Machine aesthetic

The machine aesthetic is a label used in architecture and other arts to describe works that either draw inspiration from industrialization and mechanized mass production, or use elements resembling the structures of complex machines such as ships and planes for the sake of appearance, as in the horizontal metal-framed window strips of International Modernism that evoked an ocean liner. It is not itself an art style or movement but a trait shared by multiple movements of the first three decades of the 20th century, including French purism, Dutch De Stijl, Russian suprematism and productivism, German constructivism associated with the Bauhaus, and American precisionism, most of whose adherents admired industrial development, sometimes with ambivalence.