ABSTRACT
Like the computer of CyberCity and the postmodern, the machine of the
Machine City is ingrained in the way we represent and imagine (or have
represented and imagined) the modern city. Metaphors of the Machine City
linked to representations of and reflecting attitudes toward modernity and the
metropolis at the turn of the twentieth century come easily to mind. Calvin
Coolidge seemed to encapsulate the idolization of the machine age when he
proclaimed, “The man who builds a factory builds a temple. The man who
works there worships there.”6 The metropolis was believed to be an inorganic
and fabricated environment, the product of mathematics and the creation of
the engineer. Thus we find, for example, Ludwig Meidner in “Directions for
Painting Images of the Metropolis” advising the artist of 1914 to pay attention
to “tumultuous streets, the elegance of iron suspension bridges, the gasome-
ters, . . . the howling colors of the autobuses and express locomotives, the
rolling telephone wires, the harlequinade of the advertisement pillars.”7 And
before long the dynamics of motion in the big city, as well as the visual juxtapo-
sition of disparate elements (graphics, musical rhythms, typography, and photo-
graphy) used to create picture poems, were captured by one of the machines
of the twentieth century: the movie camera. Laszlo Moholy-Nagy explained in
his fourteen-page film script for Dynamics of the Metropolis of 1921-22 that
there were to be shots of construction sites from below, from above, from
diagonal views, from revolving cranes, shots of the flashing letters of electric
advertisements, and shots filmed from racing automobiles and moving trains,
to set up the dynamic tempo of the city. Although Moholy-Nagy’s script was
never produced as a film, it seems to have reached fruition in William
Ruttmann’s Berlin: A Symphony of the City of 1929.
