might itself be operating as a mechanically developing process, that forms the background to the rise of the machine age in architecture. These ideas paved the way for the eventual assimilation of new technologies into architecture – resolving some of the “confusion” caused by the innovations of the nineteenth century – and it is these ideas that must be considered next in a effort to understand the background to more recent architectural developments.

The Mechanical Universe – Vesalius, Copernicus and Bacon

The two philosophical sources for the dominance of the mechanistic model in twentieth century architecture concern what were traditionally two of the greatest mysteries of the pre-modern world, the first of which is spatial and the second temporal. Probably since the dawn of human consciousness the question of the spatial structure of the physical universe and of the objects found within it has been a source of considerable intrigue and speculation. Much of the world’s mythological and religious thinking has addressed the persistent mysteries of why things are the way they are and why they behave in the way they do. By the same token, a similar amount of creative energy has been expended on the question of why some things seem to change with the passage of time while others perpetually appear the same. More recently, however, both science and philosophy have attempted to answer both of these intriguing and fundamental questions by applying a similar model of the mechanistic system – first by considering the universe and its contents as machines and the second by suggesting that history itself follows a mechanical and directed evolution towards a goal.

two of the group’s leading voices. Hermann Muthesius, who had recently been in England studying domestic architecture for the German government, set out a series of ten these on the aims of theWerkbund programme, which were focused on the need for standardization in design.For example:

1.       Architecture, and with it thewhole area of the Werkbund’s activities, is pressing towards standardization,and only through standardization can it recover that universal significancewhich was characteristic of it in times of harmonious culture.

In the secondsection he went on to claim that standardization was also the key to animprovement in aesthetic awareness, as it could “… alone make possible thedevelopment of a universally valid, unfailing good taste.”12 In replying tothis presentation, Henry van de Velde, who was also director of the School ofApplied Arts in Weimar that later formed the core of the Bauhaus, set out analternative point of view, even though he was as determined as anyone in themovement at the time to promote such Modernist principles as “truth tomaterials” and the “honesty” of construction:

1.       So long as there are stillartists in the Werkbund and so long as they exercise some influence on itsdestiny, they will protest against every suggestion for the establishment of acanon and for standardization. By his innermost essence the artist is a burningidealist, a free spontaneous creator. Of his own free will he will neversubordinate himself to a discipline that imposes upon him a type, a canon.13

The final layerin this archeological excavation of the building-as-machine analogy in recentarchitecture explores this conflict between

12 Muthesius/van de Velde, “Werkbund Theseand Antitheses” in Ulrich Conrads(ed.), Programmes and Manifestoes on 20^th Century Architecture, Lund Humphries, London, 1970, p28.

13 Muthesius/van de Velde, “Werkbund Theseand Antitheses” in Ulrich Conrads(ed.), Programmes and Manifestoes on 20^th Century Architecture, Lund Humphries, London, 1970, p29.

A similar confusion as to the true natureof modernist architecture arose from the title of the exhibition which introducedthis initially European phenomenon into the architectural scene in NorthAmerica. “The International Style: Architecture Since 1922”, organized by HenryRussell Hitchcock and the architect Philip Johnson at the Museum of Modern Art,New York in 1932, suggested that, far from being a “scientific method” ofproducing buildings according to the functional and technical requirements ofthe brief, the new architecture was actually as much a product of thecreativity of the individual “artist” as architecture always had been. Thisconflicting interpretation of the ideals of the Modern Movement had alreadybecome apparent in the teaching programme of the Bauhaus – the school set up inGermany as a new model for education, to rival the Classical teaching of theEcole des Beaux Arts in Paris, but with a technically based curriculum in placeof the traditional historical one. Walter Gropius, who directed the new schoolfrom its inception in 1919 through to 1928, had attempted to unify theindustrial and the creative aspects of the practice of design, through theteaching of architects, artists and sculptures together in the techniques ofcraft production. Unfortunately, the factional in-fighting between those broughtin to teach in the “craftwork” as opposed to the “artwork” sections of thecourse meant that the school made little headway towards its stated objectiveof “the creation of standard types for all practical commodities of everydayuse …”.11

         Theemphasis on standardization for the mass-production market had already caused arift in the running of another, earlier, group to which Walter Gropius wasaffiliated, the pre-World War 1 Deutsche Werkbund, for whom he had designed anexhibition pavilion in 1914. In the conference held in Cologne at the time ofthe exhibition the opposition between the free will of the artist and thedeterminism of industrial production was made particularly clear in a debatebetween

11 Walter Gropius, “Principles of BauhausProduction”, in Ulrich Conrads (ed.), Programmes and Manifestoes on 20^th Century Architecture, Lund Humphries, London, 1970, p 96.