2024 Seminar

Reading List

Convened by Claire Zimmerman, Austin Ehrhardt, and Katie Filek.

Part I: Architecture and Cost in the Shadow of Scientific Management

Week 1
Introduction to the Costs of Architecture: Land, Money, Materials, Labor

Zimmerman, Claire. “The Costs of Architecture.” Grey Room 71 (2018): 6–13.

Reference

Anderson, Elizabeth. Value in Ethics and Economics. Harvard University Press, 1995.

Marx, Karl. “Constant and Variable Capital.” In Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, translated by Ben Fawkes, 1:307–19. Penguin Classics, 1992.

Week 2
Production, or Architectural Labor as Variable Capital: Construction Sites of the Built Environment

Deamer, Peggy. “Architectural Production and Consumption: Architectural Work in the Capitalist Context.” In Architecture and Labor, 53–62. Routledge, 2020.

Watson, Joseph M. “Organization for Cooperation: The Varieties and Vagaries of Labor at Rockefeller Center.” Journal of Architectural Education 73, no. 2 (2019): 156–67.

Reference

Ferro, Sérgio. “Dessin/Chantier: An Introduction.” In Industries of Architecture, edited by Katie Lloyd Thomas, Tilo Amhoff, and Nick Beech. Routledge, 2015.

Goodman, Anna, and Maura Lucking. “Images Doing Work: Construction Photography at the Tuskegee Institute and Black Mountain College.” Journal of Architectural Education 73, no. 2 (2019): 248–56.

Hyde, Timothy. “The Building Site, Redux.” Journal of Architectural Education 75, no. 1 (2021): 84–93.

Willis, Carol, ed. Building the Empire State. W. W. Norton, 2007.

Week 3
Production, or Architecture as Fixed Capital: The Industrial Campus and the Assembly Line

Sturtevant, Elliott. “Fear the Elephant: Selling Flexibility at the Austin Company in the Aftermath of the Great Depression.” Architectural Theory Review 26, no. 1 (April 2022): 35–55.

Zimmerman, Claire. Albert Kahn Inc.: Architecture, Labor, and Industry, 1905–1961. MIT Press, 2024.

Reference

Nye, David. “Invention.” In America’s Assembly Line, 13–40. MIT Press, 2015.

Esch, Elizabeth. The Color Line and the Assembly Line: Managing Race in the Ford Empire. University of California Press, 2018.

Week 4
Production, or Architecture as Fixed Capital: The Office Building

Abrahamson, Michael. “‘Actual Center of Detroit’: Method, Management, and Decentralization in Albert Kahn’s General Motors Building.” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 77, no. 1 (March 2018): 56–76.

Merwood-Salisbury, Joanna. “1880–1900: The First Chicago School and the Ideology of the Skyscraper.” In Architecture and Capitalism: 1845 to the Present. Routledge, 2014.

Willis, Carol. Form Follows Finance: Skyscrapers and Skylines in New York and Chicago. Princeton Architectural Press, 1995.

Reference

Bluestone, Daniel. “‘A City Under One Roof’: Skyscrapers, 1880–1895.” In Constructing Chicago, 104–51. Yale University Press, 1991.

Olivier Zunz, Making America Corporate, 1870–1920. University of Chicago Press, 1990.

Week 5
Production, or Architecture as Fixed Capital: The High Rise Between the Wars

Abramson, Daniel M. “Inventing Obsolescence.” In Obsolescence: An Architectural History, 12–37. University of Chicago Press, 2016.

Fenske, Gail. The Skyscraper and the City: The Woolworth Building and the Making of Modern New York. University of Chicago Press, 2008.

Reference

Abramson, Daniel. Skyscraper Rivals: The AIG Building and the Architecture of Wall Street. Princeton Architectural Press, 2001.

Barr, Jason M. Building the Skyline: The Birth and Growth of Manhattan’s Skyscrapers. Oxford University Press, 2016.

Willis, Carol. Form Follows Finance: Skyscrapers and Skylines in New York and Chicago. Princeton Architectural Press, 1995.

Chappell, Sally A. Kitt. “A Reconsideration of the Equitable Building in New York.” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 49, no. 1 (March 1990): 90–95.

Week 6
Circulation, or Architecture and Absolute Surplus-Value: The Warehouse

Orenstein, Dara. “Flow, or Fixity in Motion: The Warehouse.” In Out of Stock: The Warehouse in the History of Capitalism, 27–66. University of Chicago Press, 2019.

Osman, Michael. “Cold Storage and the Speculative Market of Preserved Assets.” In Modernism’s Visible Hand: Architecture and Regulation in America, 45–80. University of Minnesota Press, 2018.

Reference

Marx, Karl. “Absolute and Relative Surplus-Value.” In Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, translated by Ben Fowkes, 1:307–19. Penguin, 1976. Also see volume 2 on storage.

Part II: Architecture and Cost in Architectural Historiography

Week 7
Postwar Finance I

Ludewig, Jasper, and Maren Koehler. “Financialized Space.” Architectural Theory Review 26 no. 1 (April 2022): 1–6.

Rice, Charles. “The Business of Architecture and Development.” In Interior Urbanism: Architecture, John Portman, and Downtown America, 31–48. Bloomsbury, 2016.

Week 8
Postwar Finance II

Hyde, Timothy. “‘Striking and Imposing Beauty’: On the Evidence of Aesthetic Valuation.” In Writing Architectural History: Evidence and Narrative in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Aggregate Architectural History Collaborative, 274–284. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021.

Stevens, Sara. “Equitable Life Assurance Society: Urban Renewal as Design by Committee.” In Developing Expertise: Architecture and Real Estate in Metropolitan America, 98–138. Yale University Press, 2016.

Thomas, Amy. “Layers of Longevity.” In The City in the City: Architecture and Change in London's Financial District, 196–213. MIT Press, 2023.

Week 9
Postwar Industry

Kapp, Silke, and Katie Lloyd Thomas. “Down Below, Disqualification: How to Design the Formal Subsumption of Labour.” In Struggles in the Concrete, edited by Luisa Corna and Mark Crinson. Birkhauser, forthcoming.

Thomas, Katie Lloyd. “Architectural Specifications and the Division of Labor.” Harvard Design Magazine 52, “Instruments of Service,” edited by Elizabeth Christoforetti and Jacob Reidel (Fall 2024).

Thomas, Katie Lloyd, and Tilo Amhoff. “Writing Work: Changing Practices of Architectural Specification.” In The Architect as Worker, edited by Peggy Deamer, 121–43. Bloomsbury, 2015.

Wall, Christine, Linda Clarke, Charlie McGuire, and Olivia Muñoz-Rojas. Building the Barbican 1962–1982: Taking the Industry out of the Dark Ages. University of Westminster, 2013.

Reference

Clarke, Linda. Building Capitalism: Historical Change and the Labour Process in the Production of the Built Environment. Routledge, 1992.

McGuire, Charlie, Clarke Linda, and Christine Wall. “Battles on the Barbican: The Struggle for Trade Unionism in the British Building Industry 1965–7.” History Workshop Journal 75 (Spring 2013): 33–57.

Clarke, Linda, and Georg Herrmann. “Cost vs. Production: Labour Deployment and Productivity in Social Housing Construction in England, Scotland, Denmark and Germany.” Construction Management and Economics 22, no. 10 (2004): 1057–66.

Clarke, Linda. “Valuing Labour.” Building Research and Information 34, no. 3 (2006): 246–56.

Leslie, Stuart W. “Secret Spaces: Southern California’s Think Factories.” In The Architecture of Industry: Changing Paradigms in Industrial Building and Planning, edited by Mathew Aitchison. Routledge, 2020.

Wall, Christine. An Architecture of Parts: Architects, Building Workers, and Industrialisation in Britain, 1940–1970. Routledge, 2013.

Week 10
How New Is “Modern Industrial Capitalism” and How Has it Changed the Built Environment?, Part I

Astengo, Gregorio. “A Landscape of Conflict: Speculators and Books in Early Modern London.” Revista de Arquitectura 23 (2021): 146–61.

Bremner, Alex. “Asset Building: Global Finance and the Structures of Gentlemanly Capitalism.” In Building Greater Britain: Architecture, Imperialism, and the Edwardian Baroque Revival, 203–51. Yale University Press, 2022.

Stephenson, Judy. “Contracts and Ways of Working in the Building Trades” and “What Did Bosses (in London Construction) Do?” In Contracts and Pay: Work in London Construction 1660–1785, 79–140. Palgrave Macmillan, 2020.

Week 11
How New Is “Modern Industrial Capitalism” and How Has it Changed the Built Environment?, Part II

Abramson, Daniel M. Building the Bank of England: Money, Architecture, Society 1694–1942, 117–76; 239–44. Yale University Press, 2005.

Nguyen, Jason. “Building on Credit: Architecture and the Mississippi Bubble (1716–1720).” Grey Room 71 (2018): 40–67.

Sadighian, David. “The Business of Beaux-Arts: Architecture, Racial Capitalism, and Branqueamento in Belle Époque Brazil.” Architectural Histories 11, no. 1 (2023): 1–40.