The Allegorical Architectural Machine

The intersection of architecture and the machine has a history that stretches back to the Industrial Revolution, however the machine has recently begun to appear in new ways in speculative architectural drawing and modelling. This issue of AD considers the influence of the machine as an allegorical device for exploring alternative architectural practices, and includes a cross-section of viewpoints from emerging and established international practitioners and academics.

Allegory, a technique native to literature, provides a critical method through which machine typologies can contribute to deeper architectural narratives, offering new lenses for challenging or reassembling conventional modes of thought. An allegorical architectural project can unveil a story that enhances our awareness of something important. This AD reveals how engagement with the machine as an allegorical device in architectural discourse provides an avenue for architecture to provoke new ideas in response to current environmental, political, economic, cultural and social issues. At the forefront of this discussion, it extends the criticality of the topic within the broader spectrum of history, theory, philosophy, allegory and new technologies.

Contributors: Daniela Atencio and Claudio Rossi, Peter Baldwin, Brian Cantley, Kirill Chelushkin, Giuliano Fiorenzoli, Marissa Lindquist, Bea Martin, Derek Hales, Wes Jones, Brian M Kelly, Tom Kundig, and Caleb White

Featured architects and designers: Jones, Partners: Architecture, Olson Kundig, Adolfo Luis Moure Strangis, and Liam Young.

Daniel K. Brown (MArch, Yale) is a registered architect and Professor of Design Studio at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. His research investigates allegorical architecture – design as storytelling – situating architecture within the realm of social and cultural activism. He has won numerous international research fellowships including the Fulbright, as well as 12 teaching awards including the National Award for Sustained Excellence in Tertiary Teaching.

Michael Chapman is a practicing architect and Professor at the School of Architecture and Built Environment, The University of Newcastle, Australia. Chapman has written widely about the historical avant-garde, specifically Dada and surrealism as well as industrialisation, Marxism and cycles of modernism. Michael has been commended for numerous awards, including the AIA Unbuilt Award (special mention 2021) and the Australian Tapestry Workshop Architect’s Design Prize (highly commended 2021).