Lumbering Toextinction In The digital Field: The Taylorist Office Building

摘要

The global dominance of North American tall and low office building typologies throughout the 20th century was nearly total. Skylines worldwide and the physical and social structure of most suburbs are testimonies to this enormous technological, economic, social, cultural, and, of course, architectural achievement. Even the Roman Empire failed to achieve such hegemony. There are many reasons for this. Two deserve particular attention from architects. The first is the extraordinary daring of architects in Chicago (and a little later in New York) in bringing together multiple technologies to create the high rise office building-in the context, of course, of an extraordinary explosion in economic activity in the U.S. in the last three decades of the 19th century-and the parallel and equally unprecedented inventiveness in real estate, engineering, and construction practice. Second is the specific intellectual debt the world owes to Frederick Taylor's concept of "Scientific Management," i.e., the rationalization of the processes of production to achieve greater efficiency not least in the design and construction of office buildings and subsequently in the management of the burgeoning administrative activities within them.