Architecture, Labor, Industry, and the (

From the industrial outposts up and down the eastern seaboard of the United States, across the Mississippi Delta, over the Great Lakes from Erie, Pennsylvania to Buffalo, Toronto, Detroit, and Chicago, over the western plains to Edmonton, Oklahoma City, Omaha, and from there to the technology centers of Vancouver, Seattle, and Silicon Valley, the sites of large-scale industry changed American society over two centuries. Just as gas flares mark subterranean oil deposits under the Texas plains, industrial buildings materialize complex networks of architecture, labor, and industry. They transform seemingly immaterial economic forces into concrete things through the labor of lots and lots of people. They are “fruiting bodies” that blossom from networks of money, labor, and natural resources, where human beings transform raw materials into consumer products.

As industry moved across the North American continent, it took shape in buildings designed to optimize resources, improve manufacturing, and provide employment. From Amoskeag, New Hampshire to Silicon Valley, factories grew and changed in a continuous collective design process focused on throughput or flow. These buildings were also tied to urban development and large-scale housing; in studying industrial buildings, we also necessarily study cities, neighborhoods, and company towns. In addition, industrial buildings are meant to improve on the ones that came before them, and to give way to the optimizations of ones that come after. Factory design thus reflects a tangible belief in technical progress. Factories are embedded in society diachronically, across time, and synchronically, across space. They are not singularities; they are inherently relational buildings, like other forms of vernacular architecture.

In classes that move chronologically through this terrain, we also focus on two questions: first, how has industrial architecture been situated within architectural history? Second, what happens when we study building design with the kind of heightened synchronic-diachronic awareness that industrial building demands? Industrial architecture is closely connected to capitalism. Studying it reveals architecture’s role in that social organization in a new light. We will survey and closely study buildings to address these and other questions.