Leon Trotsky, Functionalist

'The Shatura electric power station is a thing of beauty. Gifted and devoted builders made it. Its beauty is not put on, is not an affair of tinsel decoration, but grows from the inherent properties and needs of technology itself. The highest and only criterion of technology is fitness for purpose. The test of functional fitness is economic efficiency. And this presupposes the most complete correspondence between part and whole, means and end. Economic and technological criteria fully coincide with aesthetic ones. One may say, and it will not be a paradox, that Shatura is a thing of beauty because a kilowatt of its power is cheaper than a kilowatt-hour of power from other stations situated in similar conditions.'

Leon Trotsky, Culture and Socialism, 1926