Redesigning the Workplace: The North American Factory in the Interwar Period

In 1912, the Gisholt Machine Company, makers of lathes, balancing machines, and other machinery, built an addition to their shop in Madison, Wisconsin. Although the older building had been considered a modern plant when it was built, only twelve years earlier, it was already out of date. To remain competitive, Gisholt constructed a new building in which the work space could be reorganized to minimize material handling and facilitate the flow of work from raw material to finished product. ¹

More than a decade later, the American Foundry Company of Indianapolis faced a similar problem. Wishing to introduce a new continuous-pour process to speed up the work pace, the company had to make a choice: either build a new foundry or renovate the existing one. In contrast to Gisholt, American Foundry decided that the advantages of the latter approach were decisive. The main change the company made to its facility was to introduce a monorail conveyer system; cheap compared to a new building, it could be installed over a weekend and promised to lower production costs by speeding up work and reducing the labor force. ²

The strategies adopted by Gisholt and American Foundry, their obvious differences notwithstanding, were similar in some significant ways. Both companies refashioned their work space to match the character of the work, and both rebuilt incrementally. Just as important, their approaches to redesigning the workplace--different combinations of new construction, renovation, and reorganization--contrasted with the changes put in place at around the same time by the Ford Motor Company, with its high-volume, standardized production system. Considered by many to mark an epochal break with the traditions of factory architecture, the succession of plants built for Ford in Detroit between 1900 and 1925 have become symbols of the dynamic relationship between factory design and early-twentieth-century industrialism. The nineteenth-century-style, three-story mill building on Piquette Avenue, built in 1904, was, at the time it went up, a good example of a well-planned factory. By 1909 it had become obsolete. It was replaced by Ford's Highland Park plant, designed by Albert Kahn. Highland Park created a new form of manufacturing space, one that featured a strong association between architectural form and industrial process, but the pace of innovation in production techniques quickly rendered it obsolete as well. With the construction of the River Rouge complex between 1915 and 1925, a new factory form reached its culmination: the single-story structure enclosing a large yet simply organized work space with its constituent parts tightly integrated into a whole. ³

Comparing Ford with Gisholt and American Foundry calls attention to the relationship between industrial change, especially in manufacturing processes, and factory layout. Two bodies of literature have grappled with these issues. The first focuses on factory design. More than any other scholar, Lindy Biggs, in The Rational Factory, provides insights into the processes responsible for the transformation of the nineteenth-century mill building into the twentieth-century factory. Two aspects of her work are particularly relevant here. First, she draws attention to the idealized and standardized model of what she calls the rational factory, especially as embodied in the Ford factories built in Detroit between 1904 and 1930. Second, she brings out the links between a factory's internal geography, production inputs and operations (notably material handling and electricity), and the ideologies of industrial engineers and architects. As their scale of operations grew, some manufacturers clamored for a factory capable of integrating various parts of their production processes. For the growing number of experts associated with manufacturing, the ability to put into operation the core components of what they called modern industry--the moving assembly line, special purpose machines, Taylorized semiskilled workers, tight production schedules ruled by the stop watch, and long runs of standardized products--depended on the ability to construct new work spaces in the factory. ⁴

Biggs breaks important...