The first two readings, ‘Springs of Mechanization’ and ‘Space Time and Architecture,’ discuss two sides of the mechanization and industrialization of movement.  The first being the mechanics of movement; the technical aspect of how objects and systems actually move.  The analysis basically mechanizes organic movements; that is to say that Oresme, Descartes, Marey, and Gilbreth’s end result is a graphic representation showing the mechanized movements.  The mechanics, once extracted from the movements could be used to re-create them in a man-made mechanic system like Jacques de Vaucanson’s mechanic performers.  The second is the presence [or non-presence] of art in mechanization and industrialization (products).  At a point, art is seen as irrelevant and the public only cares about utilitarian ideals such as rapid production; it is as if the pure lack of art is necessary because the raw industrial product showcases the new methods and abilities of production.  It can also be argued that this lack of art in a sense became the new art because the utilitarian, or modern, products were, arguably, seen as beautiful because they were different and new.  Art has to continuously be different, it needs to change, it needs to evolve, to influence exploration of new ways of thinking and interpretation.

Fashion designer and artist Jean-Paul Goude took an interesting spin off cubism between the 60’s-00’s where he broke images of people into bits and pulled them apart to create more appealing proportions.  He refers to this work as ‘Modifications’ and it is quite similar to the productivity refinements and mechanization of the industrial period.  These studies also included experiments on actual people, one example is how through using mainly clothing alterations and enhancements he made a small, scrawny man into a  good looking desirable one.  There is a video where he shows the ‘modified’ man wearing tall platform shoes, lower waisted pants, shoulder pads and fake teeth.  Once something is made, it can be studied and then be made better.  In industrialization the movements of workers were studied (as seen in the movie ‘Modern Times’) to reduce them down to the bare minimum in order to increase efficiency and profits. The worker could be made better since his movements could be studied.  Likewise, Goude took images of people, some models with perfect proportions and some normal people with less than desirable proportions, cut them up and laid them out giving him the ability to reconfigure their proportions.  Through this process he made normal people into theoretical super models and he also experimented the altering the propotions of models into new visulizations of beauty.  He has a series of work in the latter field called ‘Muses’ which are beautiful abstractions of the human body.

To tie this back to architecture, the idea of improving has always existed in architecture and manifests itself in technology.  As time goes on, technology evolves and is incorporated into buildings; it can be seen as the movement of architecture or the evolution of buildings.  What needs to be done now, as it has always been done in the past, is to take the current state of buildings and through empirical studies and experimentation incorporate [and invent] new technologies to improve the performance and construction of buildings.