Author(s): | Slaton, Amy E. |
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Reviewer(s): | McSwain, James B. |
Published by EH.NET (October 2001)
Amy E. Slaton, Reinforced Concrete and the Modernization of American
Building, 1900-1930. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. xiii
+ 255 pp. $42.50 (cloth), ISBN 0-8018-6559-X.
Reviewed for EH.NET by James B. McSwain, Department of History, Tuskegee
University.
Amy E. Slaton of Drexel University explores the cultural forces at work in
the modernization of plant construction. Specifically, she examines the use of
reinforced concrete to build manufacturing facilities and attendant
engineering skills and testing procedures, as well as claims of
rationalization, efficiency, and scientific underpinnings, and arguments for
social beneficence, worker happiness, and productivity. Her thesis is that the
functionalist reinforced-concrete factory of the 1900-30 era reflects
“commercial, architectural, and technological change” spun off from the
intensification of hierarchical arrangements of labor and management. She
finds networks of educators, engineers, and industrialists that supported and
strengthened class, ethnic, and gender perceptions in business and
construction affairs. While ostensibly offering scientific objectivity to
clients, these men consolidated and exchanged “knowledge systems” which they
used to elevate their “occupational and cultural” status.
The genesis of concrete testing and inspection was in a nineteenth-century
interest in controlling raw materials, which by 1900 had been incorporated
into university engineering programs. Materials testing laboratories found in
concrete a commodity in great demand after 1890 for commercial construction.
Lab instructors subsequently trained engineers and technicians who took
testing methods to the public. Instructors also wrote specifications for
concrete construction and sold their expertise to the construction trades
through consulting. While the construction industry in general moved towards
mechanization and simplification of labor to cut costs, advocates of testing
claimed their students should be exempted from this trend. As graduates of a
university curriculum in engineering, they possessed, instructors insisted,
the intuitive knowledge or insight to perform what would otherwise be regarded
as highly routine testing procedures.
According to Slaton, instructors consistently identified “native-born white
men” as the most suitable candidates for training. Working assiduously to
develop equipment and procedures for evaluating brick, paving materials, farm
structures, masonry and cement, instructors also tried to persuade industries
of the value of testing and evaluation of materials but only if in the hands
of college-trained engineers who possessed practical knowledge, understanding
of theory, and experience-sharpened intuition. These trained engineers were
agents of rationalization who could lower costs, produce reliable results, and
guarantee efficiency.
Slaton contends that through “published standards and specifications for
concrete” materials, specialists and university engineering instructors
extended their “hierarchical occupational vision” into the commercial world.
Standards upheld the notion that testing and inspection had to be done by
trained technicians. They also served as means to supervise construction
tasks, which complemented contemporary agendas for industrial administration.
By controlling testing and inspection of concrete on the job site, standards
and specifications not only assured material quality but also made
construction procedures routine. They were the systematic application of
“assessment techniques” that made premium scientific knowledge an “affordable
tool” for builders.
Slaton also argues that written prescriptions for concrete construction
established reasonable expectations of performance and quality in specific
categories such as set time, tensile strength, and volume consistency.
Standards assigned responsibility to various elements in the workforce
hierarchy, reinforcing skill distinctions, keeping testing out of the hands of
unskilled laborers, and preserving occupational opportunities for “onsite”
technicians and engineers. Of course, in as much as knowledge of what was
acceptable in concrete use was tentative and cumulative, professional
engineering organizations made routine, not the outcome of tests, but the
methodology. Predictably, they emphasized that testing demanded competent,
intelligent, and reliable operators, which meant university-trained people,
who could thereby guarantee the “usefulness” and economy of quality control.
Slaton argues that, despite the rhetoric about tester qualifications, concrete
specifications were ambiguous, subjective, imprecise, and inexact,
undercutting the claim that applied science and technology in concrete
construction required “occupational pedigree” and personal character.
In addition Slaton is interested in how knowledge of concrete was applied on
the job site to construct “utilitarian factory buildings.” The initial
challenge for companies that put up such buildings was to underline their
expertise in concrete but market these skills as affordable and competitive
commodities. The next hurdle was to sell consumers on the notion that
reinforced concrete buildings were efficient. Builders pointed out that the
concrete factory designs were uniform, minimizing “design expenses,” which
made them like many other “mass-produced artifacts” of the 1900-1930 period.
Firms most successful in this market were turn-key operations that combined
under one roof design, planning, engineering, and construction. These
companies streamlined and standardized construction methods, reducing them to
site preparation, digging foundations, building and pouring forms, surface
finishing, and installation of non-concrete fixtures. Various systems
appeared, such as the Kahn or Hinchman-Renton, that featured pre-assembled
columns, beams, girders, and reinforcement elements, which were trucked to the
site or cast on the lot, and then hoisted into place. This rationalization of
production and construction methods required less skilled labor and so cut
costs. This led inevitably to mechanization of concrete-mixing and
portability, so that suppliers could guarantee a steady flow of large amounts
of wet concrete to the job site. These steps Slaton found in the business
conduct of Aberthaw Construction Company (Maine), which she uses as a case
study to illustrate how a specific firm maintained “meticulous workplace
control” of labor and materials and advertised this as progressive business
methodology.
Slaton concludes that the minimalist aesthetic of reinforced concrete
buildings was a deliberate design choice. It arose from the hierarchical
social system fostered by university instructors, their engineering students,
and construction management. Standardized concrete construction was allegedly
scientific, uniform like the standards and specifications issued to guide
concrete use in building, and “streamlined” by modern, progressive engineering
techniques. The uniformity of concrete factories reflected a contemporary
concern that workers function in an orderly atmosphere. The functionalist,
utilitarian design of the concrete building also mirrored the accelerating
trend of mass production and consumption, which subordinated everything,
including aesthetics, to its advancement. Functionalist design was, Slaton
contends, a deliberate rejection of “conspicuous waste,” and an embrace of
blanket truthfulness, austerity, simplicity, and “realism.” It provided
workers with a superior “physical environment” that fostered health, morale,
and contentment.
Slaton’s work is a sophisticated marriage of sociology and history. Historians
interested in the intersection of social factors such as gender or race, in an
industrial context, with professionalism, progressive-era mentalites, and
construction practices will enjoy Slaton’s complex and daring analysis of
their interactions, conflicts, and syntheses. There is an apparent dissonance
or disjunction in her work, but this comes from a novel meshing of seemingly
discontinuous or unconnected themes and problems.
I applaud Slaton for what she has attempted. Her book has many interesting
insights and makes original connections among technology, business, and social
values. Even so, I have reservations. I read the work hoping to learn about
concrete as a construction material, including its history, physical
characteristics, attractiveness as a substitute for steel, ongoing research
into its uses, development of standards, and the technical problems
surrounding its application to engineering difficulties. Slaton touches on
some of these categories, and explores them to the degree required by her
narrative. But ultimately, for her, examining concrete, particularly concrete
commercial factory construction, is only a platform from which to develop
complaints about how male engineers, university instructors, and construction
management fabricated circular arguments to justify university-educated,
technically accredited males dominating the industry. They made testing and
quality control routine, but resisted the logic that their own scientifically
refined, professional oversight could also be reduced to easily learned steps
that untrained laborers could perform.
Slaton insists that concrete specifications and construction standards were
ambiguous and subjective, proving that the authors of same were desperate to
salvage their professional worth in what should have otherwise been an
egalitarian exercise that women, uneducated workers, and the technically
deficient could undertake with equally acceptable outcomes. Slaton found talk
of character, reliability, and intuition as evidence that consumers and
management could rely upon university-trained engineers to turn out quality
concrete construction, to be self-serving, unconvincing, and prejudicial, all
blatantly contradictory to an otherwise modernist rhetoric of efficiency,
rationality, and standardization.
What I hoped to learn from her work is related to my research into municipal
engineering in the Gulf South, where city officials faced problems about
substituting concrete for brick in sewer and freshwater facilities, and fears
about the reliability of concrete. They sought the opinions of consultants
such as Rudolph Hering, or city engineers such as B.M. Harrod or Linus W.
Brown of New Orleans about the truthfulness or completeness of concrete
suppliers’ information brochures and manuals, and so forth, and sometimes
wrestled in court over the political and legal consequences of their decisions
or mistakes. I am not sure yet that Slaton has helped me with my parochial
research interests, but neither did she retard my efforts. For those astute
enough to benefit from her complicated work, she supplies many provocative
ties between otherwise seemingly unconnected topics.
James B. McSwain is author of “Fire-Hazards and Protection of Property:
Municipal Regulation of the Storage and Supply of Fuel Oil in Mobile, Alabama,
1894-1910,” (forthcoming 2002) Journal of Urban History.
Subject(s): | Industry: Manufacturing and Construction |
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Geographic Area(s): | North America |
Time Period(s): | 20th Century: Pre WWII |