Modernism’s Visible Hand: Architecture and Regulation in America

274 Pages·2018·15.725 MB·English

by  Michael Osman

Modernism’s Visible Hand
Buell Center Books in the History and Theory of American Architecture
Reinhold Martin, Series Editor
The Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture at
Columbia University was founded in 1982. Its mission is to advance the
interdisciplinary study of American architecture, urbanism, and landscape.
The Temple Hoyne
Buell Center
for the Study of
American Architecture
Modernism’s
Visible Hand
ARCHITECTURE AND REGULATION IN AMERICA
MICHAEL OSMAN
University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis London
A different version of chapter 2 was previously published as “Preserved Assets” in
Governing by Design: Architecture, Economy, and Politics in the Twentieth Century, ed. Aggregate
(Architectural History Collaborative) (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012),
1– 20.
Every effort was made to obtain permission to reproduce material in this book. If any
proper acknowledgment has not been included here, we encourage copyright holders to
notify the publisher.
Copyright 2018 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a
retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the
publisher.
Published by the University of Minnesota Press
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Minneapolis, MN 55401- 2520
http://www.upress.umn.edu
Printed in the United States of America on acid- free paper
The University of Minnesota is an equal- opportunity educator and employer.
25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Osman, Michael, author.
Title: Modernism’s visible hand : architecture and regulation in America / Michael Osman.
Description: Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 2018. | Series: Buell Center
books in the history and theory of American architecture | Includes bibliographical
references and index. |
Identifiers: LCCN 2017056774 (print) | ISBN 978-1-5179-0097-7 (hc) |
ISBN 978-1-5179-0098-4 (pb)
Subjects: LCSH: Architecture and technology–United States–History. | Architecture and
society–United States–History. | Buildings–Environmental engineering–United States–
History. | Technological innovations–Economic aspects–United States–History. | Risk
management–United States–History. | BISAC: ARCHITECTURE / History / Modern (late
19th Century to 1945). | ARCHITECTURE / Criticism. | SOCIAL SCIENCE / Sociology /
Urban.
Classification: LCC NA2543.T43 O86 2018 (print) DDC 720.1/03–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017056774
Contents
Preface vii
Introduction xi
1. The Thermostatic Interior and Household Management 1
2. Cold Storage and the Speculative Market of Preserved Assets 45
3. Representing Regulation in Nature’s Economy 81
4. Imaging Brainwork 127
5. Regulation through Paperwork in Architectural Practice 165
Conclusion 185
Acknowledgments 191
Notes 193
Index 237
The planning room in the Watertown Arsenal. Carl G. Barth Collection, Baker Library, Harvard
Business School.
Preface
The taking of a modern steamship about the world (though one would not minimize
its responsibilities) has not the same quality of intimacy with nature, which, after all,
is an indispensable condition to the building up of an art. It is less personal and a
more exact calling; less arduous, but also less gratifying in the lack of close com-
munion between the artist and the medium of his art. It is, in short, less a matter
of love. Its effects are measured exactly in time and space as no effect of an art
can be. It is an occupation which a man not desperately subject to sea- sickness
can be imagined to follow with content, without enthusiasm, with industry, without
affection. Punctuality is its watchword. The incertitude which attends closely every
artistic endeavour is absent from its regulated enterprise.
Joseph Conrad, The Mirror of the Sea (1906)
At the end of the nineteenth century, life in America increasingly relied
on infrastructures that delivered electrical power, water, and other ameni-
ties to buildings. Among the newly developed mechanical systems within
these buildings, some circulated artificially controlled air at a uniform
temperature, and others were used to integrate various processes involved
in industrial production.
My purpose is to describe the conceptual terrain from which these sys-
tems emerged and their adaptation to buildings. As a point of entry, me-
chanical control of the environment in homes, public buildings, and stor-
age warehouses begins my exploration of a range of techniques developed
in this large nation to govern its infrastructure and the lives that it helped
support. These systems were coordinated from an array of divergent com-
ponents, a process of integration that was piecemeal and never unified.
Therefore, no single economic theory, technological change, scientific vii
viii Preface
discovery, or political upheaval can fully explain the heterogeneous forces
that organized life in the decades between the Civil War and the end of the
First World War.
In lieu of a historical event that sets these transformations into mo-
tion, regulation provides a unifying term for understanding the technolo-
gies, reforms, and principles that emerged at that time. This term describes
a practical mode of living, working, and thinking; it refers to an assem-
blage of techniques— mechanical, legal, administrative, and scientific—
that defined a range of deviations from normal in which modern life could
retain both the appearance of order and the functionality of organization.
Common to all these techniques was the assumption that no system could
be described as ideal, self- correcting, or inherently ordered. To mark the
difference between these techniques and the naturalized theories of the
self- regulating “invisible hand” offered by classical political economists,
I use the business historian Alfred D. Chandler Jr.’s concept of the “visible
hand.” Modernism did not materialize in buildings as the embodiment
of an idea about a new society; rather it was constructed through inter-
sections of management with technology and physical infrastructure that
operated on the environment and the economy to constrain the errors and
deviations endemic to a society invested in growth.
The history of regulation in the United States undergirds the history
of modernism. Its protagonists include architects, engineers, entrepre-
neurs, scientists, and industrialists. And although monumental images of
the American metropolis filled the pages of European journals, produc-
ing the appearance of a society unified around distinctly modern values,
the society represented in those images was in fact built up from an ac-
cumulation of numerous changes to the mundane routines of daily life.
Architecture reflects these minute shifts. Buildings housed much of the
machinery and the activities that made American life modern. This is not
to say that this machinery was exclusively American; in fact, techniques
of regulation tended to pass from one context to another rather easily. I
have constrained the geography of this study to make specific connections
between regulation and the development of political, social, and economic
institutions in the United States after the Civil War. Indeed, against the
historiographical tendency to view this New World nation as uninhibited
by history, modern architecture arose no more naturally in America than
in Europe, with conflicts and unpredictable shifts in the purposes served
by technologies used in buildings. While some of these buildings imme-
Preface ix
diately lent themselves to a photographic image of modernity, such as the
skyscrapers built during this period, the buildings that are the focus of
this study enacted and represented processes that governed the nation in
less obvious ways.
This is not a history of enthusiastic people doing interesting things;
instead, it is an investigation of the kinds of activities that Joseph Conrad
understood to be involved in “taking a modern steamship about the world”:
the gradual and measured restructuring of American society through tech-
niques related to regulation. Changes in the definitions of home, market,
nature, and labor can be traced to what have become canonical modernist
images of great machinery— dynamos, giant ventilators, and refrigeration
machines— but also in the bureaucratic systems and buried infrastructure
that integrated these technologies into the fabric of modern life.