1,720,972 research outputs found
The electrification of the factory, or the flexible layout of work(s)
No full textThe introduction of electric power brought two changes to the factory, electric lighting, and electric drive and the transition to electrical power transmission. This chapter explores the consequences of the electrification of the factory for the organisation of the production process. In a series of journal articles the first director of the AEG turbine factory Oskar Lasche explained the operational and economic characteristics of electric power transmission. His intent was to outline its influence "on the layout of the buildings, the arrangement of the workshops and the design of the work processes." He argued that electric power transmission allowed for a significant reconfiguration of the production process. For Lasche the main advantages were the improved organisation and thereby achieved greater efficiency. But what were the issues posed by electrification? If machines no longer had to be positioned in relation to gears, shafts and belts, what then determined their position? What organising principles replaced the direct mechanical connection to the power source? This chapter argues that the electric single motor drive enabled machines to be autonomous from the systems of mechanical power transmission and to become mobile on the shop floor, allowing for flexibility in factory layout and in organisation of the production process. As consequence more abstract ordering principles such as the 'sequence of work' and the 'route of manufacture' became possible and necessary. In that respect electric drive opened up the continuing attempts to find together the ideal layout for the factory production plan and the factory floor plan
Vorwort
No full textWe know that architecture depends. But as soon as the description of the relations of dependency (heteronomy) and the freedom of their actors (autonomy) is made more concrete, the subject, architecture, seems to be almost dissolved between the established patterns of disciplinary views and interests. Which relations of dependency do we actually speak of? How do they materialise? What happens to our conception of architecture, if we not only consider ideas, designs, and their representations, but also material and labour, building technologies and the construction industry, and indeed the power of capital and its role in the creation of the built environment? In our opinion general theories about the question of autonomy in architecture should be replaced by specific investigations of concrete examples. With this book, we resume a discussion at the end of the 1960s and early 1970s in Germany, the analysis of urban and architectural planning by Klaus Brake, Helga Fassbinder, and Renate Petzinger, the critique of the bourgeois category of autonomy by Michael Müller, and the designation of architecture as the planning of building by Jörn Janssen. The two last authors have written central contributions to a more precise determination of the field of aesthetic and economic autonomy for this volume, which are also linked to this debate. However, for us these questions need to be asked new again today, especially as new methodological tools such as actor-network theory, science and technology studies, media and cultural studies, or New Materialism expand and enrich our field of research
Industries of Architecture
No full textWe understand the industries of architecture as specific, yet polyvalent, historically contingent, ambivalent and emphasise this through pluralisation. First, ‘industry’ to us is never just a matter of technology, but always also a matter of social organisation and social relations. Second, we cannot assume that ‘industry’ identifies any one particular form of technical and social organisation and that the formations vary according to specific contexts, and hence ‘industry’ is always already localised. Third, ‘industry’ is understood as dynamic. What constitutes ‘industry’ has undergone enormous change. In our own context we might characterise this as transition from a factory mode of production (identified by the entrepreneurial, laissez faire model of the nineteenth century) to a state mode of production (supported by state institutional bureaucratic and technocratic planning), and now to a corporate mode of production (global, de-centralised and responsive to financial capital requirements), when ‘industry’ is no longer concentrated in specific building typologies or modes of production, but has to be considered as more spatially dispersed across institutions and techniques. Fourth, we aim to bring issues from ‘professional practice’, ‘project management’, or the ‘merely technical’ realms, where debates are usually more to do with pragmatics and efficiency, into the architectural humanities—to history and theory, and to design—where they may be more critically engaged. We argue that the theoretical tools—the basic concepts, categories and procedures of knowledge formation—that are deployed in this chapter and elsewhere are not just productive of our subject, but are produced by that subject
The Agency of the Paper Plan: The Building Plans of Late-Nineteenth-century and Early-Twentieth-century Berlin
Full text linkThis article closely investigates the unique visual representations of the buildings plans of late-nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century Berlin and emphasizes the agency of the paper plan in the profession and discipline ofStädtebau. Following positions in German media theory, the paper plan is understood and theorized as medium of bureaucracy and the plan drawing as its cultural techniques. In doing so the article traces the refinement of the instruments for the regulation of the building of the city in Germany; from the building plan, to the building zones plan, to the town development plan. The understanding of the building plans and the approach to their interpretation in this article is based on two main principles. First, the article is primarily concerned with the general methods of the building plans as instruments and products of regulation and only secondarily with their individual content as specific layouts of urban form. Second, the article sees the building plans as material objects, as paper plans that had to be produced by drawing, engraving, and printing, handled by different actors, carried and distributed by various systems, as well as stored and archived in plan chambers. The article argues that the paper plans have an agency in seeing the city and hence thinking about the city, through their methods of visual representation, and an agency in the formation of graphic terms and concepts, derived from the making of the building plans. They mediated visual and verbal knowledge of the city that would have been inconceivable without them
An 'architecture of bureaucracy': technocratic planning of government architecture in Belgium in the 1930s
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The production of the Commons: Mies van der Rohe and the art of industrial standardisation
No full textTools for conviviality: architects and the limits of flexibility for housing design in New Belgrade
No full textArchitecture as the Ideology of the Plan: Revisiting Manfredo Tafuri's Critique of Ideology
Full text linkThe paper revisits Manfredo Tafuri's "Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology" (1969). In the essay Tafuri analyses the integration of architectural ideology - 'project' and 'utopia' - into state ideology, its move from superstructure to base. For him "Architecture as the ideology of the Plan is swept away by the reality of the Plan at the moment the plan came down from the utopian level and became an operant mechanism." Tafuri's essay was a comment on Antonio Negri's "Keynes and the Capitalist Theory of the State post-1929" (1968). According to Negri the economic crisis of 1929 had destroyed confidence in the future. As a consequence the state was "to remove fear of the future", to eliminate its risk and uncertainty. The cure was to project the future according to present expectations, "the state as the plan". For Tafuri though, "It is significant that almost all the economic objectives formulated by Keynes in his General Theory can be found, in purely ideological form, at the basis of the poetics of modern architecture." It was architecture that aimed at the reorganization of production, distribution and consumption in the capitalist city. While his 'critique of ideology' is often discussed, the specific notion of 'architecture as the ideology of the Plan' remains largely overlooked. The paper clarifies Tafuri's critique of ideology, drawing attention to the 'plan' as specific form of representation, organization and administration. It situates the essay within the political context of Italian Workerism and their slogan "contro il piano", against the plan
‘Except where herein otherwise directed’: building with legal documents in early nineteenth-century England
Full text linkThe paper investigates the changes in architectural practice following the introduction of contracting in gross in early 19th century England, emphasising the role of legal documents in building. It establishes a relationship between the conditions that this form of contracting set for the production of architecture and building and the methods of describing and defining a project in advance. The paper reads the contract documents that were to be produced in the office in order to build on site as evidence for a response of architectural practice to changes in building practice. It traces this process in the adaptation of the writings of the legal documents to contracting in gross by comparing the specifications of John Soane’s building contract for Tendring Hall of 1784 with the instructions and model specifications of early 19th century handbooks and practical guides. The specific interest was in the role of these legal paper documents in the building process and the way they established, formed and transformed the social relations of building production. The paper emphasises the different writing strategies for the building specifications. It acknowledges that these documents were the products of industrial, economic and social forces, and that the forms they took resulted from their changing role in the building process. The paper finally asks what practices these material documents replaced, and how they did so. It looked at what effects their changing formats and structures, and the details of language and phrases they use, had on the processes and outcomes of building
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