Architect Albert C. Martin, Jr.'s aerospace laboratories and manufacturing complexes, along with the residential developments surrounding them, visually and symbolically defined a new industry and a new lifestyle. For about a decade, roughly 1956--66, Martin's designs for Thompson Ramo Wooldridge, the Aerospace Corporation, North American Aviation and other firms gave Los Angeles a unique industrial landscape. Aerospace modernism offers a way of reframing southern California's Cold War by viewing it through a lens of architecture and design. Martin's architecture gave material form to a regional economy, a collective imagination and an emerging political economy increasingly central to southern California. It also gave form to the conviction of his corporate clients and their Air Force patron that only the right kind of buildings -- scientific, industrial and residential -- could attract the kind of creative talent and inspire the kind of thinking required for state-of-the-art aerospace engineering. Paradoxically, an architecture of openness and transparency hid a world of secrecy and classification, spaces that normalized secrecy not just in the workplace but also in entire communities.
...MoreSimilar Citations
Book
Westwick, Peter J.;
(2012)
Blue Sky Metropolis: The Aerospace Century in Southern California
(/isis/citation/CBB001201066/)
Article
Scranton, Philip;
(2009)
The Shows and the Flows: Materials, Markets, and Innovation in the US Machine Tool Industry, 1945--1965
(/isis/citation/CBB000932543/)
Chapter
Wang, Zuoyue;
(2012)
Engineering a New Space: Chinese American Scientists and Engineers in Aerospace in Southern California
(/isis/citation/CBB001201075/)
Chapter
Seth, Anita;
(2012)
Los Angeles Aircraft Workers and the Consolidation of Cold War Politics
(/isis/citation/CBB001201070/)
Chapter
Pandya, Mihir;
(2012)
The Vanishing Act: Stealth Airplanes and Cold War Southern California
(/isis/citation/CBB001201071/)
Chapter
Westwick, Peter J.;
(2012)
Aerospace and Hollywood: How Computer Animation Went from Space to Cineplex
(/isis/citation/CBB001201073/)
Thesis
Layne Karafantis;
(2016)
Under Control: Constructing the Nerve Centers of the Cold War
(/isis/citation/CBB892830760/)
Book
Vanderbilt, Tom;
(2010)
Survival City: Adventures among the Ruins of Atomic America
(/isis/citation/CBB001033354/)
Chapter
Bugos, Glenn E.;
(2012)
Aerospace in the Rest of California: The View from Silicon Valley
(/isis/citation/CBB001201077/)
Chapter
Johnson, Ann;
(2004)
From Boeing to Berkeley: Civil Engineers, the Cold War, and the Origins of Finite Element Analysis
(/isis/citation/CBB000502027/)
Thesis
Lachlan W. Sands;
(2020)
The Emergence of Modernity in the Early Aerospace Industry 1950-1970
(/isis/citation/CBB535848896/)
Article
Krupar, Jason;
(April 2020)
The Disappearing Nuclear Landscape: Snapshots of Lost Atomic Technologies
(/isis/citation/CBB658970261/)
Book
Wels, Susan;
(2008)
California Academy of Sciences: Architecture in Harmony with Nature
(/isis/citation/CBB000952057/)
Article
Elena Aronova;
(2018)
Earthquake Prediction, Biological Clocks, and the Cold War Psy-Ops: Using Animals as Seismic Sensors in the 1970s California
(/isis/citation/CBB843098907/)
Article
Michael Christopher Low;
(2020)
Desert Dreams of Drinking the Sea, Consumed by the Cold War: Transnational Flows of Desalination and Energy from the Pacific to the Persian Gulf
(/isis/citation/CBB142755583/)
Book
Daniel A. Barber;
(2016)
A house in the sun: Modern architecture and solar energy in the Cold War
(/isis/citation/CBB252946784/)
Article
Shimizu, Hiroshi;
Kudo, Satoshi;
(2011)
How Well Does Knowledge Travel? The Transition from Energy to Commercial Application of Laser Diode Fabrication Technology
(/isis/citation/CBB001211695/)
Chapter
Graham, Wade;
(2012)
Blueprinting the Regional City: The Urban Environmental Legacies of the Air Industry in Southern California
(/isis/citation/CBB001201078/)
Article
Christophe Lécuyer;
(2019)
Confronting the Japanese Challenge: The Revival of Manufacturing at Intel
(/isis/citation/CBB464859120/)
Thesis
Sawin, Janet Laughlin;
(2001)
The Role of Government in the Development and Diffusion of Renewable Energy Technologies: Wind Power in the United States, California, Denmark and Germany, 1970--2000
(/isis/citation/CBB001562381/)
Be the first to comment!