The Allegorical Architectural Machine
Architectural Design
1. Edition November 2024
144 Pages, Softcover
Wiley & Sons Ltd
The intersection of architecture and the machine has a history that stretches back to the Industrial Revolution, however the machine has recently begun to appear in new ways in speculative architectural drawing and modelling. This issue of AD considers the influence of the machine as an allegorical device for exploring alternative architectural practices, and includes a cross-section of viewpoints from emerging and established international practitioners and academics.
Allegory, a technique native to literature, provides a critical method through which machine typologies can contribute to deeper architectural narratives, offering new lenses for challenging or reassembling conventional modes of thought. An allegorical architectural project can unveil a story that enhances our awareness of something important. This AD reveals how engagement with the machine as an allegorical device in architectural discourse provides an avenue for architecture to provoke new ideas in response to current environmental, political, economic, cultural and social issues. At the forefront of this discussion, it extends the criticality of the topic within the broader spectrum of history, theory, philosophy, allegory and new technologies.
Contributors: Daniela Atencio and Claudio Rossi, Peter Baldwin, Brian Cantley, Kirill Chelushkin, Giuliano Fiorenzoli, Marissa Lindquist, Bea Martin, Derek Hales, Wes Jones, Brian M Kelly, Tom Kundig, and Caleb White
Featured architects and designers: Jones, Partners: Architecture, Olson Kundig, Adolfo Luis Moure Strangis, and Liam Young.
Daniel K Brown and Michael Chapman
Introduction Building Machines From Prodigies to Progeny 6
Michael Chapman and Daniel K Brown
Con-textual Devices and MachiNet(Works) 14
Bryan Cantley
Between Utopia and Hallucination 24
The Holistic Space in Speculative Drawing Practices
Kirill Chelushkin
Essential Machines 32
Kinetic Architecture and the Human Experience
Tom Kundig
The Machinic Garden of Forking Paths 40
Time, Tempo and Tango
Bea Martin
Because of Seeing Architecture 48
To Execute, It Is First Necessary To Conceive
Giuliano Fiorenzoli
Coping Mechanisms Four Dysfunctional Machines 56
Michael Chapman
The Temporalisation of Space and the Spatialisation of Time 64
Daniel K Brown
Machine Aesthetics 74
Material Indices of Post-Digital Architecture
Caleb White
Desirous Machines 94
Towards a New Architectural Allegory
Peter J Baldwin
Desirous Forces 102
The Great Endeavor, the Machine Allegory of Worldbuilding
Marissa Lindquist
The Glade of the Chicken Computer 110
An Allegorical Operator's Manual
Derek Hales
Allegorical Façades 118
When Clouds Become Clocks
Brian M Kelly
The First Allegory and the Last Word 128
Wes Jones
From Another Perspective 136
Dogmatic Gas and Mosquitoes
Neil Spiller
The machine provided both an aesthetic and functional device linked not only to architectural form but also to fabrication
Daniel K Brown and Michael Chapman
Contributors 142
Michael Chapman is a practicing architect and Professor at the School of Architecture and Built Environment, The University of Newcastle, Australia. Chapman has written widely about the historical avant-garde, specifically Dada and surrealism as well as industrialisation, Marxism and cycles of modernism. Michael has been commended for numerous awards, including the AIA Unbuilt Award (special mention 2021) and the Australian Tapestry Workshop Architect's Design Prize (highly commended 2021).
