Thesis ID: CBB381219074

Ordering Modernity: The American Architectural Profession between Fact and Law, 1786-1884 (2023)

unapi

The nineteenth-century American building world assembled an unprecedented armature of professional knowledge. This dissertation reconstructs that armature by sampling from the profusion of technical and institutional documents that helped architects, engineers, and builders reckon with the enigmatic abstractions of liberal and industrial capitalism— along with the regimes of labor, infrastructure, and resource management they introduced. Typically ignored by architectural historians, these documents form a valuable archive of cultural texts and evidential indices. As a system of knowledge, they tether design to a series of political-economic conflicts. Revolutionary Philadelphia carpenters and reactionary Anglican specifiers alike found in printed numbers sources of authority and claims on temporal power. Postbellum architect-engineers like John C. Trautwine and Frank Kidder used pocketbooks to transfuse the logics of locomotives and lumber mills into the core of architectural practice. Through a professional sleight of hand, institution-builders like Richard Upjohn and Richard Morris Hunt distanced themselves from the appearance of calculation while depending upon it ever more, encrypting it in drawings, institutional scripts, and legal precedent. In their work with architect H.H. Richardson, general contractors James and Orlando W. Norcross most fully realized the potentials of this system, synthesizing technical literature, industrial capital, and a proprietary mythos of materials to achieve the apotheosis of American architecture. I plumb this obscure world of literate builders and architect-engineers to map such architecture as an expanded field of infrastructural practice, arguing that industrial modernity was perhaps best glimpsed not in an iron frame but in a carefully-sourced palette of quarry-faced sandstone.

...More
Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB381219074/

Similar Citations

Article Smith, Ryan K.; (2014)
The “Mad” Engineer: L'Enfant in Early National Philadelphia (/isis/citation/CBB001450302/)

Article Grange, Kristina; (2003)
Om mötet mellan arkitekter och ingenjörer (/isis/citation/CBB000500398/)

Book Oliver Hochadel; Agustí Nieto-Galan; (2016)
Barcelona: An Urban History of Science and Modernity, 1888-1929 (/isis/citation/CBB830669276/)

Article Kisacky, Jeanne; (2005)
Restructuring Isolation: Hospital Architecture, Medicine, and Disease Prevention (/isis/citation/CBB000630017/)

Article Worthen, Dennis B.; (2010)
Reflections (/isis/citation/CBB001000207/)

Article Chernin, David A.; (2009)
The Evolution of the American Dentist, Part 1---Amalgamation: 1776--1840 (/isis/citation/CBB001210512/)

Book Pursell, Carroll W.; (2001)
American technology (/isis/citation/CBB001180188/)

Book Rydell, Robert W.; Schiavo, Laura Burd.; Bennett, Robert; (2010)
Designing Tomorrow: America's World's Fairs of the 1930s (/isis/citation/CBB001230773/)

Book Adnan Morshed; (2015)
Impossible Heights: Skyscrapers, Flight, and the Master Builder (/isis/citation/CBB234169728/)

Article Kuehn, Daniel; (Summer 2017)
Analyzing the Engineering Technician and Technologist Workforce: Data Coverage and Gaps (/isis/citation/CBB183479856/)

Article Stepanenko, Irina; (2009)
Quelques épisodes de l'activité d'Augustin Betancourt à Tsarskoe Selo (/isis/citation/CBB001450862/)

Book Christopher D. Green; (2018)
Psychology and Its Cities: A New History of Early American Psychology (/isis/citation/CBB358367573/)

Article McMahon, Daniel; (2012)
Geomancy and Walled Fortifications in Late Eighteenth Century China (/isis/citation/CBB001231499/)

Authors & Contributors
Kuehn, Daniel
Wilkinson, Miles
Adnan Morshed
Worthen, Dennis B.
Thomson, Ross
Stepanenko, Irina
Concepts
Engineering
Professions and professionalization
Architecture
Modernity
Technology and culture
Medical education and teaching
Time Periods
19th century
18th century
20th century, early
20th century
Qing dynasty (China, 1644-1912)
21st century
Places
United States
Barcelona (Spain)
Virginia (U.S.)
Russia
China
Great Britain
Institutions
Virginia Military Institute
United States Military Academy
Comments

Be the first to comment!

{{ comment.created_by.username }} on {{ comment.created_on | date:'medium' }}

Log in or register to comment