ABSTRACT
As early as Vitruvius in the first century ad, architects have had a deep interest in the machine. Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci designed war machines. It was seen as a legitimate aspect of architectural practice up through the Renaissance. Viollet-le-Duc, in the mid-nineteenth century, explored the marriage of the gothic with the cast iron aesthetic of the machine. It was the Victorian industrial age of “cast iron, soot and rust” (Banham 1984). The machine was the central metaphor of the modern age. Architecture did not escape the fascination with the machine. As described by Reyner Banham in his seminal book, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (1960), the early twentieth century was the first in what was expected to be a series of machine ages.
