Building machines: from prodigies to progeny

The machine is one of the most recurring elements in the architecture of Modernism, originally fetishised in the first decades of the 20th century in both the polemics of Le Corbusier and the discursive avant-garde practices of Dada. The mass expansion of industrial processes and technological innovation, fuelled to a large extent by two catastrophic wars, saw unprecedented technical innovation in the decades after. The machine provided both an aesthetic and functional device linked not only to architectural form but also to fabrication. Both aspects became central to Reyner Banham’s influential theory of architecture in the 1960s1 which drew from the early experiments of the avant-garde to frame a future of design inseparable from the mechanical processes of industrial production. These machinist histories provided the DNA upon which a speculative and ambitious design culture emerged in the 1980s that sought to propose new histories, narratives and imagery in order to chart this new terrain.