Metals, Machines and Modernity Crystal Palace, london, Joa&p/1 Paxton, t85t. Paradigm lor mau -prochx'ed 1, l teml bY lldlng. 6 One day'" OIIlput. Ford Mo!or Company, H ~hl.nd Pari< , Michigan, 1\1 14. 7 The building industry is currently undergoing the The decades following the construction of most rapid and radical transformation it has e)(pe· the Crystal Palace saw the deyelopment of econom­ rJenced in over a century. This change is in large ical steel smelting methods. The conditions were measure being led by the exploitation of new design, thus created for the steellrame - made 01 standard fabrication and assembly processes which make components that were mass-produced in widely possible the realization of buildings and structures dispersed factories and brought together for rapid that would not have been technically or economi­ dry assembly on site - t o become the paradigm cally feasible even ten years ago. The dogma of for the systems buildings that would dominate the mass production that dominated the 20th century. 20th century. The intrOduction of steel was impor­ epitomized by the universal steel section, is being tant, not only because it was shaped by industrial challenged by the liberating potential of computer­ processes of production, but also for its inherent aided design and manufacture, with profound impli­ material attributes. For the first time, architects and cations for the conceptualization and construction engineers had at their disposal a very strong mate­ of built form. rial with enormous capacity in tension as well as The last period of comparably fundamental compression. This would dramat ically change the change, arguably, occurred in the mid-19th century nature of form and space, promoting the deyelop­ when mass production processes for iron, steel and ment of both high-rise and long span structures, glass were developed. Architects benefited from liberating the building envelope from its load-bearing deYelopments in other fields, in particular, the engi­ obligations, and ushering in the Machine Age. neering innovation spawned by the design and con­ The Machine Age was the age of metals. struction of the railway. Conceived as a formally in­ Henry Ford's assembly lines in Detroit eleYated pro­ determinate, open-ended and infinitely adaptable kit duction processes to a high art, orchestrating thou· of standard components, the railway helped to lay the sands of components in time and space to create ground rules for the development of steel in building the emblematic mass-produced steel product olthe construction. The most notable structure to make use 20th century, the automobile. The pressures of the of these principles was the Crystal Palace in London production process pushed manulacturing out 01 designed in 1851 by Joseph Paxton, a gardener who mUlti-story concrete-framed buildings and into vast worked directly with fabricators to make a building single-story long span steel-framed structures. that continues to inspire architects and engineers World War I spurred the deYelopment of alloy steels today. De signed and erected in less than eight months with greater strength and durability. While alloying and utili~i ng a kit of standardi~ed parts, it was at the resulted in only modest increases in compressive time the largest enclosure eyer built. The design and strength, its principal benefit was a dramatic in­ construct ion of the Crystal Palace were heralded as crease in the tensile capabilities of steel.2 Like the the first architectural applications of Adam Smith's principles of the division 01 labor, these advances in prinCiples of the division of labor, which coordinated material science were also absorbed by Ford so men, materials and machines on a vast scale.1 In that, by 1927, the Model T incorporated 54 different startling contrast to the architectural ethos of the types 01 steet a Likewise, alter World War I, the pro­ day, the building was conceived not as form but as duction of aluminum became increasingly economic. process. Constituting both the means and end of production, metal machine tools and the predominantly metal­ consumer goods they produced radically transfor- F 0 ......., MOl,,", T..:~n'c. ' Cent." We""n, Ml c ~ lg.n, ee-a S.. ~n.n, 19$8. Curt ..n ... 11 01 plt l.brIc., ... ma ..·p<o(IUC'" com_, •. Eem" Hoo. .. , P IIoC IlIc P.,....... Calilomle. c~.rt" .nd R.y Eam ... 1\1.4\1. c... Slu<ly HOU" t8, One 01 ........ 01 Mu,,, <I"'gn'" •• p,o,o'y".. IO' m... ·p'o(!uc ... " ..,­ I ..""" ~ou ill ng .y.t,m•. 8 med the lives 01 ordinary people. Motor vehicles, as part 01 an open-ended and lIexible system defi­ non-existent in 1900, numbered 26 million in the ned by I·section columns and triangular lattice truss­ United States alone by 1930:· the stage was set lor es on a rl90rous 1.5 m grid. Benefiting from the close the development 01 the aviation industry: and metal collaboration between the architect and a client with products such as toasters, vacuum cleaners, refri9- expertise and a vested interest in innovative metal erators and all kinds 01 domestic appliances, prolifer­ technology, the building envelope was a prefabrl· ated. cated curtain wall of glass and metal-clad insulated In architecture, as in the daily lives 01 con­ sandwich panels, and the suspended ceilings were sumers, metals and modernity were inseparable. a specially designed cast aluminum-framed system. Modernist preoccupations with the skeletal frame Many of these components, developed from firsl and the curtain wall generated the free plan, Ideas of principles, became prototypes for standardized universal space, and experiments with mass-pro­ products that would subsequenlly be mass-pro­ duced buildings. These ideas were explored In the duced and marketed by others. Inspired by the car 1920s and '30s through Mies van der Rohe's vision­ industry, the performance 01 these systems was as ary drawings 01 glazed skyscrapers, Buckminsler important as their fabrication and appearance. In Fuller's promotion 01 mass-produced aluminum the design 01 the General Motors Technical Center, housing, and Jean Prouve's prototypes lor pressed much was made of the external walt, only 60 mm melal structural systems and panelized metal clad­ thick, which had the same thermal performance as ding systems. They would not be realized on a large a 400 mm masonry cavity wall. while the innovative scale until after World War II, when much 01 the ceiling system integrated lighting, acoustic treat­ development in metal structures and cladding was ment, sprinkler systems and air-conditioning. concentrated in North America. The aluminum-and­ During the same period, the Case Study glass-clad Equitable Building in Portland, Oregon, Houses commissioned In California were designed designed by Pietro Belluschi and completed in 1947, to serve as prototypes of mass-produced steet­ launched a series 01 American skyscrapers inspired Iramed housing systems. Although a number of by the ~ pent-up visions 01 the twenties. -s ln contrast prototypes were built, none was put into production. with the desire 10 build ever higher, one ol the most The most compelling example remains the 1949 signilicant projects of the period was the low-rise Eames House with Its oll-the-shetf structure 01 General Motors Technical Center, commissioned in rolled-section columns and open web steel joists 1945 and opened in 1956. This research campus, and its steel-Iramed panelized cladding system. designed by Eero Saarinen, represented an extra­ Likewise, during the 1940s and '50s, Mies van der ordinary synthesis of metal, machines and modern­ Rohe was especially preoccupied with both the ity. Saarinen observed, - General Motors is a metal­ constructional and representational potential of the working industry; it is a precision industry; it is a standard steel section and the articulation of struc­ mass-production industry. All these things should, ture and enclosure. Working by then in America, his in a sense be expressed in the architecture of its interest in refining a tectonic vocabulary was sup­ Technical Center. Thus the design is based on steel ported by a nascent building industry that was -the metal of the automobile. Like the automObile appropriating technology - including the welding of itself, the buildings are essentially put together, as steet and the extrusion of aluminum - from wartime on an assembly line, out of mass-produced units.·8 enterprises? In this technologically charged envi­ All of the buildings on the campus were conceived ronment, Mies developed the grammar of the I-beam H PompodOu. PIlriI, Rlttlzo Piano Sect;"" CC c.nt,. .nd R"'''''rd R ~ .... , 1977, Ca" ~ . tI... In laundry, Section 00 oSection AA ."'"" """'-0'," '~"""""-'" C 9 and H·column; worked through a series of iterations While the Centre Pompidou has been cited of steel, aluminum and bronze-mullioned curtain as an exemplar olthe productivist school, it also wails; and sought the ultimate refinement of mass represented a significant break from this tyranny of production, the universal detail. industry. Although clearly a systems building con­ Although this spirit of innovation in North ceived as a kit of parts, structural elements designed America was short-lived, mid-century American as specially made steel castings were used in place Modernism inspired a new generation of European of the anonymous and ubiquitous cold-rolled architects in the 1960s and '70s. The culmination of section. Peter Rice, the structural engineer for the the thinking that commenced with the Crystal Centre Pompldou, was attracted to cast steel pre­ Palace might be exemplilied by two buildings that cisely because · ... although manufactured by in­ emphasize the elegance of industrial production: the dustry, it is not a hard impersonal industrial product Centre Pompidou by Renzo Piano and Richard but one where human intervention is very evident.· v Rogers, completed in 1977, and the 1978 Sainsbury The gerberette - at once an essay on the structural Center by Foster Associates.