#172 Mon (12/12/22) - "Houses are machines for living in" - Le Corbusier

 The quote "Houses are machines for living in" is attributed to the architect Le Corbusier. Le Corbusier was a Swiss-French architect and urban planner who was an influential figure in the development of modern architecture. He believed that buildings should be designed to serve the needs of their users, and that they should be functional and efficient. He used the phrase "houses are machines for living in" to express this idea, and it has become one of his most famous quotes.

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How would our study of urban geography be different if instead of assuming that all "man-made" structures were intentionally constructed by men for some purpose, built environments were able to self-manifest, perhaps due to either small-scale ie. nanobots or fabricator goo, utility fog, or large-scale construction automatons, like in Tsutomu Nihei's Blame!, or vast 3D city printers.  What if cities were constructed recursively or fractally by some autonomous entity? Secreted, like a coral reef. A leftover husk, or a discarded shell from some other activity? What if enclosed spaces were not constructed but left over after an extensive tunneling or excavation process. Sculpture is sometimes called the art of removing all of the unnecessary bits. A spandrel.

We might view their disposition across the landscape as evidence for some otherworldly (metascale) intelligence.  We might try to discern intent based on examination of the remaining evidence, rather than the other way around. Mapping cities would become somethign like a forensic exercise. What would the resulting study of this phenomenon be called Geopsychology? Urbanography? [These terms are already used to mean something else, however.]