UGLY AND ORDINARY ARCHITECTURE (136)
tectural iconography based on their interpretation of the progressive technology of the Industrial Revolution (Fig.121).
Colquhoun refers to the "iconic power" attributed by "those in the field of design who were and preaching pure technology and socalled objective design method. . . to the creations of technology, which they worship to a degree inconceivable in a scientist."16 He also writes of "the power of all artifacts to become icons . . . whether or not they were specifically created for this purpose," and he cites nineteenth-century steamships and locomotives as examples of objects "made ostensibly with utilitarian purposes mind" which "quickly become gestalt entities . . . imbued with aesthetic unity" and symbolic quality. These objects, along with the factories and grain elevators, became explicit typological models that, despite what architects said to the contrary, significantly influenced the method of Modern architectural design and served as sources for its symbolic meanings.
INDUSTRIAL STYLING AND THE CUBIST MODEL
Later critics referred to a "machine aesthetic," and others have accepted the term, but Le Corbusier among the Modern was unique in elaborately describing industrial prototypes for his architecture in Vers une Architecture (Fig.122). However, even he claimed the steamship and the grain elevator for their forms rather than their associations, for their simple geometry rather than their industrial image. It is significant, on the other hand, that the buildings of Le Corbusier, illustrated in his book, physically resemble the steamships and the steamships and the grain elevators but not the Parthenon or the furniture in Santa Maria in Cosmedin or Michelangelo's details for Saint peter's which are also illustrated for their simple geometric forms. the industrial prototypes became literal models for modern architecture, while the historical-architectural prototypes were merely analogs selected for certain of their characteristics. To put it another way, the industrial buildings were symbolically correct; the historical buildings were not.
For the abstract geometrical formalism of Le Corbusier's architecture counted for the hovering, stuccoed planes that enveloped the industrial sash and spiral stairs in the Villa Savoye. Although historians describe the relation between painting and architecture of this period as a harmonious diffusion of the Zeitgeist, it was more an adaptation of the language of painting to that of architecture. The systems of pure, simple forms, sometimes transparent, that penetrate flowing space were explicitly
16.Ibid.