Introduction
“Theory and Design in the First Machine Age” by Reyner Banham, published in 1960, is considered to be one of the most influential and valuable critical books in the architectural and designer world. Banham gives an explanation to the term “Machine Age” in the context of the industrialization and modernization process. He generally stated that both the architecture and design of that particular period reflected the ideas and were formed by the “Machine Age” in which they actually occurred. He expressed the idea that the design itself actually helps to define a certain period.
Main body
It can be stated that the values and the ideas of the certain Age predetermine the attitude to a certain design. These factors may help to analyze the distinctions between different kinds of Machine Ages, particularly the one we are interested in – the First Machine Age. Reyner Banham outlined the characteristics of two Machine Ages: the First one and the second one, but let’s discuss just the first one.
Banham was actually in no doubt with the thought that the First Machine Age was a grade burst with the past. On the one hand, it was characterized by a distinct and newly appeared stage of technological progress and by new machines, on the other hand, it was characterized by a “…thorough overhaul of ideas and methods in the plastic arts generally, marked by such signs as the Foundation Manifesto of Futurism, the European discovery of Frank Lloyd Wright, Adolf Loos’ Ornament and Crime… the achievement of fully Cubist painting, and so forth. These mark a watershed…” (Banham, p.61, 1960).
Talking about certain terms of technology and the First Machine Age, Banham states that there was certain evolution from the system and the decay of machines to the human scale. Banham shows in his book that the remarkable change appeared only in the nineteenth century’s began with such devices as electric cookers, the gramophone, and the telephone, ordinary vacuum cleaners, and some other mechanized goods that have permanently changed the way of domestic life.
Banham gives his own explanation of the First Machine Age: “Mains electricity made a decisive alteration… one of the most decisive in the history of domestic technology…. It brought small, woman-controlled machinery into the home, notably the vacuum-cleaner. Electrical techniques brought the telephone as well, and for the first time domestic and sociable communication did not depend on the sending of written or remembered messages. The portable typewriter put a machine under the hands of poets; the first gramophones made music a domestic service rather than a social ceremony” (Banham, p.10, 1960).
I think that his views may be regarded as a means of those machines which actually transformed relationships between the person and the technology (like the vacuum cleaner was shown as a labor-saving appliance). He tries to show that social relations were also changed. For example, music was no more a social ceremony where a person had to control one’s behavior, follow dress codes. It has become a common “domestic service” that was naturally characterized as personal and informal.
Aesthetic features of the First Machine Age represented the novelty and design of technology. It can be pointed out that early machines were not aesthetically designed – they were simply put together and aggregated. The key point here was the fact that they worked, nobody cared about the way they looked like.
Nevertheless, after the process of designing had become a serious and competitive business in the 20s years of the 20th century, the situation changed a lot. It was mentioned that at such places as the Bauhaus machines were entirely considered. Humanity witnessed the progress and the development of the aesthetic of the machine. The machine of that period had to look factory-produced and aesthetically designed.
It might be seen that at the Bauhaus’s (after 1923) and other modern and progressive places the machine’s aesthetic of designed primary forms became very important. The style was different: Bauhaus’s unadorned surfaces and “Sachlichkeit reductivism”.
We can find out from Banham’s book that a little bit later the USA designers such as Raymond Loewy made machine aesthetics’ flavor much more romantic. They represented the streamlining techniques that gave the feeling of advance and a certain dynamical spirit. We can say that all the mentioned above were technological and stylish looks.
It can be added that in his book Banham mentions the following great people related to the Modern Movement: Gropius and Meyer (representatives of the “pioneer phase” of the Modern Movement), and also Frank Lloyd Wright, Antonio Sant’Elia, Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier.
Banham describes Antonio Sant’Elia as a “Futurist”, he has written about him: “Sant’Elia was in touch with the Futurists… In 1912, 1913 and 1914 he made a number (possibly several hundred) of imaginative drawings of buildings and town-planning ideas, and a group of these under the title of the Città Nuova were shown at an exhibition of the group Nuove Tendenze in May 1914. In the catalogue of this exhibition there appeared, over Sant’Elia’s name, a Messaggio on the problems of Modern architecture: and a reworked version of this Messaggio appeared on the canonical eleventh day of July 1914, as the Manifesto of Futurist architecture, still over the name of Sant’Elia, and without other signatories” (Banham, p.127, 1960).
Banham also wrote some about Le Corbusier and Gropius, and about those who criticized the above-mentioned architects. We can see that most critics of the period of Thirties interpreted in the scanty sense that Le Corbusier had to be ascribed to Rational, the paradox is that Le Corbusier as well as Gropius had turned it down.
Apart from this, the author informed that by 1926 when Le Corbusier actually performed to publish his next major theoretical views, he had become a sort of a vested figure in the Paris architecture world.
I would like to support a conclusion made by Banham and related to the problem of “Functionalism and Technology”. If we regard the term functionalism, then it is necessary to outline that as a certain creed it probably had pure nobility. At the same time bit was poverty – affected symbolically. The architecture of the period of Twenties was permissive of its essential severity and nobility. It was heavily and deliberately overloaded with some symbolic meanings that were previously rejected or simply ignored by its advocates in the period of Thirties.
That is why there appeared some key reasons for the decision to argue on a diminished front. The first key reason, considered the most important one, can be explained as a means of most of those advocates came from such countries as Holland, Germany and also France: they had to invent the new style, and came to the given point later.
Nowadays the era of the huge monumental exhibition that made money is not urgent. It is very important that today we judge an exhibition by the means of its accomplishment in the cultural sphere. Such conditions as economic, technical, and also cultural have changed totally.
Conclusion
Nowadays technology, as well as the industry, faces radically new issues and problems. That is why it is necessary to find some good solutions for modern technology and industry in order to improve the quality of our culture and our society. German industry and actually the entire European industry should understand and try to solve these tasks mentioned above. I can agree with Benham’s suggestion that the way should lead from quantity to quality, and thus from the extensive towards the intensive.
Works Cited
Banham, Reyner. Theory and Design in the First Machine Age. London: Architectural Press, 1960.