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.
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