Architectural machines

Abstract

The title Machines D'Architecture is derived from the genre of work stemming from Libeskind's, ill-fated, Three Lessons in Architecture. The word machine is curious today in that it doubly evokes technology and nostalgia, both rationalist and romantic, in this seamless, electronic virtual world around us. The mechanistic iconography used in these machines tends towards the first category, honouring the clarity of articulation and the 'notation of intensified human transaction' Hogben, 44, expressed by these older machines. Libeskind, as one of the contributors, claims that architecture is at a hinging point in its traditional sense, or using his own rhetoric entering an end condition Libeskind, Architecture Intermundium, 115. They are intended to suggest a potential future for architecture. The Machines are enabling the parameters of this discourse to be expanded filling an abyss, that many of these architects are claiming to be witness to.