Professor Silenus, known only for the "rejected design of a chewing-gum factory", declares against man: The only perfect building must be the factory, because that is built to house machines, not men. All ill comes from man. - Decline and Fall, Evelyn Waugh, 1928
Oh how times have changed! What a difference 80 years makes! No, Mr Silenus, all ill comes from the machine. If you could get in a time capsule and come to 2009 I would show you Big Brother and cctv cameras, global warming, traffic jams, cyber stalking and nuclear war.
Oh how times have changed! What a difference 80 years makes! No, Mr Silenus, all ill comes from the machine. If you could get in a time capsule and come to 2009 I would show you Big Brother and cctv cameras, global warming, traffic jams, cyber stalking and nuclear war.
I can understand Silenus's fascination with the machine, just as I understand Corbusier's. Imagine living in a world that is developing so rapidly you blink and miss a thousand things. Imagine never having seen a car before, a skyscraper or even a fridge. This new modern world would've been earth-shatteringly exciting when you contemplate the possibilities laid out before you and for an architect it would've been so immense I would be surprised if Corbusier didn't wet himself with anticipation.
Is it any wonder a new generation of designers became obsessed with new technology? I, like a lot of my colleagues, probably would've done. Machines were so perfect, so efficient. Wasn't it only logical to begin to look at architecture in this mechanical way too?
So that's what Corb did - the house became a machine for living in. Cities became factories for the machines. Everything would run litter ally like clockwork and everyone would have the most fantastic lives, free from ordinary responsibility and reaching a "maximum individual liberty".
But this is exactly where the dream of buildings and cities as machines stops and becomes a nightmare. This mechanisation of architecture extended to the mechanisation of society, to institutionalisation and depersonalisation. People weren't individual anymore, they were no longer free, they had become trapped in the machine. What if you didn't want to live in a vertical street? What if you couldn't drive a car? Well, then you would damage the machine, you would stop it from working so efficiently. The machine would start to grumble and kick out smoke and make your life Hell, but like an old German banger it would just keep on going, spilling oil everywhere and making a mess.
But this is the beauty of hindsight, Corb wasn't to know what his little science project would do to architecture and planning in the century to follow. All we can do as the next generation is learn from the mistakes of the past, not to get too carried away with new and exciting ideas. We need to remember we are only human, we ourselves are now part of the machine. There can be no detaching of the architect from society, no looking down from a higher place. We cannot pretend we are God and our ideals cannot be projected upon the masses with Utopian results, we cannot make an Eden - trying to fix the machine is enough for one eternity.
Is it any wonder a new generation of designers became obsessed with new technology? I, like a lot of my colleagues, probably would've done. Machines were so perfect, so efficient. Wasn't it only logical to begin to look at architecture in this mechanical way too?
So that's what Corb did - the house became a machine for living in. Cities became factories for the machines. Everything would run litter ally like clockwork and everyone would have the most fantastic lives, free from ordinary responsibility and reaching a "maximum individual liberty".
But this is exactly where the dream of buildings and cities as machines stops and becomes a nightmare. This mechanisation of architecture extended to the mechanisation of society, to institutionalisation and depersonalisation. People weren't individual anymore, they were no longer free, they had become trapped in the machine. What if you didn't want to live in a vertical street? What if you couldn't drive a car? Well, then you would damage the machine, you would stop it from working so efficiently. The machine would start to grumble and kick out smoke and make your life Hell, but like an old German banger it would just keep on going, spilling oil everywhere and making a mess.
But this is the beauty of hindsight, Corb wasn't to know what his little science project would do to architecture and planning in the century to follow. All we can do as the next generation is learn from the mistakes of the past, not to get too carried away with new and exciting ideas. We need to remember we are only human, we ourselves are now part of the machine. There can be no detaching of the architect from society, no looking down from a higher place. We cannot pretend we are God and our ideals cannot be projected upon the masses with Utopian results, we cannot make an Eden - trying to fix the machine is enough for one eternity.
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