The Modern Interior

as the division of labour which cut across the holistic process of the
craftsman, were rationally conceived and organized. Inevitably the spaces
in which work was undertaken had to be designed to facilitate them.
Little or no thought was given to the appearance of those spaces, how -
ever, nor to the physical and psychological comfort of their occupants.
Factory engineers and space planners, rather than architects, decorators,
upholsterers or amateur ‘home-makers’, determined the lay-outs of the
machinery that went into them. The ‘automatic’ machinery being used in
the illustration opposite is laid out following the consecutive procedures
of the manufacturing being undertaken.
In the early twentieth century the desire to enhance the rationality
and efficiency of factory production processes was particularly evident in
the manufacture of complex, high-technology, engineered goods, such as
automobiles. Two significant rationalizing forces emerged to influence
that area, one centred around the work of Frederick Winslow Taylor and
the other led by Henry Ford in his Highland Park factory. Ford’s engineers
pushed the concept of mass production several stages forward
through, among other initiatives, the introduction of the moving assembly
line which replaced the craft workshop in which several men had
worked simultaneously on a single static car. Taylor adopted a different
approach, however. The purpose of ‘Scientific Management’, which was
fully developed by around 1900, was to ensure that the tasks given to
workers in factories were as fully rationalized and as efficiently under -
taken as possible. 23 To implement that objective he undertook time and
motion studies of factory workers and proposed alternative procedures.
Taylor’s theory was premised upon the existence of a divided labour
process and the principle that work could be made more efficient. It was
analysed and reorganised rationally in terms of the space and time in
which it was undertaken. It involved, for example, ensuring that workers
did not waste time by taking too many steps or by unnecessary repetition.
As Sigfried Giedion subsequently explained, ‘everything superfluous had
to go.’ 24 Taylor’s approach emphasized the importance of the physical
arena in which work was undertaken but he conceived it purely in terms
of a space/time continuum. Importantly, he was also keen that his approach
should be implemented not only in factories but also in ‘homes, farms
and governmental departments’. 25
The look of the spaces inside nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury
factories emerged, therefore, as a direct result of a focus on the
rationalization of the activities that went on within them, rather than, as 121