Lost and Longing

To the contemporary reader, “The Machine Stops” (1909), a unique science fiction short story by E.M. Forster, will seem accurately prescient, envisioning new digital media, network connections, artificial intelligence, robotics, and bio-technologies, yet it will also arouse some disquieting issues. Our analysis focuses on Forster’s depiction of technology, as devastating both to the human body and to the experience of space and place.

In Forster’s dystopic fable, people live alone in tiny podlike rooms in a vast global web of underground cities, maintained by a ubiquitous technological apparatus, the Machine. Kuno, the protagonist, attempts an escape when he understands the relationship with space as vital. He says: “[W]e have lost the sense of space. We say ‘space is annihilated’, but we have annihilated not space but the sense thereof …,” anticipating Meyrowitz’s claim of a society with “no sense of place,” as well as Pallasmaa’s criticism on the pervasiveness of the “scopic.”

The timeliness of such concerns thus implies “The Machine Stops” as highly significant in the hyper-mediated present world, for questioning the relationship between corporeality, representation, and nature. If the Machine’s living unit reduces architecture to its sheltering function, at the same time its social mediated interaction and individual sense of space drives the symbolic, social, and political premises of the architectural into a far broader discussion.

According to authors such as Vidler, a similar pervasive body detachment might risk today’s architecture, in the process of loosing its crucial cultural and social significance while becoming “bodiless and experientially rather empty” (Cruz, 2013)—a sort of new digital modernism yet disembodied and absent of a vital sense of space as in Forster’s cautionary tale.

Thus, as this story opens with an exhortation to the reader’s imagining of a windowless hexagonal individual cell, we confront the Machine’s constraint space and its implications with some contemporary living cell projects, namely the Nakagin Capsule Tower (1972) in Tokyo, the inhabitation cells designed by Israeli-born artist Absalon (1993), and the architectural speculations with cellular and honeycomb morphologies by MATSYS design studio (2004 to present).

Reference

Cruz, Marcos. The inhabitable flesh of architecture. Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2013.