Form follows Function, as we all know… but function can change, leaving the form out of context.
Consider the long, rather dilapidated building with the vaulted, tilting roof seen behind this parking lot in downtown Jerusalem. What does its form tell you?
In its heyday, in the 1940s and 50s, this strange form was dictated by the building’s function: it housed a luxurious, large movie theater, the Orion Cinema. The long, narrow, slanting form was due to the rising rows of seats.
Today these large cinema halls are a thing of the past, driven out of business by home video and the smaller, more modern halls of multi-theater complexes in shopping malls, whose function is not visible externally any more. And the grand old Orion building now houses a McDonalds… whose function has nothing to do with its form either. The younger generation who eat in it have no idea that it was one of their city’s major entertainment venues 70 years ago… and would certainly not recognize the building’s odd shape. Oh well…
Nice dog, this one: not too ferocious to allow sympathy, yet substantial enough to scare away thieves. And in case your Latin is rusty, CAVE CANEM means exactly what its modern counterpart in the image at right does (but then, Latin being an important influence in English, you could have identified the words in “Caveat” and “Canine”…)
The intent was to keep the chuck key from getting lost, of course… you could stick it into the hole and the rubber flaps would keep it in place when it wasn’t being used to tighten the chuck. These keys were all too easy to misplace, so this was an excellent solution – as the vermiform appendix used to be when we were all eating leaves before we became humans and learned about chocolate and other delights.
