Mechanics and Meaning in Architecture (review)

Mechanics and Meaning in Architecture. By Lance LaVine. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. Pp. xix+207. $62.95/$24.95.

Lance LaVine contends that the meanings conveyed by the forms of architectural technologies--those of structure, climate control, and illumination--have not been voiced, but rather left to the quantifiable domain of engineering. As technologies of habitation developed, LaVine writes, a symbiosis developed between the forms that they took and the meaning of how they adapted the forces of nature. Thick walls conceptually communicated a sense of severe winter temperatures, for example, while sparse, small windows not only addressed the problem of heat loss through wall openings but also communicated the inhabitants' need for connection with the outside world. Over time, advances in new materials and in building technologies with respect to new and economically efficient designs, as well as the lack of advancement in the physical structure of elements such as beams, columns, or windows, contributed to the obscuring of their intangible meanings.

LaVine presents a convincing analysis of the dichotomy between the architectural and engineering professions that resulted from industrial and economic conditions of the mid-nineteenth century. Societal values in the new era of electricity, steel, and automobile manufacture were dominated by utilitarianism and functionality. Because the engineering profession had a tradition of empirical problem-solving, it was seen by society as the design profession. Its highly ordered constructions reflected innovative solutions to tangible problems. Architectural thought did not respond with indignation, although it was being muted. Instead, it adopted the prevailing attitude reflected in modern architecture while maintaining a focus on the effect of the built environment on human thought. The result of the partitioning of technologies by discipline is a limit to the idyllic "marriage of art and science." As a pertinent example, LaVine cites Herbert Read's documentation of the evolution of a functional tool, such as the ax, into a symbol of power, stripped of its utility so that it may be considered legitimate art.

Through a series of case studies, LaVine details the interpreted or "felt" form of walls, floors, roofs, beams, columns, and windows with respect to the natural forces they codify. His choices reflect his desire to illustrate contrasts in technological meanings: a Finnish log farmhouse, the Charles Moore House in Orinda, California, Tadao Ando's Wall House in Osaka, Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye in Poissy, France. He succeeds in illustrating the polarity of architectural thought to the quantifiable forces of nature and the difficulty in voicing technological meaning. The ways in which floors are communicated as possession of territory, or roofs as a connection to the cosmos, are impossible to convey with engineering terminology. The relation of light and heat to a given space cannot be expressed in British thermal units.

It seems paradoxical to say that technological form must have a voice or language of its own in architecture in order to express what cannot be defined literally, while also contending that the metaphorical portrait of the nature that humans have created can be found in the analysis of their houses. Through his analysis of these houses and their technical meaning (or lack thereof), LaVine hypothesizes that architectural design must include the meaning of technology and not treat it solely as a measurable entity in order to shape the inhabitants' understanding of their relationship with nature.