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The Organizational Complex: Architecture, Media, and Corporate Space
A historical and theoretical analysis of corporate architecture in the United States after the Second World War. The Organizational Complex is a historical and theoretical analysis of corporate architecture in the United States after the Second World War. Its title refers to the aesthetic and technological extension of the military-industrial complex, in which architecture, computers, and corporations formed a network of objects, images, and discourses that realigned social relations and transformed the postwar landscape. In-depth case studies of architect Eero Saarinen's work for General Motors, IBM, and Bell Laboratories and analyses of office buildings designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill trace the emergence of a systems-based model of organization in architecture, in which the modular curtain wall acts as both an organizational device and a carrier of the corporate image. Such an image—of the corporation as a flexible, integrated system—is seen to correspond with a "humanization" of corporate life, as corporations decentralize both spatially and administratively. Parallel analyses follow the assimilation of cybernetics into aesthetics in the writings of artist and visual theorist Gyorgy Kepes, as art merges with techno-science in the service of a dynamic new "pattern-seeing." Image and system thus converge in the organizational complex, while top-down power dissolves into networked, pattern-based control. Architecture, as one among many media technologies, supplies the patterns—images of organic integration designed to regulate new and unstable human-machine assemblages.
- GenresNonfictionArchitecture
324 pages, Paperback
First published September 1, 2003
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
January 30, 2008
Despite having sentences like:
"If there is an apparent contradiction here, it is that such interiority functions for them as the pivot point for a negative dialectics that prevents their account from collapsing into the totalizing perspective they attribute to the culture industry itself."
Martin's book is highly enjoyable and well thought-out. In exploring the ideas of "organization" and "organism" in 1950s American corporate culture, he moves between the design of buildings, of computers, even of IBM's dress code. Martin uses the writings of Gyorgy Kepes to underscore the scientification of architecture and the expansion of systems into everyday life. There are moments when his writing seems to mirror the infinite loops of patterns and linkages he describes in aesthetics (Chapter 2 will leave your head spinning with names and ideas), but I appreciate his ability to move between seemingly disparate topics.
"If there is an apparent contradiction here, it is that such interiority functions for them as the pivot point for a negative dialectics that prevents their account from collapsing into the totalizing perspective they attribute to the culture industry itself."
Martin's book is highly enjoyable and well thought-out. In exploring the ideas of "organization" and "organism" in 1950s American corporate culture, he moves between the design of buildings, of computers, even of IBM's dress code. Martin uses the writings of Gyorgy Kepes to underscore the scientification of architecture and the expansion of systems into everyday life. There are moments when his writing seems to mirror the infinite loops of patterns and linkages he describes in aesthetics (Chapter 2 will leave your head spinning with names and ideas), but I appreciate his ability to move between seemingly disparate topics.
August 3, 2011
Martin has written a difficult book. Pity, because he's got some great things to say about the architecture he considers here. His thesis - that the curtain-walled corporate architectures of Saarinen, Bunshaft and others represents the networked structure of the corporations that commissioned them - is obscured by so much paranoic research that it's difficult to sift.
Martin frames it as a battle between his "organizational complex" and entropic chaos. Ultimately, entropy must prevail, represented for Martin most pointedly by the space warp scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
This book provides a worthwhile, if dense, read on an intellectually-overlooked episode in modern architectural history, tying it with strains of thought and action common in their time.
Martin frames it as a battle between his "organizational complex" and entropic chaos. Ultimately, entropy must prevail, represented for Martin most pointedly by the space warp scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
This book provides a worthwhile, if dense, read on an intellectually-overlooked episode in modern architectural history, tying it with strains of thought and action common in their time.
March 7, 2024
Wow this was fucking awesome!! -1 star because a bit too dense/academic at times and lagged in places, but holy shit so much insight / incredible analysis here, particularly in Ch3/4 re how office/car design lays bare their internal organizations/economic imperatives. For my capstone so long review/summary below:
Reinhold Martin’s book The Organizational Complex surveys office architecture of the 1940s-1960s, and the backdrop of corporatization that fueled it. Martin works extensively with William H. Whyte’s notion of the “organization man” and conformity of the time period—while common belief would suggest this fueled blandness and standardization, Martin’s view is more sophisticated: “Rather, like capitalism in general, it broke down the modern subject from within by encouraging consumerist differentiation as itself a norm, thus dividing the individual into an ever-finer set of indefinitely variable (yet enumerable) regulating codes.” Martin’s organization man is ‘posthuman,’ a cyborg “subject immersed in and constructed by data flows and patterns.”
Martin thus views organizations and the buildings that house them in terms of organization and communication. Postwar anxieties about nuclear attacks often emphasized this—many worried more about disruptions of communication channels and transportation than actual nuclear fallout. Corporations, then, could be seen as a diffuse form of organization, a defense against “the disorder that was anticipated with the demise of centralized governmental and civic authority in the immediate aftermath of a nuclear strike.” In viewing the corporation as an idealized organizational form, it, too, could promise a “return to mythic organic community of pre-metropolitan subjectivity.”
Martin sees architectural analysis as the best thread into these ideas—buildings explain how corporations view themselves and their employees. He notes that “[architectural analysis is] relentlessly articulating the circuitries of control implied by the modular, patterned cascade, as well as the networks of power and knowledge that make it possible? And might not such an analysis also provide access to the holes embedded within those networks, holes that were and are the modern media, including buildings like Seagram?” In essence, Martin uses the study of architects and designers like Eero Saarinen and Gyorgy Kepes, who worked closely with corporate clients, to gain insight into dominant social forces underlying mid-century modernism.
Chapter 1 begins with a broad sketching of Martin’s idea of “organization,” which emerges mostly from cybernetics and the language of command and control. For Norbert Wiener, “the thought of every age is reflected in its technique” — previously, the clock or steam engine, now of communications and control. Foucault takes a similar approach: simple mechanical machines correspond to sovereign societies, thermodynamic machines to disciplinary societies, cybernetics machines and computers to control societies.
These generalizations could also model the parallels between the human nervous system and information processes, or the human subject and the skyscraper; per Martin, “Whereas a cottage requires no specialized ventilation system, a skyscraper, with its rooms within rooms, is habitable only if equipped with a sophisticated means for circulating and exchanging air. The same goes for the nervous system. Wiener argues that what counts is not the size of the basic components (such as neurons, which are similar in humans and ants) but their organization, which determines the ‘absolute size’ of an organism’s nervous system.” Wiener, too, sought to find a human amidst this modernization: “This is not about preserving the ‘human’ by restricting its contact with machines. IT is about steering the organized human-machines named by Wiener back toward something like ‘humanity.’”
Chapter 2, titled “Pattern Seeing,” concerns itself with definitions: ‘thing seeing’ — the perception of static objects—versus ‘pattern seeing’—detecting emergent, fluctuating boundaries. Martin brings in Kepes, including interesting notes about his view on the nature of photography—that photos can make new nature visible through technological mediation. He also emphasizes Kepes’ relationship to the Bauhaus—his book was largely how Anglo-American audiences absorbed the Bauhaus’ ideas, and he kept close friendship with (Bauhaus Professor) Lazlo Moholy-Nagy and his wife Lucia Moholy.
Most of Martin’s interest in the Bauhaus comes from its fusion of industry and art: “because culture could now be seen as a source of criteria for self-conscious evolutionary selection, there was no contradiction in introducing a humanistic element into the otherwise vocation-oriented Bauhaus curriculum devoted to the logic of the machine.” Similarly, in Martin’s words “the brief life of the New Bauhaus still encapsulates the cliché- ridden conflict between the pragmatism of American industry and the utopianism of the European avant-gardes.” We hear briefly about new beliefs in advertising as art, and the “Modern Art in Advertising Exhibition”—”the selection underscored a commitment to make itself useful to industry in order to remain in existence, even as Moholy-Nagy continued to emphasize a broad, humanistic orientation”
Martin also examines several of Kepes early attempts to parse the relationship between art and science—his encounters with theoretical biology that drew from systems theory, Gestalt psychology, and pattern formation, and his view that “the authority of scientific knowledge is undone by the constitutive role played by aesthetic form in its visualization.” Martin astutely points here, too, to the parallels between early chronophotography/motion studies and their parallels in scientific management.
I found the third and fourth chapters, with no doubt, the most insightful and interesting. Martin titles Chapter 3 “The Physiognomy of the Office,” where he details how office designs express their functions. This is his premise: “[e]very feature of the man created environment has [an] inherent physiognomy [and] thus is an object of communication.”
Martin focuses on this as a way of seeing; office plans shown “side by side in a standardized format accompanied by vital statistics, inviting a comparison of objects in terms of their pragmatic responses to a set of technical problems. Coupled with articles on the economics of high-rise real estate, techniques of curtain wall construction, and the foreseeable effects of automation on the workplace, this comparative anatomy affords a partial glimpse of what had become, by the mid-1950s, the science of the office.”
He gives an interesting reading of the design of the Rockefeller Center, particularly in dealing with unknown tenants who might use space in non-standard ways. He notes that “the only office spaces that could reasonably sustain internal layouts determined by the sort of functional requirements sought by Tafuri are those built for a single client whose needs were known in advance.” Thus, office spaces would work for an “optimized rentability” — the Rockefeller Center “responded to the unpredictable needs of future tenants by offering a range of possible locations for the partitions that abutted the exterior walls, since the dimension of the intervening solid piers (3 6 and 6 3) allowed partitions to be placed anywhere along their width.” In this way, “as Rockefeller Center was being designed, the volatility and unpredictability of the real estate market had already begun to be internalized in office buildings.”
He pairs this with an interesting formal reading of the RCA Building—because fewer elevator banks were needed on each successive floor (banks only going to certain groups of floors; higher floors need fewer elevators), buildings would produce substantial “deep space” in the middle of rooms where the banks no longer were. The exterior, however, bore this, to maintain standardization: “the volume was stepped back each time an elevator bank terminated, in order to remain consistent with the 27-foot depth requirement established by market considerations.”
Martin also explores how “the artificiality of the metropolis began to mutate into modern environments dedicated to the well-being of the worker.” The rise of the white collar worker meant more recognition of the value of “an empathic relation between manager and employee, clothed in the image of modernity.” He brings in Elton Mayo’s studies of workers, which suggested that productivity increased with a sense of identification in a corporate institution; “Mayo and his colleagues concluded that productivity in the factory could be enhanced through methods designed to relate to the worker as a mem- ber of a social group.” Interestingly, these sorts of ‘social equilibria,’ between worker and management, were phrased in scientific terms much like physical/statistical equilibria of Gibbs and Cannon.
Martin’s central point of the chapter examines the “tension between the twin imperatives of flexibility and standardization.” This largely yielded “standard modular units which interlock without the intervention of such aids as nail or glue. Implicit in this development is the search for modules with the greatest combina- tory possibilities.” This came down to a single directive: ‘variety within standardization.’
From this base, the whole language of buildings developed; a “‘vocabulary’ of shell, utility units, partition units, storage units, and furniture, and with a ‘grammar’ of modular combinations that allowed a variety of ‘compositions’ within the same basic parameter.” Some architects of the time tied this to the more radical work of Buckminster Fuller and to single-family homes, although most of them disavowed his work; “Nevertheless, traces of Fuller’s treatment of the house as a logistical problem of deployment remained discernible in other experiments in domestic reorganization carried out on the pages of American professional journals during the war.”
These houses were “optimized to serve a set of standardized needs” but also allowed for flexible organization “Associated with the unpredictable needs of a postwar American family defined by change.” Thus, the role of architecture in both corporate and domestic context would be to “homeostatically [regulate] the dynamics of growth and change in order to preserve the health of the corporate (and urban) organism.”
Architecture of the time similarly aimed at idealized subjects much like Whyte’s “organization man;” a Pei-Duhart house referencing the “typical defense plant worker,” “housewife,” and “postwar” worker, Neutra’s “Alphas” and “Omegas,” J.R. Davidson’s “Mr. and Mrs. X”; “all were standardized character types who formed a hypothetical clientele for the new modern house built around such a ‘family’ reconstituted in the aftermath of war. That the corporation was figured as the institutional correlate of this very same family through subterranean links between its structures and those of houses projected by its architects a decade earlier should be no surprise.”
Martin, however, is skeptical of this sort of standardization, which he deems “pseudo personalization” that “ summons to identify with a character type as an expression of one’s individuality.” In The Organization Man itself, Whyte resolves conformity through a rebellious individualism that, eventually, seems to come only in terms of consumption.
Chapter 4 explores ideas of “organic style,” particularly in the trend of the annual model in automotive sales. Martin emphasizes this notion of individuation through identification with a type, and that this premise allowed for “prefabrication and American individualism [to not be] mutually exclusive.”
He identifies GM’s attempts toward styling as an American “belief in the importance and inevitability of change,” a sort of “dynamic obsolescence” the industry hoped to accelerate. In essence: cars embodied the economic forces of obsolescence in their design. In early production, companies like Ford would optimize production to offer cars at lower prices every year. Alfred P. Sloan, CEO of GM, eventually identified a moment when “the automobile industry became aware that its products could be submitted profitably to what he described as the ‘laws of the Paris dressmaker’” and could instead differentiate on appearance.
Martin brings this focus on fashion back to the idea of the organization. Norman Bel Geddes, a prominent automotive designer hated stylization, following rules of fashion over ‘organic laws’; he compared automobiles to “swordfish, seagulls, greyhounds, stallions, and bulls, claiming that “when the motor car, bus, truck and tractor have evolved into the essential forms determined by what these machines have to do, they will not need sur- face ornamentation to make them beautiful.”
Martin (compellingly!!) argues that this idea of the organism actually united Bel Geddes with Ludwig Mies van Der Rohe and Harvey Earl, stylist at GM. Where Mies celebrated “skin and bones” transparency of buildings that exposed their structural organization, and streamliners like Bel Geddes hoped to organize an interior in response to external forces, GM stylists simply inscribed traces of movement onto cars by the nature of the market (woah!). In Martin’s words, “Since planned obsolescence entailed a naturalization of market forces by representing the cyclical dynamics of fashion as evolutionary, it is no surprise to find the organizational techniques of “dynamic equilibrium,” refined by the avant-garde, applied here to a branch of the culture industry through a new type of aesthetic engineering dedicated to managing the market, with its most prominent practitioner—Harley Earl—coming straight out of Hollywood itself.”
This level of customization also came from the marriage of standardization and customization, using interchangeable/standard parts, and designing different bodies based on unique combinations. In Martin’s words: “Each would impart a separate identity to the Buick, Cadillac, Chevrolet, Oldsmobile, and Pontiac lines, thus achieving the marketing ideal of product differentiation while preserving the advantages of product standardization.” This mode of production was notably recorded in Peter Drucker’s The Concept of the Corporation.
Martin brings us back to office design in Eero Saarinen’s GM office, and his attempts to embody its unique corporate identity. The company had decentralized production and distribution, with centrally controlled styling in consultation with engineering and management. Saarinen’s building, thus, would reflect this; “his system materialized GM’s corporate image-management process in a network of interchangeable parts. What Saarinen called the ‘architecture of metal, of repetitious metal, in a sense in character with what General Motors stands for’ enabled him to impart visual and organizational unity to the entire complex, while also making it possible to mark crucial differences between the separate functions of this productive nerve center with distinctive lobbies.”
Chapter 5 explores early attempts at computer architecture, and IBM’s corporate identity. Martin takes up early designs of computers; further iterations led designers to show more of the internals; “The actual mechanisms themselves make lovely pictures, so we finally put in safety glass and let the customer or observer look into the machine mechanism itself, rather than try to hide it under a cover.” This was, in certain ways, contrary to how IBM framed itself; Watson Sr. spoke publicly that “[o]ur machines should be nothing more than tools for extending the powers of the human beings who use them” while simultaneously referring to them as “brains” in internal documentation; IBM seemed, in some ways, to feel it could not show truly what they were.
Chapter 6, titled “Topologies of Knowledge” takes up commercialized science and commercially directed research, particularly at IBM and Bell Labs. Martin brings the focus again to the personality of the scientist and attempts to tailor the environment to them. The scientist, unlike the traditional organization man, was seen as an an introvert; “The organization man—the man in the gray flannel suit walking down Park Avenue or performing an administrative function for IBM—had here become a ‘tweedy’ university professor roaming about the suburban landscape, his functional extroversion replaced by an equally functional introversion.”
In the Epilogue, Martin ventures briefly outside of architecture to take up how “ art rose to the level of science precisely to the degree that it exhibited a measure of patterned organization comparable to that made visible in the new nature revealed by advanced imaging technologies, and vice versa.”
Martin brings in a study of the John Deere headquarters that Saarinen designed, noting it as a “behavior inducing environment.” Perhaps most interestingly, he brings up Freidrich Kittler’s reading of Gravity’s Rainbow, and the ways material organizational capture might differ from psychological capture; “Pynchon’s GI protagonist (whose postwar tag, we might add, could easily read GM), an individual escapes the ‘operational paranoia’ of the intelligence agent only to the extent to which it seizes him at the personal level.’”
I really liked this book and got a ton out of it—it synthesizes a lot of ambient threads around commercial art and formations of postwar corporations and organizations. At times The Organizational Complex leans a bit academic for my taste (I know, I nabby The Information for being too pop-science)—it employs perhaps my least favorite academic trope, a sort of abstract finger-wagging at architects for the implications of their work, and at times the prose is unnecessarily dense.
That said, I think it’s still one of the most interesting and useful things I’ve read this year. Martin presents an incredibly compelling thesis about the ways these buildings manifest the economic forces that birthed them, the opposing imperatives of customization and standardization of the time, and new visions of a communally-oriented, human-relations mediated ‘cyborg’ worker/”organization man.” I found his insights about how changing car appearances manifest the economic directives as well (toward planned obsolescence), and how Kepes parades art and science. Particularly interesting here, too, was the tie between chronophotography and scientific management. In general, this was an ambitious and well-argued book about how architects shaped buildings to the organization of their clients, and how such designs yield insight into social, aesthetic, and market forces of the time—highly recommend!
Reinhold Martin’s book The Organizational Complex surveys office architecture of the 1940s-1960s, and the backdrop of corporatization that fueled it. Martin works extensively with William H. Whyte’s notion of the “organization man” and conformity of the time period—while common belief would suggest this fueled blandness and standardization, Martin’s view is more sophisticated: “Rather, like capitalism in general, it broke down the modern subject from within by encouraging consumerist differentiation as itself a norm, thus dividing the individual into an ever-finer set of indefinitely variable (yet enumerable) regulating codes.” Martin’s organization man is ‘posthuman,’ a cyborg “subject immersed in and constructed by data flows and patterns.”
Martin thus views organizations and the buildings that house them in terms of organization and communication. Postwar anxieties about nuclear attacks often emphasized this—many worried more about disruptions of communication channels and transportation than actual nuclear fallout. Corporations, then, could be seen as a diffuse form of organization, a defense against “the disorder that was anticipated with the demise of centralized governmental and civic authority in the immediate aftermath of a nuclear strike.” In viewing the corporation as an idealized organizational form, it, too, could promise a “return to mythic organic community of pre-metropolitan subjectivity.”
Martin sees architectural analysis as the best thread into these ideas—buildings explain how corporations view themselves and their employees. He notes that “[architectural analysis is] relentlessly articulating the circuitries of control implied by the modular, patterned cascade, as well as the networks of power and knowledge that make it possible? And might not such an analysis also provide access to the holes embedded within those networks, holes that were and are the modern media, including buildings like Seagram?” In essence, Martin uses the study of architects and designers like Eero Saarinen and Gyorgy Kepes, who worked closely with corporate clients, to gain insight into dominant social forces underlying mid-century modernism.
Chapter 1 begins with a broad sketching of Martin’s idea of “organization,” which emerges mostly from cybernetics and the language of command and control. For Norbert Wiener, “the thought of every age is reflected in its technique” — previously, the clock or steam engine, now of communications and control. Foucault takes a similar approach: simple mechanical machines correspond to sovereign societies, thermodynamic machines to disciplinary societies, cybernetics machines and computers to control societies.
These generalizations could also model the parallels between the human nervous system and information processes, or the human subject and the skyscraper; per Martin, “Whereas a cottage requires no specialized ventilation system, a skyscraper, with its rooms within rooms, is habitable only if equipped with a sophisticated means for circulating and exchanging air. The same goes for the nervous system. Wiener argues that what counts is not the size of the basic components (such as neurons, which are similar in humans and ants) but their organization, which determines the ‘absolute size’ of an organism’s nervous system.” Wiener, too, sought to find a human amidst this modernization: “This is not about preserving the ‘human’ by restricting its contact with machines. IT is about steering the organized human-machines named by Wiener back toward something like ‘humanity.’”
Chapter 2, titled “Pattern Seeing,” concerns itself with definitions: ‘thing seeing’ — the perception of static objects—versus ‘pattern seeing’—detecting emergent, fluctuating boundaries. Martin brings in Kepes, including interesting notes about his view on the nature of photography—that photos can make new nature visible through technological mediation. He also emphasizes Kepes’ relationship to the Bauhaus—his book was largely how Anglo-American audiences absorbed the Bauhaus’ ideas, and he kept close friendship with (Bauhaus Professor) Lazlo Moholy-Nagy and his wife Lucia Moholy.
Most of Martin’s interest in the Bauhaus comes from its fusion of industry and art: “because culture could now be seen as a source of criteria for self-conscious evolutionary selection, there was no contradiction in introducing a humanistic element into the otherwise vocation-oriented Bauhaus curriculum devoted to the logic of the machine.” Similarly, in Martin’s words “the brief life of the New Bauhaus still encapsulates the cliché- ridden conflict between the pragmatism of American industry and the utopianism of the European avant-gardes.” We hear briefly about new beliefs in advertising as art, and the “Modern Art in Advertising Exhibition”—”the selection underscored a commitment to make itself useful to industry in order to remain in existence, even as Moholy-Nagy continued to emphasize a broad, humanistic orientation”
Martin also examines several of Kepes early attempts to parse the relationship between art and science—his encounters with theoretical biology that drew from systems theory, Gestalt psychology, and pattern formation, and his view that “the authority of scientific knowledge is undone by the constitutive role played by aesthetic form in its visualization.” Martin astutely points here, too, to the parallels between early chronophotography/motion studies and their parallels in scientific management.
I found the third and fourth chapters, with no doubt, the most insightful and interesting. Martin titles Chapter 3 “The Physiognomy of the Office,” where he details how office designs express their functions. This is his premise: “[e]very feature of the man created environment has [an] inherent physiognomy [and] thus is an object of communication.”
Martin focuses on this as a way of seeing; office plans shown “side by side in a standardized format accompanied by vital statistics, inviting a comparison of objects in terms of their pragmatic responses to a set of technical problems. Coupled with articles on the economics of high-rise real estate, techniques of curtain wall construction, and the foreseeable effects of automation on the workplace, this comparative anatomy affords a partial glimpse of what had become, by the mid-1950s, the science of the office.”
He gives an interesting reading of the design of the Rockefeller Center, particularly in dealing with unknown tenants who might use space in non-standard ways. He notes that “the only office spaces that could reasonably sustain internal layouts determined by the sort of functional requirements sought by Tafuri are those built for a single client whose needs were known in advance.” Thus, office spaces would work for an “optimized rentability” — the Rockefeller Center “responded to the unpredictable needs of future tenants by offering a range of possible locations for the partitions that abutted the exterior walls, since the dimension of the intervening solid piers (3 6 and 6 3) allowed partitions to be placed anywhere along their width.” In this way, “as Rockefeller Center was being designed, the volatility and unpredictability of the real estate market had already begun to be internalized in office buildings.”
He pairs this with an interesting formal reading of the RCA Building—because fewer elevator banks were needed on each successive floor (banks only going to certain groups of floors; higher floors need fewer elevators), buildings would produce substantial “deep space” in the middle of rooms where the banks no longer were. The exterior, however, bore this, to maintain standardization: “the volume was stepped back each time an elevator bank terminated, in order to remain consistent with the 27-foot depth requirement established by market considerations.”
Martin also explores how “the artificiality of the metropolis began to mutate into modern environments dedicated to the well-being of the worker.” The rise of the white collar worker meant more recognition of the value of “an empathic relation between manager and employee, clothed in the image of modernity.” He brings in Elton Mayo’s studies of workers, which suggested that productivity increased with a sense of identification in a corporate institution; “Mayo and his colleagues concluded that productivity in the factory could be enhanced through methods designed to relate to the worker as a mem- ber of a social group.” Interestingly, these sorts of ‘social equilibria,’ between worker and management, were phrased in scientific terms much like physical/statistical equilibria of Gibbs and Cannon.
Martin’s central point of the chapter examines the “tension between the twin imperatives of flexibility and standardization.” This largely yielded “standard modular units which interlock without the intervention of such aids as nail or glue. Implicit in this development is the search for modules with the greatest combina- tory possibilities.” This came down to a single directive: ‘variety within standardization.’
From this base, the whole language of buildings developed; a “‘vocabulary’ of shell, utility units, partition units, storage units, and furniture, and with a ‘grammar’ of modular combinations that allowed a variety of ‘compositions’ within the same basic parameter.” Some architects of the time tied this to the more radical work of Buckminster Fuller and to single-family homes, although most of them disavowed his work; “Nevertheless, traces of Fuller’s treatment of the house as a logistical problem of deployment remained discernible in other experiments in domestic reorganization carried out on the pages of American professional journals during the war.”
These houses were “optimized to serve a set of standardized needs” but also allowed for flexible organization “Associated with the unpredictable needs of a postwar American family defined by change.” Thus, the role of architecture in both corporate and domestic context would be to “homeostatically [regulate] the dynamics of growth and change in order to preserve the health of the corporate (and urban) organism.”
Architecture of the time similarly aimed at idealized subjects much like Whyte’s “organization man;” a Pei-Duhart house referencing the “typical defense plant worker,” “housewife,” and “postwar” worker, Neutra’s “Alphas” and “Omegas,” J.R. Davidson’s “Mr. and Mrs. X”; “all were standardized character types who formed a hypothetical clientele for the new modern house built around such a ‘family’ reconstituted in the aftermath of war. That the corporation was figured as the institutional correlate of this very same family through subterranean links between its structures and those of houses projected by its architects a decade earlier should be no surprise.”
Martin, however, is skeptical of this sort of standardization, which he deems “pseudo personalization” that “ summons to identify with a character type as an expression of one’s individuality.” In The Organization Man itself, Whyte resolves conformity through a rebellious individualism that, eventually, seems to come only in terms of consumption.
Chapter 4 explores ideas of “organic style,” particularly in the trend of the annual model in automotive sales. Martin emphasizes this notion of individuation through identification with a type, and that this premise allowed for “prefabrication and American individualism [to not be] mutually exclusive.”
He identifies GM’s attempts toward styling as an American “belief in the importance and inevitability of change,” a sort of “dynamic obsolescence” the industry hoped to accelerate. In essence: cars embodied the economic forces of obsolescence in their design. In early production, companies like Ford would optimize production to offer cars at lower prices every year. Alfred P. Sloan, CEO of GM, eventually identified a moment when “the automobile industry became aware that its products could be submitted profitably to what he described as the ‘laws of the Paris dressmaker’” and could instead differentiate on appearance.
Martin brings this focus on fashion back to the idea of the organization. Norman Bel Geddes, a prominent automotive designer hated stylization, following rules of fashion over ‘organic laws’; he compared automobiles to “swordfish, seagulls, greyhounds, stallions, and bulls, claiming that “when the motor car, bus, truck and tractor have evolved into the essential forms determined by what these machines have to do, they will not need sur- face ornamentation to make them beautiful.”
Martin (compellingly!!) argues that this idea of the organism actually united Bel Geddes with Ludwig Mies van Der Rohe and Harvey Earl, stylist at GM. Where Mies celebrated “skin and bones” transparency of buildings that exposed their structural organization, and streamliners like Bel Geddes hoped to organize an interior in response to external forces, GM stylists simply inscribed traces of movement onto cars by the nature of the market (woah!). In Martin’s words, “Since planned obsolescence entailed a naturalization of market forces by representing the cyclical dynamics of fashion as evolutionary, it is no surprise to find the organizational techniques of “dynamic equilibrium,” refined by the avant-garde, applied here to a branch of the culture industry through a new type of aesthetic engineering dedicated to managing the market, with its most prominent practitioner—Harley Earl—coming straight out of Hollywood itself.”
This level of customization also came from the marriage of standardization and customization, using interchangeable/standard parts, and designing different bodies based on unique combinations. In Martin’s words: “Each would impart a separate identity to the Buick, Cadillac, Chevrolet, Oldsmobile, and Pontiac lines, thus achieving the marketing ideal of product differentiation while preserving the advantages of product standardization.” This mode of production was notably recorded in Peter Drucker’s The Concept of the Corporation.
Martin brings us back to office design in Eero Saarinen’s GM office, and his attempts to embody its unique corporate identity. The company had decentralized production and distribution, with centrally controlled styling in consultation with engineering and management. Saarinen’s building, thus, would reflect this; “his system materialized GM’s corporate image-management process in a network of interchangeable parts. What Saarinen called the ‘architecture of metal, of repetitious metal, in a sense in character with what General Motors stands for’ enabled him to impart visual and organizational unity to the entire complex, while also making it possible to mark crucial differences between the separate functions of this productive nerve center with distinctive lobbies.”
Chapter 5 explores early attempts at computer architecture, and IBM’s corporate identity. Martin takes up early designs of computers; further iterations led designers to show more of the internals; “The actual mechanisms themselves make lovely pictures, so we finally put in safety glass and let the customer or observer look into the machine mechanism itself, rather than try to hide it under a cover.” This was, in certain ways, contrary to how IBM framed itself; Watson Sr. spoke publicly that “[o]ur machines should be nothing more than tools for extending the powers of the human beings who use them” while simultaneously referring to them as “brains” in internal documentation; IBM seemed, in some ways, to feel it could not show truly what they were.
Chapter 6, titled “Topologies of Knowledge” takes up commercialized science and commercially directed research, particularly at IBM and Bell Labs. Martin brings the focus again to the personality of the scientist and attempts to tailor the environment to them. The scientist, unlike the traditional organization man, was seen as an an introvert; “The organization man—the man in the gray flannel suit walking down Park Avenue or performing an administrative function for IBM—had here become a ‘tweedy’ university professor roaming about the suburban landscape, his functional extroversion replaced by an equally functional introversion.”
In the Epilogue, Martin ventures briefly outside of architecture to take up how “ art rose to the level of science precisely to the degree that it exhibited a measure of patterned organization comparable to that made visible in the new nature revealed by advanced imaging technologies, and vice versa.”
Martin brings in a study of the John Deere headquarters that Saarinen designed, noting it as a “behavior inducing environment.” Perhaps most interestingly, he brings up Freidrich Kittler’s reading of Gravity’s Rainbow, and the ways material organizational capture might differ from psychological capture; “Pynchon’s GI protagonist (whose postwar tag, we might add, could easily read GM), an individual escapes the ‘operational paranoia’ of the intelligence agent only to the extent to which it seizes him at the personal level.’”
I really liked this book and got a ton out of it—it synthesizes a lot of ambient threads around commercial art and formations of postwar corporations and organizations. At times The Organizational Complex leans a bit academic for my taste (I know, I nabby The Information for being too pop-science)—it employs perhaps my least favorite academic trope, a sort of abstract finger-wagging at architects for the implications of their work, and at times the prose is unnecessarily dense.
That said, I think it’s still one of the most interesting and useful things I’ve read this year. Martin presents an incredibly compelling thesis about the ways these buildings manifest the economic forces that birthed them, the opposing imperatives of customization and standardization of the time, and new visions of a communally-oriented, human-relations mediated ‘cyborg’ worker/”organization man.” I found his insights about how changing car appearances manifest the economic directives as well (toward planned obsolescence), and how Kepes parades art and science. Particularly interesting here, too, was the tie between chronophotography and scientific management. In general, this was an ambitious and well-argued book about how architects shaped buildings to the organization of their clients, and how such designs yield insight into social, aesthetic, and market forces of the time—highly recommend!
March 31, 2016
absolutely seminal for anyone interested in cybernetics / systems theory
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