Review: Modernism's Visible Hand: Architecture and Regulation in America, by Michael Osman

Abstract

Michael Osman Modernism's Visible Hand: Architecture and Regulation in America Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018, 280 pp., 70 b/w illus. $30 (paper), ISBN 9781517900984 “This is not a history of enthusiastic people doing interesting things,” Michael Osman archly warns readers of Modernism's Visible Hand (ix). He argues that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a new imperative to regulate exerted profound influence on the built environment of the United States, from middle-class households to large industrial plants. Technologies for keeping ambient room temperature constant were connected in surprising ways with efforts to manage factory labor, to mitigate economic fluctuations, and to study the natural world. These developments collectively shaped the American built environment far more, Osman asserts, than the creative efforts of canonical architects. His book is part of a broader reexamination of the history of environmental control, building on but also pushing beyond Reyner Banham's now-classic polemical elevation of technical systems as the repressed protagonists of modernism. In more recent accounts, technology is shown to be interwoven with social, political, and aesthetic issues.1 Hence, Osman's title is a reference to the work of business historian Alfred Chandler, whose book The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business was published in 1977. Chandler argued that in the nineteenth century, the activity of large corporations began to be guided not by capitalism's passive “invisible hand” but more actively by a new class of professional managers.2 The efforts of these managers to steady the corporate ship amid market turbulence reflected a fundamental change in the economy. By the same token, Osman argues that the emergence of active environmental and economic regulation led to profound shifts in how buildings were conceived and used. It would be difficult to pursue such an ambitious thesis in the form of a methodically structured proof. Instead, Osman offers five quasi-independent essays about regulation in diverse contexts. As a result, his book has the character of a …