Image for The Taylorized beauty of the mechanical  : scientific management and the rise of modernist architecture

The Taylorized beauty of the mechanical : scientific management and the rise of modernist architecture

Part of the Princeton Studies in Cultural Sociology series
See all formats and editions

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 Guillen 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, Guillen 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 doing 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.

Read More
Title Unavailable: Out of Print
Product Details
Princeton University Press
0691115206 / 9780691115207
Hardback
23/07/2006
United States
English
xii, 186 p., [24] p. of plates : ill.
24 cm
research & professional /academic/professional/technical Learn More
Deeply historical and comparative, Mauro Guillen shows how a neo-institutionalist and social movement analysis complement each other as he explains the emergence and rise to prominence of modernist architecture. Systematic in its use of data, the book is nuanced in its analysis. He examines the several strains of modernism and subtly explains why modernism takes hold in some countries, but not others. An excellent analysis of aesthetics and the transformation of the profession of architecture. -- Mayer Zald, University of Michigan When Frederick Winslow Taylor was hectoring the workers of the
Deeply historical and comparative, Mauro Guillen shows how a neo-institutionalist and social movement analysis complement each other as he explains the emergence and rise to prominence of modernist architecture. Systematic in its use of data, the book is nuanced in its analysis. He examines the several strains of modernism and subtly explains why modernism takes hold in some countries, but not others. An excellent analysis of aesthetics and the transformation of the profession of architecture. -- Mayer Zald, University of Michigan When Frederick Winslow Taylor was hectoring the workers of the AM Architecture