The Machine Aesthetic

In one sense, all building materials are artificial. Even the wood we use as lumber is shaped into geometries not seen in nature: rectangular in cross-section, straight, and identical from one piece to the next. But somehow metal seems artificial in a way that masonry and wood do not. You can see artists struggling with how to address metal structure and machinery through the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, even as society was changing from the effects of industrialization. The machine aesthetic, as it was called, arguably reached its peak with precisionism.

The picture above is the interior stair of the Little Red Lighthouse. It was built in the 1880s at Sandy Hook, at the entrance to New York harbor, and moved in 1921 to its current location on a spit of land projecting into the Hudson River. Physically, it’s a tapered and hollow iron cylinder, with various projections, including a balcony and a lantern at the top. The obvious way to go up and down inside such a structure is with a helical staircase, as you can see in the picture.

There are some architectural flourishes at the lighthouse’s exterior, like the pseudoclassical door surround. But it’s really quite plain, as is fitting for a utilitarian structure. The stair, for instance, has no architectural pretensions, but is simply the most basic iron helical stair that the 1880s could have produced. But that stair is beautiful in the machine aesthetic sense. I think it helps explain where that aesthetic came from: the geometry and unornamented man-made nature of that stair structure is striking and, in its time, new.