The Taylorized Beauty of the Mechanical

[Dave Monroe]

The Taylorized Beauty of the Mechanical:
Scientific Management and the Rise of Modernist Architecture
Mauro F. Guillén

Paper | 2008 | $24.95 / £14.95
Cloth | 2006 | $30.95 / £18.95
232 pp. | 6 x 9 | 49 halftones. 2 line illus. 17 tables

The dream of scientific management was a rationalized machine world
where life would approach the perfection of an assembly line. But
since its early twentieth-century peak this dream has come to seem a
dehumanizing nightmare. Henry Ford's assembly lines turned out a
quarter of a million cars in 1914, but all of them were black.
Forgotten has been the unparalleled new aesthetic beauty once seen in
the ideas of Ford and scientific management pioneer Frederick Winslow
Taylor. In The Taylorized Beauty of the Mechanical, Mauro Guillén
recovers this history and retells the story of the emergence of
modernist architecture as a romance with the ideas of scientific
management--one that permanently reshaped the profession of
architecture.

Modernist architecture's pioneers, Guillén shows, found in scientific
management the promise of a new, functional, machine-like--and
beautiful--architecture, and the prospect of a new role for the
architect as technical professional and social reformer. Taylor and
Ford had a signal influence on Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius and on
Le Corbusier and his Towards a New Architecture, the most important
manifesto of modernist architecture. Architects were so enamored with
the ideas of scientific management that they adopted them even when
there was no functional advantage to do so.

Not a traditional architectural history but rather a sociological
study of the profession of architecture during its early modernist
period, The Taylorized Beauty of the Mechanical provides a new
understanding of the degree to which modernist architecture emerged
from a tradition of engineering and industrial management.

http://press.princeton.edu/titles/8163.html

Chapter 1

ORGANIZATION, MODERNISM, AND ARCHITECTURE

http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/s8163.pdf
http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/s8163.html