ARC3300HF
Instructor: Claire Zimmerman
Meeting Section: L0101
Thursdays 6:00 - 9:00 p.m.

Like the gas flares that mark oil wells across the Texas plains, industrial buildings materialize networks of socioeconomic practice. They make seemingly immaterial economic forces into concrete things, the “fruiting bodies” of subterranean infrastructures of money, labor, and natural resources transformed into “raw materials.” As industry moved across the North American continent over nearly two centuries, it took shape in buildings designed to optimize resources, manufacturing, and employment. From textiles in Amoskeag, New Hampshire to steel and cars in Pittsburgh and Detroit respectively, factories grew and changed in a continuous collective design process focused on throughput or flow. Across the Great Lakes to Toronto and Chicago, over the western plains to Edmonton, Oklahoma City, Omaha, and from there to the manufacturing tech centers of Vancouver, Seattle, and Silicon Valley, the sites of large-scale industry in North America track the changing built environment from solid production to airy virtual networks.  

How have architects deployed the visibility of industrial buildings through design, and to what end? 

In this course we consider the role of architectural appearance in New England campuses of industry, Chicago icons of modern architecture like the Marshall Field Warehouse, Detroit’s Ford Motor Company plants at Highland Park and River Rouge, New York skyscrapers of major industrial producers, and the postwar campuses of General Motors (Michigan), Boeing (Washington), and Silicon Valley tech giants. Students will deliver one site report during a mid-semester field trip and short presentations on our assigned readings. Final projects should focus on the post-WWII landscapes of industry in North America (and their extra-territorial extensions) in a paper, a podcast, an extended blog post, a website, a detailed annotated bibliography, or an output mutually agreed upon by instructor and student.