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.
