The Theory of Machine Design in the Second Industrial Age

Abstract

At the conclusion of Theory and Design in the First Machine Age, Reyner Banham invokes the testimony of Buckminster Fuller to remind us that the architects and designers of the Modern Movement: produced a Machine Age architecture only in the sense that its monuments were built in a machine age, and expressed an attitude toward machinery-in the sense that one might stand on French soil and discuss French politics, and still be speaking English.l This observation reminds us of the need to assess the new economic and technological forms which impinged on design practice and its conceptualization during the emergence of the Modern Movement. Without such an assessment we must remain uncertain of both the originality of its thought and its significance. The 'first machine age' began long before the turn of the century. By selecting everyday objects which prefigure the 'rational' 'Philebean solids' fashionable in the 1920s, it has been suggested that modernism had vernacular roots in early industrial culture.2 To define an industrial vernacular would require a comparative study of the relations between design and the conditions of production, developing the programme Siegfried Giedion laid down 40 years ago for an anonymous design history. The results of Giedion's own researches emphasize the diverse and disruptive impact of mechanical technology and industrial capitalism on design practice and aesthetic theory.3 Giedion looked to the scientific discourses associated with the second industrial revolution to overcome this anarchy, believing that the analysis of space, time, and motion undertaken by scientific management provided the modernist avant-garde with a method for the functional reconciliation of technical virtuosity and 'organic' needs, to the benefit of society as a whole. If that formulation now appears hopeful, it directs our interest to the connections between design practice and the theoretical self-awareness of the second industrial age. To explore this relationship, we need to know more about changes in the place of design activity in the enterprise. As theoretical and operational discourses interacted with vernacular practice in myriad enterprise contexts, an adequate perspective on the development of design must involve a comparison of company histories of what would now be called design management. The study of Peter Behrens and the AEG by Buddensieg, et al., is an important step in this direction. The formation of the matrix of modern design did not, however, require the intervention of celebrated architects, nor even a self-conscious juxtaposition of Art and Industry. In this article I shall examine certain changes which took place in the management of machinery design at a leading American machine-tool maker, Brown & Sharpe, in order to show how the emergence of modernism may be located in the transformation of design process. In 900o the Brown & Sharpe Manufacturing Company was one of the largest machine tool manufacturers in the world, and also one of the most prestigious.4 The firm's early experience with precision instrument making and the standardized manufacture of sewing machines had been brought together in refined and innovatory machine-tool designs which commanded a leading position in the embryonic American tool markets of the i86os. Behind this success lay the complementary attributes of the founding partners: Joseph Brown's mechanical ingenuity and Lucian Sharpe's business acumen and discipline, which provided a shoestring version of functionally diversified management. Soon the wellorganized firm was a model 'rational shop' where the best mechanics were keen to work, while other firms which had produced important designs at midcentury struggled to find direction in an increasingly diversified market. Success, however, also brought the problems of managing a larger workforce and product range in an increasingly competitive tool market. As design leadership passed to a number of departmental figures its product range, while