The Taylorized Beauty of the Mechanical: Scientific Management and the Rise of the Modernist Architecture, by Mauro F. Guillen. Princeton, NJ, & Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2006

摘要

Guillen retells the story of how modernism in architecture took its inspiration from principles of early twentieth-century industrial engineering and scientific management. As Guillen notes on the first page of the book, "Modernist architecture is the child of industry and engineering." The book develops a scholarly argument, which will be a compelling read for anybody interested in the history of modern architecture and its relationship to industrial management. Guillen analyzes the roots of modern architecture in the period from 1890 to 1940 in various countries in Europe, the United States, and Latin America. In the book he aims to systematically assess economic, social, and political conditions in the selected countries that could explain modern architecture's love affair with scientific management and engineering ideas and how modern architecture from 1890 onward increasingly began to borrow ideas about methods, standardization, and planning from such management paradigms as scientific management. The book here offers a comprehensive conceptual treatment of its chosen subject and a critical cross-national comparison of institutional conditions that supported the implementation of engineering ideas in modern architectural planning and design. In these respects, Guillen can make very credible claims to the originality of his research.