things you can “read” from the way they stand, open, and ornament themselves.
If that’s the test, then “as long as it looks like a house” isn’t good enough.
A big boxy spec house with a pasted‑on “farmhouse” façade technically looks like a house, but its form is following marketing, not the inner life of the plan. Sullivan’s point wasn’t “make a house look like a house”; it was “let this house’s true character—how it sits on the land, gathers its rooms, places its doors and windows, even uses decoration—grow from its structure and the lives within it, not from a costume borrowed out of a style catalog.”
By that standard, a lot of what I’ve done in production housing is exactly what Sullivan was arguing against.
In a typical subdivision, houses are like Mr. Potato Head: the same basic form endlessly adorned with a rotating menu of gables, brackets, and the occasional “Modern” face slapped on next door. Instead of being shaped by the specific site or the family living inside, the design is driven by efficiency and marketing. It’s form following the spreadsheet—garage‑forward layouts, shallow plans for tight lots, front “features” designed to look good in photos. Function, in the deeper sense—how people move, gather, age, work, and relate to the street—comes second.
So how does a designer like me, steeped in production work, move closer to Sullivan and still help meet America’s demand for attainable housing?
The answer I keep hearing in my head is: shift your definition of “function.”
Instead of “function = count the bedrooms and hit the price point,” define function as the actual living patterns you’re serving—multigenerational life, work‑from‑home, aging in place, shared courtyards—plus performance and operating cost: daylight, cross‑ventilation, compact envelopes that keep mechanicals smaller. I’m not suggesting you make every plan fit only one kind of family. I’m wondering if each model should start from a real pattern of living. What if plans and massing responded to those deeper functions first, and then you built repeatable “families” of those plans across a community?
Affordability still depends on repetition, but does it have to mean “cookie‑cutter”? Could you standardize structural grids, wet‑wall locations, and assemblies so you can vary elevations and room groupings without blowing up cost? Is it possible to develop three to five genuinely distinct building types—alley‑loaded lots with ADUs, courtyard duplexes, shallow‑lot row houses—instead of one chassis with four façades? That’s very close to what the “missing middle” conversation is already asking for.
Let’s be honest: in reality, “form follows finance” is often the real law. Garage‑forward massing, big front‑loaded two‑stories, and low‑slope roofs don’t come from poetry; they come from cost, lending, and appraisals.
I’m not pretending you can ignore that. But within those constraints, you can look for low‑cost moves that change lived experience more than they change bid price: better stair placement, stacked plumbing, one extra opening that makes a flex room actually work as an office, a porch deep enough to use.
Finally, you can stop forcing costume variation. Rather than four façades on the same house, tie visible differences to real program differences.
Units with ADUs should read differently from those without. Corner lots ought to broadcast more glazing and side entries because they really engage two streets.
Use ornament and detail the way Sullivan did: column grids, stair towers, porch systems, and eave lines that actually correspond to how the building is put together.
None of this is easy. I know the pressures you’re under: cycle time, option packages, investor expectations, municipal checklists. But I also know we can nudge the work, one small decision at a time.
Join me, and let’s see if this is achievable or just a theoretical exercise.
This week, pick one production plan you know by heart and do a 10‑minute truth check. Print the plan and front elevation, grab a pen, and do three things:
- Put a star on the drawing where the real daily entrance is (not the pretty one).
- Circle the room that actually does the most “living” work (kitchen–family core, loft, etc.).
- On the elevation, put a checkmark where those two spots show up. If they don’t show up at all, or if the elevation is still shouting “garage” louder than “life,” sketch just one small change—maybe a deeper porch, a better‑placed window, or a stronger front‑door moment—that would let the outside tell the truth a little better. That’s it. One change.
As I learned on that Buffalo sidewalk, buildings don’t survive on philosophy alone. That security guard’s alarming “Please come with me inside” turned out to be an invitation into a law firm’s century‑long love story with Sullivan’s Guaranty Building—through bad remodels, near‑demolition, fire, and finally restoration and an interpretive center carved out of rentable space.
They didn’t just let form follow function once in 1896; they’ve spent decades letting their own choices follow a belief that this particular building is worth the trouble.
If we, as residential designers, can bring even a fraction of that stubborn pride and long‑view stewardship to our “cookie‑cutter” streets, Sullivan’s old law might finally start to mean something on the ground.
