Came across a fantastic Fritz Kahn image called
Man as Industrial Palace at city of sound. The image comes from the Dream Anatomy Exhibition at the US National Library of Medicine.

In the early 20th century, Fritz Kahn produced a succession of books on the inner workings of the human body, using visual metaphors drawn from industrial society?assembly lines, internal combustion engines, refineries, dynamos, telephones, etc. The body, in Kahn?s work, was “modern” and productive, a theme visually emphasized through modernist artwork.

So, the reverse of this mechanistic modernism might be something like The City as human body metaphor. But now we have gone beyond machine-as-body, to digital-network-as-ecosystem: digital networks (even the “social”, rather than material, ones) are conceptualized using biological, not mechanical metaphors. The new socio-techno-biological metaphor is about mutation, infection, swamps and swarms – nothing so contained as an individual human body.