In 1896, the American architect Louis Sullivan wrote that a building's shape should emerge from its purpose rather than be dressed up to disguise it — a principle he called "form follows function." The phrase outlived Sullivan's own buildings, picked up decades later by Bauhaus designers who sharpened it into doctrine, and eventually landed in mid-century furniture and industrial design as shorthand for a whole worldview: that an object's honesty could be read in how little i