Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2012
It is the pervading law of all things organic and inorganic, of all things physical and metaphysical, of all things human and all things superhuman, of all true manifestations of the head, of the heart, of the soul, that life is recognizable in its expression, that form ever follows function. This is the law.
Louis SullivanForm follows function – that has been misunderstood. Form and function should be one, joined in a spiritual union.
Frank Lloyd WrightGENRE
Arrangement, in its most narrow sense, is concerned with identifying the parts of a text and organizing those parts into a whole. Classical rhetoric focused on oral speeches, but arrangement has evolved to deal with written texts and, more recently, the visual design of texts, as well as the interplay of visual and aural design in electronic media. Although “arrangement” as a term is currently out of fashion, and the Greek and Latin terms, taxis and dispositio, are not familiar except to specialists, a cluster of overlapping terms cover essentially the same subject in a wide variety of disciplines: “form,” “organization,” “design,” “shape,” and “structure.”
This subject comes second in classical rhetoric's canon, but does the form, as Louis Sullivan says in the epigraph above, really follow the function? Does the invention of ideas determine how the ideas will be arranged? Do you see what materials are available and then decide what you can build?
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.