Form and function. Can we seperate them?

[GreyICE]

See, the hopeless diamond is butt ugly. The spitfire looks alright, although I've never changed my opinion that the wings look awkward as hell. An F-22 looks great. That german plane is pretty much butt ugly, whoever did the lines on that thing hated both aesthetics and not showing up on radar screens.

Aesthetics are aesthetics, function is function.

[The Curious Squid]

To separate the two you would need form to be independent and completely innovative without any regard for the function. I don't think either one can exist without the other. If it did you'd be looking at something that did nothing or have something that looked like nothing.

We do have such things, it's called art. It's there for the sole purpose of being aesthetic. Similarly, you can get items which are designed purely on a functional level with no mind to aesthetics, unfortunately if something exists then it has to have a shape and therefore looks like something, even if it looks like nothing else you've ever seen and counter to the designers intent (or lack of) humans being humans will assign it descriptive terms such as ugly or pleasing in our own subjective manner.

[Hermit]

can one separate aesthetics and pleasing looks and function from the context in which it exists

"Beauty", as the well worn saying goes, "is in the eye of the beholder." There is nothing particularly objective about it, and I go further and say that beauty and function do not run in synchronicity. For instance, I like the look of the Ford GT40, even though aesthetics were not a factor in its design. Its form was determined by its function: To be the fasted car in the 24 Hour-long race at Le Mans. It did win that race four years in a row.



The Porsche 917 too was built specifically to win the 24 Hour-long race at Le Mans, and similarly, aesthetics were not considered in its design. It fulfilled its function twice, and later Porsches that succeeded the 917 won it another eight times. I think those cars looked fuck-ugly.



In short, pleasing looks are not a function of function. At least not to me.