The Architecture of Industry

Changing Paradigms in Industrial Building and Planning

Mathew Aitchison

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317044796
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Arquitectura
• Subtopic: Historia de la arquitectura

From the Rust Belt to Silicon Valley, the intersection between architecture and industry has provided a rich and evolving source for historians of architecture. In a historical context, industrial architecture evokes the smoking factories of the nineteenth century or Fordist production complexes of the twentieth century. This book documents the changing nature of industrial building and planning from the end of the nineteenth century to the beginning of the twenty-first century. Drawing on research from the United States, Europe and Australia, this collection of essays highlights key moments in industrial architecture and planning representative of the wider paradigms in the field. Areas of analysis include industrial production, factories, hydroelectricity, aerospace, logistics, finance, scientific research and mining. The selected case studies serve to highlight architectural and planning innovations in industry and their contributions to wider cultural and societal currents. This richly illustrated collection will be of interest for a wide range of built environment studies, incorporating findings from both historical and theoretical scholarship and design research.

1

Industrial Architecture, Past and Present

Mathew Aitchison

It may well be that what we have hitherto understood as architecture, and what we are beginning to understand of technology are incompatible disciplines. The architect who proposes to run with technology knows now that he will be in fast company, and that, in order to keep up, he may have to emulate the Futurists and discard his whole cultural load, including the professional garments by which he is recognised as an architect.¹

This closing passage from Peter Reyner Banham’s Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (1960) is often cited in connection with architecture’s ability to keep abreast of developments outside the discipline. In Banham’s study of modernism, this was the question of technology, understood in its broadest sense. Beyond his immediate intentions, perhaps Banham’s observation has also proved so popular because it also describes a permanent struggle for designers between the instrumentalism of technology, economics and utility on the one hand, and the cultural, social, artistic and aesthetic pretensions of the design professions on the other hand. Extending Banham’s premise, the present collection of essays is an attempt to examine the “garments” that architecture and planning have both assumed and discarded in pursuing a specific kind of fast company: industrial building and planning. In this sense, the present collection seeks to understand both sides of this struggle and to frame its findings within a longer historical context.

The discourse and practice of architecture has fundamentally changed since the industrial revolution. Where Western architecture of the late eighteenth century was largely charged with the design of ecclesiastical, military, and public buildings, or with housing and symbolizing the reigning powers and the nobility, by the early nineteenth century the rise of large-scale industrial building and planning heralded a new era for architecture. The relationship between industry and the works of architecture and planning designed for it was not a passive one. Despite Banham’s suggestion that architecture and technology may be incompatible, the relationship between architecture and industry shows that their deep engagement has been highly productive. As the essays in the following collection demonstrate, at times industry has led by demanding innovative solutions to technical or functional problems. On other occasions, architecture and planning have left a lasting imprint on the way industry operates and is conceived.

The idea of industry has undergone as much change since the Industrial Revolution as have its building and planning outcomes. Over the past century, economically advanced countries have undergone both rapid and slow processes of industrial transformation. As the chapters of this book demonstrate, this has been a transformation from primary or secondary industries such as agriculture, mining, or manufacturing, towards tertiary and even quaternary industries exemplified by service, research and development, finance, logistics, and so-called “creative” industries. In other less “industrialized” countries, industrial practices may not have changed dramatically, but their impact, both locally and internationally, has changed considerably due to the processes of globalization, transportation, and technological advances. This transformation is significant for the present collection because it has inevitably resulted in a wide variety of building and planning practices, many of which have yet to be acknowledged in architectural and planning discourses.

The research findings in this book make no attempt to predict the future of industrial architecture, rather the authors’ approach has been one of empirical observation combined with historical research. Throughout the production of this book, the emphasis has been on the trans-historical nature of industry and its intersection with the design and construction of the built environment. As such, the following essays are a stocktaking, or – at the very least – a snapshot of industrial activity across the past century and an attempt to outline the implications of contemporary building and planning for industry within this longer historical context. Hence, the commonalities between studies are principally methodological and only secondarily thematic in nature. Laura Sivert’s essay examines hydroelectricity and the Tennessee Valley Authority, documenting the transformation of the region in the 1930s and drawing connections with contemporary experiences of hydroelectrical operations around the world. My own essay on mining in Australia demonstrates the continuity of the role mining has played in the development of Australia from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. Jesse LeCavalier’s study of logistics charts the historical development of the field from its wartime associations to the innovations pioneered by Walmart and the company’s advanced conceptions of logistics.

In terms of scholarship, the historiography of “industrial architecture” has typically implied standout moments of architecture and planning by accomplished designers. After some initial resistance, such buildings and places are now firmly inscribed in the cannon of nineteenth and twentieth century architecture and urban planning. The present collection has expanded this scope to include the full range of built environment outcomes, irrespective of their perceived architectural or planning merit. Erik Ghenoiu’s study of the “New Brooklyn Economy” and its attendant creative industries describes a building and planning culture which is essentially an exercise of re-purposing and reoccupying formerly industrial buildings and spaces. LeCavalier’s study of Walmart and my mining case study, reveal building and planning outcomes which are far from what would customarily be thought of as exemplary, or even noteworthy architecture and urban planning. Stuart W. Leslie’s research on Southern California’s aerospace industry, Sandra Kaji-O’Grady’s analysis of contemporary scientific research laboratories, and Amy Thomas’s study of international finance and the City of London, all attempt to look behind the corporate facades of the big budget buildings, toward the secret, or otherwise invisible logics which have underpinned their creation and operation, and the particular role architecture and planning has played in this dynamic. The implications of an expanded view of recent industrial building and planning are immense, but, importantly, they are not without history.

The intersection between architecture and industry has provided a rich and evolving source for both historians and practicing architects throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. When considering works such as Walter Gropius and Adolf Meyer’s Fagus Factory (1911) and Gropius’s subsequent Bauhaus (1926) it is clear the aesthetic and formal outcomes of early industrial architecture played a large role in development of early Modern architecture. In the early nineteenth century, while touring England and Scotland, Karl Friedrich Schinkel took particular interest in the milling and textile factories in the British Midlands, which later informed his own landmark works, such as the Bauakademie building in Berlin (1831–1836). At the beginning of the twentieth century, agglomerations such as Henry Ford’s Highland Park (1909) near Detroit designed by Albert and Julius Kahn and Earnest Wilby set the standard for large-scale “Fordist” production complexes in the United States and worldwide. While in Germany, Peter Behrens’s designs for industry, such as his AEG Turbinenfabrik (1909), marked a turning point in architectural history from Beaux-Arts and classically inspired interpretations of the needs of industry, towards a more substantial reinterpretation of the changing functional demands, new building technologies and their formal corollaries.

This break with tradition and re-orientation towards a modern future is a path well trodden by early twentieth century architectural historians such as Sigfried Giedion (1888–1968), Nikolaus Pevsner (1902–1983), and Henry Russell Hitchcock (1903–1987) – each with a slightly different, or more nuanced version of events. As we have seen, it was a view continued, with certain addenda, by the second wave of historians of modern architecture, including Bruno Zevi (1918–2000) and Banham (1922–1988). In many of the works by these historians, research on industrial architecture has tended to focus on technological and stylistic advances, especially where these have demonstrated an uptake within wider architectural culture. Giedion’s Mechanization Takes Command: A Contribution to Anonymous History (1948), and Banham’s The Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment (1969) are foundational examples of this line of thinking. By the end of the twentieth century, other disciplines, in particular those concerned with the social, cultural, and economic effects of industrialization, have perhaps placed greater emphasis on the analysis of the novel and dramatic effects of changing industry, particularly in urban settings. A stand out example of this type of work is Richard Sennett’s analysis of labor conditions within the “new economy”, elaborated in his book, The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism (1998). Architectural discourse and scholarship in the same period has largely remained aloof from such fundamental critique and analysis, instead generating polemical studies, such as Rem Koolhaas’s well-known “Project on the City”, and outcomes such as Shopping (2002), produced in concert with his Harvard students.

1.1 AEG Turbinenfabrik, 1909, Berlin. Architect, Peter Behrens. Photograph by the author, 2003.

It is difficult to conceive a history of industrial architecture without taking into account the contributions and impact of industrial urban and regional planning. In many nineteenth and twentieth century projects for industry, architects and planners were required not only to house industry in factories, but their workers in nearby housing developments. This dynamic precipitated the first model towns in Britain, such as Saltaire (begun 1851), Port Sunlight (1888), and Bourneville (1895), and led towards the Garden City movement. In the early twentieth century, as illustrated in Ghenoiu’s discussion of the Kunstgewerbe and Deutsche Werkbund movements, this close association between industrial building and planning not only continued, but also became demonstrative of the movement’s wider aspirations. As Leslie’s account of the Californian aerospace industry of the 1960s demonstrates, this dynamic continued with the iconic housing developments by Joseph Eichler, which provided not only accommodation for the researchers working within the aerospace industry, but were also a vehicle for the stylistic and moral virtues of its “blue sky” mentality.

The nineteenth century era of large-scale industrial reformation also heralded the rise of entire industrialized regions, such as the British Midlands, the German Ruhr and the Rust Belt in the United States. Historically, industry has implied a concentration of bodies, materials, and energy, and demanded significant investment in the shape of buildings and infrastructure, which often became landmarks for industrial regions and symbols of prosperity. Banham’s A Concrete Atlantis: U.S. Industrial Building and European Modern Architecture, 1900–1925 (1986), documents such building and planning: part homage to the industrial complexes and grain elevators of Buffalo, New York, and part analysis of the impact of these utilitarian structures on a generation of Modern architects. Sivert’s essay on the TVA in Chapter 3, demonstrates a comparable problem: design for industry applied at the scale of an entire region whose constituent parts range from buildings to large-scale infrastructure. Viewed together, the studies in this collection on hydroelectricity, logistics, and mining, also reveal that contemporary industries operate across a range of scales: regional, national and international. As such, their built environment outcomes are, or have historically been, difficult to incorporate within the narrative of architecture and planning outlined above which has often focused on individual architects or singular buildings.

As the experience of these industrial regions demonstrate, the plight of their cities and citizens were intimately linked to industry and its economic success. As illustrated by this book, the economic downturns associated with intense industrial development are not anomalies, but integral parts of the industrial experience. As Leslie points out in his essay, California has lost around 280,000 jobs in aerospace since 1988. More recently, mining and finance also provide tangible examples of industries with high susceptibilities to boom-bust cycles.

Although different in character, it is interesting to briefly consider other contemporary places, which, in future times, might be viewed in a similar light to historical regions of heavy industry introduced above. Although technology is changing what was previously thought to be the inevitable agglomerative force of industry, for the time being, economic activity is often tied to factors of location, geography, and proximity. A prominent example of such a trend is that of the so-called “new economy” and the architecture and urbanism of Silicon Valley. If any demonstration were needed to illustrate the continued importance of this form of industrial concentration, it can be found in the proliferation of the “other” Silicon Valleys, which have emerged in recent decades. Like Hollywood and its spin-off Bollywood, there are now multiple Silicon Valleys: Bangalore in India; Zhongguancun in China; and Russia’s newly promoted Skolkovo innovation hub – all vying for access to the hi-tech research and development economy, all generating a particular approach to building and planning. As Reinhold Martin noted in regard to the original Silicon Valley’s chosen architectural idiom:

Along the lost highways of the postindustrial landscape, the digital age has thus found its architectural expression as a routinized amalgam of historical pastiche and technological triumphalism.²

As we have seen, historical examples of the productive interplay between industry and architecture are numerous, including such highlights as Kahn with Ford, Behrens with AEG, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Johnson Wax Headquarters in Racine, and Eero Saarinen’s designs for IBM. More recently, this dynamic has continued in the New Economy – albeit within rather traditional terms – with Foster and Partners’ plans for Apple Campus 2 in Cupertino, California. What these examples have in common, and what has been identified as a key area of continuity in the present study, is the representative role of industrial architecture. As Leslie has pointed out, the architecture and planning of the aerospace industry did not happen in an ideological vacuum, but rather in the Cold War politics of the 1950s and 1960s, which demanded both secrecy and bravado in equal measure. In her analysis of a raft of new laboratory buildings for the now global research industry, Kaji-O’Grady notes that these buildings are the result of a new triad of funding involving industry, universities, and the state, where seeming innovation and representation in architectural terms is taken at face value for technological, ethical and intellectual progress. Sivert’s study shows that it was this same representative role of architecture and planning that was enlisted to “sell” the TVA enterprise to both its local and national audiences.

Another observation to emerge from this collection is that although some aspects of industry over the past century have become more abstract, secretive, and diffuse, their effects are no less significant for this. The industrial building and planning previewed in this book shows that where the location of nineteenth and twentieth century industry was primarily an urban phenomenon assuming a visual prominence and by its very nature surrounded and built by people, contemporary industries are much more geographically diverse. As pointed out in Thomas’s study of finance and my own mining study, contemporary industry is changing territorial understandings through terms like onshore and offshore and the virtual world of international trading. Or, in the case of mining, challenging spatial conceptions of “global” and “local” implied by globalized trade paired with local building.

Despite the emphasis placed on the changing nature of industrial building and planning in this introduction and on many of the following works, it would be a grave misconception if the message taken from this book was that the story of industrial architecture and planning was overwhelmingly novel and ever-renewing. Kaji-O’Grady’s chapter on scientific research shows that the idea of the solitary, genius (though often mad or megalomaniac) scientist is an image that has persisted from the nineteenth century to the present and continues to pervade the design of contemporary research laboratories. Ghenoiu’s parallel views the Deutsche Werkbund and Brooklyn’s “maker” networks, reveals deeply shared commonalities in motivations across the separating century, but with physical outcomes that could not appear more different.

The bulk of the research in this collection was originally presented at a conference session entitled “The Architecture of Industry” held in Buffalo, New York at the annual meeting of the Society of Architectural Historians in 2013.³ On the eastern end of the Rust Belt, Buffalo is now one of many cities in the region making its way towards a post-industrial future. Yet the future of Buffalo and other cities in regions like Pittsburgh, Detroit, or Cleveland, is not one without industry, but rather a different or changed relationship with industry. As such, Buffalo was perhaps a fitting location for the session and its approach which called for submissions documenting both significant moments of industrial architecture and planning from the past, and an expansion of the scope of research to capture a range of issues presented by contemporary industry. With the presence of Buffalo’s rich industrial heritage and changing fortunes loom...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• About the Editor
• About the Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Industrial Architecture, Past and Present
• 2 Post-Industrial Spaces of Production: The New Brooklyn Economy and the Deutsche Werkbund
• 3 The Industrial Pastoral in the Tennessee Valley Authority
• 4 Secret Spaces: Southern California’s Aerospace “Think Factories”
• 5 Walmart and the Architecture of Logistics
• 6 Laboratories of Experimental Science
• 7 Offshore City: The Regulatory Space of Finance and the City of London
• 8 The Experience of Australian Mining: Building, Planning, and Urbanization
• Index