Twentieth-century architecture was influenced by a single analogy coined by the great French architect, Le Corbusier. He proposed that ‘the building is a machine for living in’.
This is very far from the truth. The mistake, at its heart, is that a machine is an inanimate object that can be turned on and off and operates only at the whim of its controller.

     A building is very different because, although it is true that it can be controlled by its occupants, the driving force that acts upon the building to create comfort and shelter is the climate and its weather, neither of which can be controlled, predicted or turned on and off. Machines are fixed, static objects, amenable to scientific assessment. Buildings are part of a complex interaction between people, the buildings themselves, the climate and the environment.

     The view that buildings are fixed also fits well with certain types of scientific analysis, of daylight factors, energy flows, Uvalues, mechanical ventilation and so on. But this mechanistic view finds the more dynamic parts of the system (temperature, natural ventilation, passive cooling and all the multitude of human interactions) very difficult to model and, therefore, to understand. In houses it is often these ‘difficult’ parts of the system that change a house into a home, and the building into a delight.