A dialogue between Melanie Pocock and Michael Lee
Melanie Pocock: The title of the exhibition and of your neon text, Machine for Living Dying In, incorporates two frequently cited notions of the home: the first, ‘A house is a machine for living in’ by Swiss-born architect Le Corbusier from his 1923 book, Towards a New Architecture; the second ‘A house is for dying’ by American architecture professor Douglas Darden, whose Condemned Buildings (1993) comprises ten antitheses to architectural maxims.
While these quotes appear to contradict each other—one invoking the home as a source of life, the other death—I would argue that they are actually quite proximate. Let me explain. While Le Corbusier’s housing projects aimed to facilitate living through their use of pre-fabricated materials and abstract forms, they ended up achieving the opposite: the sterile, soulless character of these materials and forms alienating their inhabitants. So the accent on ‘living’ in his architecture shifted towards a focus on its machine-like qualities—how it induced a kind of automated living that, by its very automated nature, seemed like an unfolding ‘death’.
I was wondering what your thoughts were about such changing interpretations of Le Corbusier’s notion, and how they relate to your ideas of the home as a place of both comfort and discomfort?
Michael Lee: In his conviction for things simple or simplified, Le Corbusier may have come across as simplistic. He gets praised and maligned in equal measure for his reductive method. When things didn’t happen as he promised, he naturally gets the blame. Most objections, however, are directed at the word ‘machine’ in his maxim, blaming it for the bland and overly masculine environment his designs have fostered, leaving his ‘living’ premise unattacked. Douglas... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline
Michael Lee, Diagonals, 2014. Emulsion on wall, polyurethane on PVC and enamel on galvanised iron, 294 x 650cm. Courtesy of Yavuz Gallery, Singapore.
Michael Lee, Hazard No. 4, 2014. Paper collage, 41 x 38cm. Courtesy of Yavuz Gallery, Singapore.
