Industrial Revolution and Architecture
Siegfried Giedion's book about the effects of the IndustrialRevolution upon humanity's personal and social space, and the discipline ofarchitecture as a whole, is entitled Mechanization Takes Command. In histitle, Giedion suggests that human beings' intimate surroundings werecompletely permeated and transmuted by the forces of mechanization, asgenerated by the mass industrialization of production and society. Ironically, the forces of humanity created the machine. The machine
The equilibrium of the human body, which requires a certain state ofnature to function at its best is instead subjected to machines-forinstance, workers must put on extra clothes to keep warm in offices thatare kept cool for the computer machinery present. Spaces to produce grow larger and less decorated, as machines needmore room and cannot take delight in art. Even amenities, such as ornate'dressings' to rooms and clothing are now purchased from mass-producingfactories, rather than made by the individual. Or, they are subjectedto the heat of the assembly line, working in the dark to produce far moregoods then they need in huge factories. The cumulating effect ofthis in terms of architecture is of course the development or suburbancommunity, where even all of the houses look the same, as if manufactured. But instead, human life and humanspeed has become subordinate to the pace and confining discipline of themachine-based modalities of production. Spaces that human beings occupygrow smaller as they are piled into apartments, to live in small andenclosed cities, to serve machines, and human beings are denied the timeand leisure to produce works of beauty that are individual, to add delightto their increasingly small surroundings. In fact, Gideon believes thatbecause mechanization sprang entirely from the mind of man, it is moredangerous and less easily controlled than natural forces since it reacts onthe senses and the mind of its creator in a way that natural forces do not.
Common topics in this essay:
Takes Command,
Industrial Revolution,
Siegfried Giedion's,
natural forces,
human life,
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