Comments on Brook Muller’s “The Machine Is a Watershed for Living In (Reconstituting Architectural Horizons)”

in a stimulating and rich address, Brook Muller diagnoses some of the problems and challenges that our ecological crises bring to contemporary architecture, and attempts to break out of the conceptual straitjacket of modernism that he sees as contributing to the difficulty of producing original, promising solutions. In particular, he draws attention to the hugely pervasive role of Le Corbusier’s idea of the house as a machine for living in: here, he suggests, Le Corbusier’s enduring influence is manifested not only in the “litany of environmental challenges associated with the legacy of the architectural machine” such as “climate change, massive species die-off, diminished air and water quality, and water and other resource scarcities” but has also impoverished the imagination thanks to the “inheritance of a functionalist modernist language that has supplanted all others” (Muller, in this issue, 78–92). The ruling architectural metaphor of the machine has, in effect, become manifested as a reductive model that undermines the diversity of ecosystems, simplifying complex processes, making them monotonous and uniform and producing damaging externalities. There are thus two intertwined problems here: from the one angle, the concrete reductive effects of the mechanistic mode of architectural creation, and on the other, the problem of finding new modes of envisioning architecture that can free the practical imagination to go beyond and ultimately replace the ruling machine metaphor of architectural modernity.

Reading Muller on these points, I was strongly reminded of the notion of the “device paradigm” popularized by Albert Borgmann, the philosopher of technology. Borgmann argues that the characteristic dynamics of modern life can be best understood in terms of a pervasive, reductive simplification in which a particular good may be procured more and more straightforwardly, but this development, precisely because of the ease involved, often disrupts complex and richly interwoven social patterns that previously did the job. Thus the technology of a wood-burning stove required attendance by the whole family, bringing with it forms of care, vigilance, social cooperation, learned skills, and fidelity to particular routines, orienting the senses in particular ways and making demands of attention and knowledge. Its replacement by the device of central heating generates the same end, but in a way that backgrounds the technology, makes no significant demands of knowledge on the use, and mandates no particular set of social relations. However, the very straightforwardness of device usage, in which pushing a switch replaces a complex pattern of relations, serves to distract attention from technology and its unbundling effects. Once a technology is discreet and unobtrusive, its wider effects easily go unnoticed. Borgmann, in neo-Weberian style, sees modernity as profoundly characterized by the ongoing simplification of complex webs of interaction by stripped-down means–ends relations. This process of simplification and instrumentalization that often proceeds with relatively little conscious attention to the results being produced closely resembles the dynamics identified by Muller, and I sympathize with Muller’s characterization of the intertwining problems of concrete reduction and imaginative blockage. I shall, however, revisit them for critical purposes as I wonder about the extent to which Muller’s treatment of specifics actually does justice to his broader critique.

In attempting to tackle these problems, Muller draws upon David Leatherbarrow’s influential book Uncommon Ground. For Leatherbarrow, the topography of everyday experience may be labeled in terms of horizons, which are both physically instantiated and operative as conceptual structures that help us make sense and meaning of our world. In accord with this, he distinguishes our equipmental horizon, referring to the everyday furnishings, tools, and belongings with which we are constantly engaged in our immediate activities; the practical horizon, which consists of our roofs, walls, and platforms for activity; and the environmental horizon, where we perceive the surrounding landscape’s scenes (Leatherbarrow 160). With this broad schema for articulating topography, Muller follows Leatherbarrow in reasserting the importance of inventive craftsmanship within architectural design while not reversing into extreme repudiations of modernism. On these grounds, the two agree that, in principle, creativity “can exist in practices that make use of elements that...