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Article ID: CBB997050461

Architects as Designers of Pre-World War II, Large-Scale Technological Sytstems: Edward W. Tanner and the Design of the Fort Peck Townsite (2011)

Fredric L. Quivik (Author)

IA. The Journal of the Society for Industrial Archeology
Volume: 37
Issue: 1/2
Pages: 115-134

URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23757912

Publication Date: 2011
Edition Details: Theme Issue: IA in Montana
Language: English

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Architects New Towns Construction Dams New Deal (1933-1939) History of technology, as a discipline Industrial archaeology Fort Peck Dam Large technology systems 20th century United States

The Fort Peck townsite, located next to the Fort Peck dam on the Missouri River in eastern Montana, is a placid setting that exhibits relatively little of its role in housing thousands of workers during construction of the dam in the 1930s. Like many New Deal projects, the Fort Peck dam served multiple purposes, primary among them to create jobs and relieve unemployment. It was also a complex technological undertaking, sponsored by the federal government to enhance the nation's infrastructure for navigation, flood control, irrigation, and power generation. To design and build such a large project, including the housing for the workers, engineers developed skills in system-building that would be deployed later to mobilize the U.S. economy for wartime production during World War II and then to develop aerospace weapons and space exploration during the Cold War. Thus, the design and development of the Fort Peck townsite was a part of a much larger system-building history. This article examines the role architects played in that larger enterprise, the successes and failures of their designs for the townsite, and the reasons lessons that could have been learned from the failures did not carry forward to the system-building developments of the 1960s.

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Associated with

Article Jon Axline (2011) "A Wonderful Piece of Engineering": The Point of Rocks Segment of the Mullan Road and the Milwaukee Road Railroad in Mineral Country, Montana. IA. The Journal of the Society for Industrial Archeology (pp. 29-42). unapi

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