The Taylorized Beauty of the Mechanical: Scientific Management and the Rise of Modernist Architecture

Description

The dream of scientific management was a rationalized machine world where life would approach the perfection of an assembly line. Since its early twentieth-century peak, this dream has come to seem a dehumanizing nightmare. This book tells the story of the emergence of modernist architecture as a romance with the ideas of scientific management.

Mauro F. Guillen is director of the Lauder Institute and the Dr. Felix Zandman Professor of International Management and Sociology at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of T"The Limits of Convergence: Globalization and Organizational Change in Argentina, South Korea, and Spain" (Princeton), "The Rise of Spanish Multinationals", and the coauthor of "Building a Global Bank" (Princeton).

"The Taylorized Beauty of the Mechanical is an ambitious work. Mauro Guillen draws from an abundance of sources, both contemporary and recent, to support his hypothesis that there was a connection between the rise of scientific management and the development of modernist architecture... Guillen has written an excellent comparative study that will appeal both to business historians and to architectural and design historians."--Per H. Hansen, Business History Review "Guillen ... offers a unique and bold explanation of the differential development of modern architecture internationally... Guillen's analysis of modern architecture is impressive and inventive. If his answers are not definitive, he certainly asks the right questions and, consequently, greatly advances the sociological study of architecture."--David Gartman, American Journal of Sociology "Mauro F. Guillen contributes to the scholarship on architectural Modernism with an interesting twist with approaching the architectural history literature from a joint managerial and sociological viewpoint... [T]his survey will be of interest to specialists and non-specialists alike."--Guillaume Evrard, European Legacy