One of America's foremost poets once said: "Form is never more than an extending of contents." I have always found this to be the most useful phrase as to defining "form" in architecture. What would the "extending" of "contents" mean in the context of architecture?

The phrase "form follows function" has almost become a household phrase. It was an attempt by the Modernists to get away from styles that only had meaning in relation to the history of architecture. The idea was that architecture should be more like a machine that functions as a dwelling or place for mankind to live and work within. In searching for an architectural form, one need only define the functions for the building, and the form would follow.

In hindsight, this is a bit rational and linear in its approach, as if we can define the function of our own lives and activities. It is also severely limiting, as our lives and activities usually have multiple purposes and functions, all present at once. Is there a piece of paper large enough to list them all? Yet when we live in the world, we physically can open the door to only one room at a time!

One of the beauties of this poet's sense of form is that there is an inherent circularity to the statement. It is almost a tautology. If we look at the root of the word "extent", we find that it means "from tension". The intent of "tende" is that there is a tension holding something together. By adding the "ex", we are being told that there is a releasing of that tension.

Likewise "content" is a containment of "tende". It is as if a pair of cupped hand are holding something within, containing them.

Thus an "extending of contents", is a releasing outward of something which is held within, and which by its nature has a natural force of tension within it. By releasing the natural hold of things, there is a movement outward, like from a pebble dropping into a pond. There is a wave which sits at the outer edge of the dropped pebble and it is expanding outward into space and time.

Another aspect of this sense of "extending" is that it must occur into something. Does the extending occur into a void? Is there already a space in nature that the extending occurs into? And here we have tied our building to the question of how the universe was formed. A building is formed around a life. A building is constructed from trees and rocks that exist in the surrounding landscape. So the expansion outward results in a form made by re-organizing what is nearby.

However, our poet did not say that form "is" this extending of contents. Rather, he said it is "never more than" the extending of contents. If a form is present, how can it be less than some quantity? In the case of architecture, let's say that a building is designed with reference to a specific style -- in a sense, copying some forms from the Egyptians, or even a modernist American who in turn has copied some other historic style. In this case there is a "extending of contents" but it's pretty much disconnected from a specific building site, a specific people who will be inhabiting the place, the natural surroundings of the place, or any other specificity for that building. Rather, it is a reference to someone else and some other place.

This does seem to be "somewhat less than" what can be imagined as optimal. It's a release of what might be called "cerebral tension". But it's sure missing the connection to the "body politic" -- the corpus, the earth, the surrounding nature.

This issue of "tende" as being at the origin of form, is a reminder that the "tents" of the nomads are the real origin of architecture. The thin fabric of a pup tent like a cocoon around a Boy Scout, is in some way the most fundamental of architectures. Of course the teepee, yurt, black tent, and other advanced technological forms carry this sense of the building actually being in tension, to more glamorous and extravagant form. Frei Otto and the other tension architecture specialists carried this forward to a modern set of forms.

When a log house begins its drying out process, there are loud pops and bangs as the tension in the logs releases itself and forms long cracks. This is especially true for spruce logs, which even have a slight spiral to the grain down the length of the log. The spiral form showing how the vigorous growth bound back on itself – holding its years of growth energy tightly within its narrow trunk.

What would architecture look like that is "not less than" its extending of content? It would be a building whose shell is kind of a concretization of the life and activities that take place inside. It is a building where the materials might still pop and crack, showing the internal tension in a piece of wood that grew for a hundred years, ring by ring. It would be a building that extends and weaves itself back into the larger site context. It would be a building that changes shape and size depending on what is happening inside, and on the pull of the moon.

It is the "tect" in architect that refers to this unusual knowledge of how to intertwine things. And it is this weaving of materials – waddle and daube, logs, steel I-beams – that creates the fabric, that can be tensioned between things, to form a tent – a building, an architecture.