ARCHITECTURE'S STRUGGLE WITH CONTROL: A DISCUSSION ABOUT FRANKFURT KITCHEN AND FOOD DISPENSER PROJECTS

Abstract

An opportunity to create a system of standards - namely, a disciplinary matrix - was a focal key point for Modern Architecture towards a systematic form of knowledge bestowed by the epistemology of scientific thinking. In this paper, the relation between science and Modern Architecture is evaluated by questioning the issue of control. It would be inadequate to understand Modern Architecture without mentioning the prudential, hazardous and predictive aspects of the term control. Thus, it wouldn't be assertive to claim that the term control recast architecture's reflex of anticipation, as the discipline's eager of borrowing scientific methods from modernity installed a veiled meaning of this term to design methodologies. Employment of scientific methods on that term marked a difference about the concept of anticipation in its elaboration as an experiment in architecture. This paper designates the elements of control in design in Frankfurt Kitchen and Food Dispenser Projects with different prosperities, which represented two different approaches ideally and methodologically in how scientific way of thinking informed material and immaterial qualities of architecture. Margarette Schutte Lihotzky's Frankfurt Kitchen project is considered here particular for evaluating architecture's anticipation with control, of which she applied an innovative method for design. The lesser known Food Dispenser project of David Greene, on the other hand, was an embodiment of individual creation or an autonomous remark (declaration) in synthesising technology and architecture by taking discipline's boundaries as a motive force. For reading the material qualities of both projects, the contrary terminology of modular/machine and fitted cabinet/fitted plug are applied; while for reading the immaterial qualities, abstraction of movement-diagram/machine-plug collage and human-labour/machine-labour are used. Although they represented different aspects of control (mechanisms) ideally and experientially in design, both projects were emancipative in reflecting the scientific guidance of control for the development of anticipative role of architecture.