Reinforced Concrete and the Modernization of American Building, 1900-1930 (review)

Amy Slaton's examination of reinforced concrete industrial structures is a fine example of the broadening vision within the history of technology. In some respects, her study extends the venerable scholarship on mass production as she joins other historians in examining the construction of concrete factory buildings at the beginning of the twentieth century. Yet this book does much more, as Slaton uses her topic to explore connections between technological change and basic social relations. Her starting point is the Progressive Era's view of science and engineering as sources of neutral expertise—a topic often considered in examinations of twentieth-century American technology. But, more than other historians, Slaton explores the meaning and consequences of "objective" expertise, by closely following a group of engineers as they developed reinforced concrete industrial buildings. By the end of her account she has identified paradoxes that highlight the fundamentally social nature of the choices that shaped such buildings in the United States.

Slaton's book is not a narrative history of reinforced concrete construction, although it does present many details about concrete, construction techniques, and engineering. Rather, she asks why these buildings took the form they did and why they matter. Her story begins with the academic engineers who developed ways of testing concrete. The first chapter is as much about American engineering education as it is about construction, however, as Slaton examines the relationship of academic engineers and industry. That she finds close ties is not news, but her findings subtly alter David Noble's emphasis upon the domination of university engineers by industrial capitalism.

Other scholars have found engineering educators to be full partners in the process of shaping technological choices for industry. Slaton's key finding is that academic engineers developed approaches to testing that were cloaked in the garb of science but actually shaped by social considerations. In brief, concrete testing practices insured that engineering graduates enjoyed high levels of prestige by leaving room for subjective judgment that only college-trained engineers of "proper character" could deliver. Defining proper character to mean white middle-class males forged a social bond between engineers and their employers. This is a central issue in the history of engineering education, for status was a dominant concern in many discussions of the subject during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Other historians of engineering, this reviewer included, have failed to explore the ramifications of those concerns as deeply as Slaton has. Her finding provides the basic paradox of the book: that scientific engineers advocated efficiency and economy in a mass-production setting through testing, yet the activities they devised rested upon traditional skills, craftsmanship, judgment, intuition. The rationalizers were not themselves to be rationalized.

This finding informs the subsequent chapters, in which Slaton follows university-trained engineering graduates pursuing testing activities on work sites, traces the preparation of specifications and standards, and examines the adoption of these standards by building firms as they rationalized construction work and workers. A final chapter explores what this understanding of the history of concrete industrial structures means for architectural history and the relationship of the concrete factory to the emergence of modern architecture.

This summary does not do justice to Slaton's account, which is well researched and conceptually rich. Only a couple of minor questions might be raised. First, this is a slim book whose main text is not even two hundred pages, and in places a little more detail and specificity might have helped. For example, it is too bad that the concrete buildings themselves move front and center only twice—in brief discussions of the Aberthaw Construction Company and of a complex of buildings in Scranton, Pennsylvania, built for the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad. Similarly, despite the importance of engineers to this study, few of them emerge as fully developed individuals. Again, it is...