The Car Factory, Post-Industrialism, and Utopia

Abstract

The architectural figure of the factory, having historically functioned as a space for the unravelling of utopian ideals, endures as a physical and symbolic place for the production of culture both material and immaterial. Expanding on Vilém Flusser's architectural and mediatic understanding of post-industrial culture as presented in his text “The Factory,” this essay posits that the dematerialized nature of the contemporary factory, while still functioning as a schema of social existence, limits the possibilities for the ideation of utopia by disengaging the subject from the regimes of knowledge and production. A case study centered on the virtual nature of Ferrari's new assembly facility in Maranello, Italy, designed by Ateliers Jean Nouvel is used to examine architecture's evolutionary relationship to the dominant means of production and material culture in the industrial and post-industrial eras.

Notes

1. Vilém Flusser, “The Photograph as Post-Industrial Object: An Essay on the Ontological Standing of Photographs,” Leonardo 19, no. 4 (1986): 331.

2. Vilém Flusser, The Shape of Things (London: Reaktion Books, 1999), 44.

3. Flusser has recognized in interviews that his thinking is deeply indebted to Hannah Arendt and Walter Benjamin.

4. Gillian Darley, Factory (London: Reaktion Books, 2003), 51.

5. Ibid., 60.

6. Anthony Trollope, North America (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1862), 249.

7. Andrew Ure, Philosophy of Manufactures or An Exposition of the Scientific, Moral, and Commercial Economy of the Factory System of Great Britain, 3rd ed. (1860; reprint, New York: Burt Franklin, 1969), 20.

8. Lindy Biggs, The Rational Factory: Architecture, Technology, and Work in America's Age of Mass Production (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 105.

9. Ibid., 117.

10. Ibid., 136.

11. Darley, Factory (note 4), 85.

12. David Gartman, From Autos to Architecture: Fordism and Architectural Aesthetics in the Twentieth Century (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2009), 15.

13. Felicity Scott, “On Architecture Under Capitalism,” Grey Room 6 (Winter 2002): 57.

14. Mary McLeod, “‘Architecture or Revolution’: Taylorism, Technocracy, and Social Change,” Art Journal 43, no. 2 (Summer 1983): 135.

15. Ibid., 137.

16. Ibid., 140.

17. Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 217.

18. Darley, Factory (note 4), 122.

19. See Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), as well as Mario Tronti, “Workerism and Politics,” Historical Materialism 18, no. 3 (2010): 186–89, which discuss a transformation of the dominant productive processes from industrial labor to communicative, cooperative, and effective labor.

20. Gartman, From Autos to Architecture (note 12), 21.

21. Murray Fraser, “Eero Saarinen and the Boundaries of Technology,” The Oxford Review of Architecture 1 (1996): 59.

22. Reinhold Martin, The Organizational Complex: Architecture, Media and Corporate Space (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 128.

23. See Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994 [1966]), which situates everyday material culture like cars and clothing as communicative extensions of man in an era of mass consumption.

24. Roland Barthes, Mythologies (London: Random House, 2009), 103.

25. Ibid., 101.

26. Alison Smithson, AS in DS: An Eye on the Road (Baden: Lars Muller, 2001), 1.

27. Martin, The Organizational Complex (note 22), 174.

28. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, “On Software, or the Persistence of Visual Knowledge,” Grey Room 18 (Winter 2005): 44.

29. Antoine Picon, “The Ghost of Architecture: The Project and Its Codification,” Perspecta 35 (2004): 19.

30. Stefano Casciani, “The Last (and Latest) Factory,” Domus 872 (July–August 2004): 22.

31. Stefano Boeri, “The Ferrari City,” Domus 872 (July–August 2004): 27.

32. “New Assembly Lines,” Ferrari S.p.A., http://www.ferrari.com/english/about_ferrari/ferrari_today/the_factory/gt_car_production/pages/new_assemply_lines.aspx.

33. Boeri, “The Ferrari City” (note 31), 27.

34. “Ferrari Factory Tour: Assembly Line,” Designboom, http://www.designboom.com/design/ferrari-factory-tour-assembly-line/.

35. Casciani, “The Last (and Latest) Factory” (note 30), 22.

36. Flusser, The Shape of Things (note 2), 44.

37. John Tagliabue, “The Prestigious Design of Ferrari's Factory,” New York Times, November 27, 2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/28/business/28ferrari.html.

38. “McLaren Production Centre by Foster + Partners,” Foster + Partners, http://www.dezeen.com/2011/11/17/mclaren-production-centre-by-foster-partners//