Industry + architecture: National narratives/international forces

Complex and mechanised, industrial architecture has altered the aesthetic and cultural landscape of places, contesting the normative divisions between structure, form, and ornament, and posing new challenges for architectural analyses. Industrialisation has modified our experience of urban and rural spaces evident in its continuing and residual affects. In exploring the nexus between industry and architecture, this editors’ issue of Fabrications examines the aesthetic, social, and political impact of industrial processes, construction practices, labour, and materials on built environments directly linked to industry. Technological innovation and labour systematisation and its particular uptake in the design and development of industrial complexes, especially as these paralleled the period of avantgarde architectural movements, generate a pendulum swing for the framing of architectural historiography–from that dominated by objects and figures to a much less charted territory of global economies of manufacturing and standardisation, equally fuelling the momentum of modernisation. Our approach is guided, in part, by the seeming neglect of certain industrial sites and architectures, due to the inadequacy of our research methods and historiographical preferences. These lacunas have prompted a much broader framing than the design of industrial complexes, which may immediately come to mind.

This issue examines the role of industry in constructing and contesting both the surprising networks and the differential map of modernisation across the geopolitical world through examples from Saudi Arabia, Australia, Indonesia, USSR, and the USA. Histories of the industrial complexes and sites of these places uncover the colonial and transnational dimensions of industry and how its architecture impacted on local cultures and other unprivileged social environments that have evolved due to industry. While a major aspect of the architecture of industry is its use of forefront technologies and processes of manufacturing, how these processes were translated into and infiltrated everyday lives is yet to be comprehensively studied. A forum exploring the case study method as an important approach for uncovering these histories considers the legacy of industrial architecture and its heritage.