On Space.  We teach the genres (high school) and the modes of rhetoric (freshman comp).  So our writers’ forms don’t follow function but rather the states’ standards of learning.  A writer learns forms best by discovering her writing’s parti, and then by finding forms, or parts of forms, that best express it.

A parti is the central idea or concept of a building.  A parti [par-TEE] can be expressed several ways but is most often expressed by a diagram depicting the general floor plan organization of a building and, by implication, its experiential and aesthetic sensibility. . . .  [I]t is unlikely, if not impossible, to successfully carry a parti from an old project to a new project.  The design process is the struggle to create a uniquely appropriate parti for a project. [Emphasis original]

– Matthew Frederick, 101 Things I Learned in Architecture School, Thing #15