Jeffrey's Reading Response #1

From this reading by Albert Smith introduces how machines, or small scale models has been pushing the limit of architecture and satisfy the curiosity to the world and reality.

Even at Gaudi's time we can see how his three-dimensional studies helps him to studies and understand the universe and thus the reality in order. Gaudi's hanging chains model was, to Gaudi, the search of the invisible things, God.

Proceeding to constructivism, both Tatlin and Lissitzky were looking for a new reference standard of the world order as Communism does not accept religion to explain the invisible things. Thus their models were to define and suggest what is communism. It was, however, Stalin later on "took control of the reference standard and tightly controlling its definition" because these machines suggest the new society with too many possibilities for the Communist Party (106). Tatlin's and Lissitzky's reference standard was then being taken over even though they "offered an important sense of measure and scale between man, technology, and the chaos of the unknown" (108).

While Kahn was hoping to find the underlying form of the world through the small-scale model machine, through the model he received unexpected representation from the model that questions his religious faith, which is also his reference standards. This scale model then led him to a new search of his own reference standard of the reality.

For Libeskind, the small-scaled study models were to destroy, to decompose architecture, and then recompose it. This is totally like how architectural students first go into architecture school to have their perception of architecture destroyed and then being rebuilt again.

In conclusion, machines in architecture are an agency to visualize the invisible things which help us understand the reality or the reference standard for architecture. It an attempt to understand, define, and measure. Without these models, these intangible ideas would become difficult to be conceptualized and new ideas would be more difficult to be developed.