Chapter 1 | Introductiondiversity of scientific fields, from natural sciences as well as physical sciences and math-
ematics, the cumulative effect is to suggest the unlikeness of architecture to science in
general”.^267 According to Banham, architectural theoreticians accepted the term “Func-
tional” into general use from the 1930s onwards, used in the sense that Le Corbusier
intended, to replace the term “Rational”. It was not, however, Le Corbusier’s intention
to replace the idea behind the latter. Both Le Corbusier and Gropius rejected the 19th
century meaning of the concept Functionalism, which had deterministic undertones.^268
The concept of rationalism is associated with technological systems and it also has
a long tradition in the philosophy of architecture. A building must satisfy pragmatic
and constructional criteria, which circumscribe the field within which the imagination
of the architect works.^269 According to Alan Colquhoun, the definition of the rational
in architecture has not remained constant but depends on changes in ideology, and it
cannot be considered independently of either economic and social factors or philosoph-
ical ideas. It never exists in isolation and it is one side of a complex system that can be
expressed only in terms of a series of more or less homologous oppositions.^270
267 Forty 2000, p. 100.
268 Banham 1999 [1960], p. 320.
269 Colquhoun 1994 [1989], p. 57.
270 ...such as reason/feeling, order/disorder, necessity/freedom, universal/particular, and so on. Colquhoun
1994 [1989], pp. 57–58.