Skip to main content

Distributed for Reaktion Books

Factory

Despite its long history, the factory has a particular appeal to modern architects, who have often preferred this building type as "authentic" architecture to the grand public buildings and luxury private dwellings of the contemporary city. Many European architects who looked to America for inspiration in the early 20th century were far more excited by the great factories of Detroit than they were by the monuments of New York and Washington, DC.

This book examines the factory in a number of incarnations; as image, as icon, as innovator and as laboratory. It traces the history of the modern factory from the utopian schemes of Robert Owen or Claude Ledoux in the early 19th century, through the great modernist "cathedrals of industry" of Peter Behrens, Albert Kahn and Frank Lloyd Wright, to the post-industrial revival of former factories, such as Renzo Piano’s reconstruction of the Fiat Lingotto factory in Turin, or the landscaped industrial parks created out of former steel mills in the Ruhr area of Germany.


This is the first book in the "Objekt" series, which will examine a wide range of iconic modern objects across many design fields, including architecture, industrial design, graphics and fashion. The books are not intended as exhaustive histories of their subject, but are written as thematic and discursive essays, keeping in mind the broader cultural meanings of objects or buildings as much as their intended functions in the modern period.

Distribution by the University of Chicago Press only to customers in the USA and Canada. Customers elsewhere should visit the UK website of Reaktion Books.


224 pages | 6.25 x 8.25

Objekt

Architecture: History of Architecture

Sociology: Social Institutions


Reaktion Books image

View all books from Reaktion Books

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
Preface
1. Factory as Image
2. Factory as Model: Early Versions
3. Modern Models
4. Factory as Innovator
5. Factory as Icon
6. Factory as Sales Tool
7. Factory as Laboratory or Laboratory as Factory?
References
Select Bibliography
Photographic Acknowledgements
Index

Be the first to know

Get the latest updates on new releases, special offers, and media highlights when you subscribe to our email lists!

Sign up here for updates about the Press