Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

White Collar Corbusier: From the Casier to the cités d'affaires

White Collar Corbusier: From the Casier to the cités d'affaires Alphabetical vertical files, c. 1912. White Collar Corbusier: From the Casier to the cités d’affaires ALEXANDRA LANGE After World War I France looked to America, not for architecture but for equipment. Le Corbusier’s 1935 trip, chronicled in When the Cathedrals Were White, was actually five years behind the times. His countrymen Hyacinthe Dubreuil and Georges Duhamel (both of whose books Le Corbusier owned) had already craned their necks at New York and Chicago skyscrapers and watched the car carcasses go by on Ford’s assembly line. But they were social critics, not designers. It was Le Corbusier who extended Frederick Winslow Taylor’s scientific management beyond the factory and into society as part of the larger interwar application of timesaving principles to the white-collar office and a resumption of the SaintSimonian ideal of the right man for the job. Le Corbusier’s affinity for scientific management linked him to other post–World War I thinkers in France who saw technology, in the right hands, as the revolutionary element for society.1 Mary McLeod’s pioneering research about this affiliation is a contribution to intellectual history that I would like to extend toward design. It is my contention that scientific management—“the regime of records”—generated new http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Grey Room MIT Press

White Collar Corbusier: From the Casier to the cités d'affaires

Grey Room , Volume Fall 2002 (9) – Oct 1, 2002

Loading next page...
 
/lp/mit-press/white-collar-corbusier-from-the-casier-to-the-cit-s-d-affaires-yHz0oRVcyH

References

References for this paper are not available at this time. We will be adding them shortly, thank you for your patience.

Publisher
MIT Press
Copyright
© 2002 Grey Room, Inc. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology
ISSN
1526-3819
eISSN
1536-0105
DOI
10.1162/152638102320989515
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

Alphabetical vertical files, c. 1912. White Collar Corbusier: From the Casier to the cités d’affaires ALEXANDRA LANGE After World War I France looked to America, not for architecture but for equipment. Le Corbusier’s 1935 trip, chronicled in When the Cathedrals Were White, was actually five years behind the times. His countrymen Hyacinthe Dubreuil and Georges Duhamel (both of whose books Le Corbusier owned) had already craned their necks at New York and Chicago skyscrapers and watched the car carcasses go by on Ford’s assembly line. But they were social critics, not designers. It was Le Corbusier who extended Frederick Winslow Taylor’s scientific management beyond the factory and into society as part of the larger interwar application of timesaving principles to the white-collar office and a resumption of the SaintSimonian ideal of the right man for the job. Le Corbusier’s affinity for scientific management linked him to other post–World War I thinkers in France who saw technology, in the right hands, as the revolutionary element for society.1 Mary McLeod’s pioneering research about this affiliation is a contribution to intellectual history that I would like to extend toward design. It is my contention that scientific management—“the regime of records”—generated new

Journal

Grey RoomMIT Press

Published: Oct 1, 2002

There are no references for this article.