Fear the Elephant: Selling Flexibility at the Austin Company in the Aftermath of the Great Depression

Abstract

Architecture seems to have lost sight of flexibility’s multiple definitions and historical depth. The concept’s easy presence in contemporary architectural discourse masks flexibility’s intimate connection to the contraction and expansion of industrial production and changing manufacturing processes in the first half of the twentieth century. Flexibility at this historical moment required rendering the manufactory divisible, thereby allowing space, a financial asset, to be redistributed over time. This article follows one such firm, the Austin Company, through a series of commissions to illustrate how it positioned itself as a flexibility supplier. Doing so allows for inquiry into the nature of flexibility in the history of industrial capitalism.