Governing by Design: Architecture, Economy, and Politics in the Twentieth Century

Chapter 4

0 T he term “ergonomics” and its adjectival derivative “ergonomic” have become household words. whether we have come to know them through advertisements for office furniture, from pamphlets circulated by osha or corporate hr departments, or from periodic trips to the physical therapist, “ergonomic” has come to connote a putatively correct quotidian relationship between our bodies and our equipment. it is intuitive—rather, it has become intuitive—that, say, the contours of a car steering wheel should not be sharp enough to cut one’s hands, that one’s computer keyboard should not engender carpal tunnel syndrome, and that the seat of a chair should be wide, deep, and high enough to accommodate one’s entire rump, regardless of its size (figure 4.1) 4 the interface ergonomics and the aesthetics of survival ◾ J O h n h a rwO O D Some people think that the industrial designer is the equivalent of a wonder drug like penicillin, to be used when sickness strikes. Actually, we are preventative medicine. —henry dreyfuss figure 4.1. “a fixed back-rest cutting into the flesh.” Source: k. f. h. murrell, Human Performance in Industry (new york: reinhold, 1965), 146. 0 John harwood  given the thoroughness of this naturalization, it is easy to forget that ergonomics is a theoretical concept and a discipline of very recent invention. moreover , its origins and the contexts out of which it emerged remain poorly understood by even some of its most ardent apologists and practitioners. a close examination of the work of two of the most important designers involved in its articulation—the german architect ernst neufert and the american industrial designer henry dreyfuss—this chapter is intended to serve as a prolegomena to a critical history of ergonomics. so often taken to be a discipline that insists on the primacy of the body or the machine, ergonomics is neither. as the applied science of designing what is known as the “man-machine” system, ergonomics concerns itself with the hyphen between “man” and “machine,” the means by which “man” and “machine” may be brought into dynamic and productive harmony. this chapter seeks first to establish the definition of ergonomics and the fundamental differences between ergonomics and theories of work that preceded it, then moves to clarify the status of the human body as a normative model within ergonomics. finally the chapter explores some of the consequences for our understanding of space that are the inevitable result of adopting ergonomics as a bedrock principle of design theory. at stake in such a history is the possibility of a critical view of numerous and rapidly proliferating metanarratives: that machines are becoming increasingly important agents within modern or postmodern culture; that “humanism” has been destroyed by the proliferation of mechanical and electronic systems; and that we reside in an age of perpetual crises, with the most important crisis being the constant, multivalent threat that our “environment” poses to our bodies. Fromtaylorism to ergonomics at its most basic level, ergonomics is a technical discourse that emerged from a perceived problem of making the human being at home in an ever more mechanized environment. this is a familiar problem to any student of architectural and design modernism, the leitmotif of its most famous accounts—from lewis mumford’s Technics and Civilization (1934), siegfried giedion’s Space, Time, and Architecture (1941) and Mechanization Takes Command (1949) to reyner Banham’s Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (1960) and william Jordy’s “the symbolic essence of modern european architecture of the twenties and its continuing influence” (1963).1 these grand histories and critiques , all of which sought to understand the development of modern design from the nineteenth century to world war ii as the creation of a so-called machine aesthetic, narrated designers’ growing awareness of the threat posed by unbridled, disorganized mechanization. the machine—whether symbolized the interface  by the airplane, the automobile, the printing press, the steel beam, the jig, the gantry, the radio, or the machine gun—was to be both the archetype of a new architecture, and a threat to be ameliorated by the humanism of the architect. despite their many important differences, a common trope of these narratives —whether the histories themselves or the designs and manifestos upon which they were based—was one of integration. written against the backdrop of mechanized warfare, frequent industrial accidents, and the crisis of cities, these authors argued that the...