Our Machinic Inheritance Review of Inhabited Machines: Genealogy of an Architectural Concept , by Moritz Gleich, Basel, Birkhäuser, 2023, 416 pp. ISBN: 9783035623765.

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes1 Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 188.2 Revealing the mechanical laws of nature also constituted a claim to authority, one which also aimed to replace the arbitrariness of personal rule and, later, religious decree with the certainty of measured replication. This is a vast topic, but I am thinking here of the helpful summary provided in Margaret C. Jacob and Larry Stewart, Practical Matter: Newton’s Science in the Service of Industry and Empire, 1687–1851 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). See also: Otto Mayr, Authority, Liberty, and Automatic Machinery in Early Modern Europe (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986); Horst Bredekamp, The Lure of Antiquity and the Cult of the Machine: The Kunstkammer and the Evolution of Nature, Art, and Technology (Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener Publishers, 1995). One should remember, in this context, that Bentham’s Panopticon; or, Inspection House (1791) was not a design for a prison, but rather imagined itself as an all-purpose mechanical architecture whose design could also be deployed for asylums, hospitals, workhouses, schools. Any place, in short, where discipline was needed.3 Kiel Moe, “The Equipmental Tradition: Architecture’s Environmental Pedagogies,” in Environmental Histories of Architecture, ed. Kim Förster (Montreal: Canadian Centre for Architecture, 2022), 4.1–4.17. See also: Michael Osman, Modernism’s Visible Hand: Architecture and Regulation in America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018), 1–43.4 On the conceptual step change introduced by steam power, see: John Tresch, The Romantic Machine: Utopian Science and Technology after Napoleon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012); Andreas Malm, Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam-Power and the Roots of Global Warming (London: Verso, 2016).5 Dolores Greenberg, “Energy, Power, and Perceptions of Social Change in the Early Nineteenth Century,” American Historical Review 95, no. 3 (1990): 693–714.6 Bernhard Siegert, “Doors: On the Materiality of the Symbolic,” trans. John Durham Peters, Grey Room 47 (2012): 6–23.7 Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, The Shock of the Anthropocene: The Earth, History and Us, trans. David Fernbach (London: Verso, 2017), 116.8 Peter Collins, Changing Ideals in Modern Architecture, 1750–1950 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1998), 166.9 Collins, Changing Ideals in Modern Architecture, 166.