During the 19th and most of the 20th century, discussions of style revolved around pure formalism or pure functionalism. Style, as the way of assembling forms, was trapped in producing consistency and sameness across architectural forms. The book ' The Function of Style' is the third in a series at Harvard GSD which focused at researching a contemporary idea of style in architecture.

The previous publication, The Function of Form, investigated the architecture of the latter part of the 20th century which defies the senselessness and anonymity of the early 20th century city. The aim was to establish whether the systems of differentiation identified earlier were exploring their style as formalism or they were based on a new idea of style that would work with form and function simultaneously as a way to use form to subvert function as set out for each type by early 20th century modernism.