TRANSIT

In 1832, the leader of the Saint-Simonists, Pere Prosper Enfantin declared that "architecture as atheory of construction is an incomplete art: the notion of mobility, is lacking in it." The unstoppable progress of the industrial revolution and various mechanical inventions, such as the reilway, made this lack in architecture all the more conspicuous. Upon the opening of the Paris-Rouen-Orleans line in 1843, Heinrich Heine called the railroad a providential event that changes the color and shape of life. Anticipating Filippo Marinetti and Paul Virilio, he wrote in Lutetia: "What changes must now occur in our way of viewing things and in our imagination! Even the most elementary concepts of time and space have begun to vacillate. Space killed by the railways, and we are left with time alone...." While the phrase "annihilation of space and time" is today often associated with new information technology, in the mid-nineteenth century it was a favorite characterization of what railroad travel meant. for architects such slogans presented a threat, as architecture had been understood since the times of Vitruvius as the organization of space and time. Yet the profession was slow to rise the challenge.

Kari Jormakka , 2002 ,Flying Dutchmen - Motion in Architecture, Birkhäuser, Seite 5