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Index Entry
Buildings as Machines:
“Humans tend to identify as machines only those complex devices which they can see move. Unable to see their buildings’ seasonally slow energy transformations functioning as machines, which indeed they are, humans fail to design their buildings with the same degree of scientific integrity with which, for instance, they conduct the 10 million discrete, but mostly invisible, tasks that have to be completed from the outset of countdown to the successful blast-off of a rocketed, humanly manned, extraterrestrially traveling capsule. As a consequence of man’s inability to see the energy transformation motions involved, the structural design of his land buildings and his livingry mechanics, such as plumbing equipment, lag three thousand years behind the evolution in airspace technology standards. Humanity’s housing structures and livingry in general are, to a high degree, only superstitiously-evolved economic prowess symbols, inefficiently repetitious of all yesterday’s make-do mistakes.”
