Architecture+Management Theory: Cross-Paradigm of the Week
The delight of interdisciplinary studies is that it can generate horizontal and critical thinking. I recently devoured a piece in a compendium about the evolution of management theory. Management, architecture, film, journalism and a number of other fields are fundamentally cross-disciplinary: mastery necessitates a progressively improved synthesis of information about target markets. In the same vein, Frank’s (2005) work resonates with me in a couple of different ways. I had a veritable Eureka moment while reflecting on Taylorism and scientific management.
As an architect, most of my associations with the late 20s and 30s inevitably reference movements in art and architecture. That the great depression created a heavy ambiance is obvious in the attributes of scientific management and the Bauhaus movement.
What is truly intriguing about the inherent relativity of all this is while the field of American management became increasingly obsessed with industry and greater efficiency, the Bauhaus movement was gaining traction and celebrating a machine-inspired approach to design. Holistically, the world was marching to the same beat. Gropius and Breuer, two of the architects of the modernist movement that emerged from Bauhaus, were both Harvard Professors. Industrial psychologists from Harvard also happened to play a key role in synthesizing ideology from the Scientific Management School with the Human Relations School: it was “Harvard faculty consulting at Western Electric’s Hawthorne plant in the late 1920s through the early 1930s” (Frank, 2005, p.36).
Radical simplification and high efficiency was an identifiable zeitgeist of this particular period, and the pattern repeated itself across industries with unrelenting fervor. Despite the hunger for increased simplicity, operating an organization in such a volatile economic climate must have been entirely complex. Daft’s (2010) description of the simple-complex dimension creates a rich framework for analysis when considering the culture of such an organization. ”The more external factors that regularly inflence the organization and the greater number of other companies in an organization’s domain, the greater the complexity” (p.145).
For architects and owners facing tangible financial pressures, the levels of environmental complexity and instability led to high uncertainty and extreme transformation during this particular period. As evidenced in the transition from rich ornament to functional decoration (Bayer, 1992), art nouveau and the more organic styles conveniently evolved into more streamlined aesthetics such as the Bauhaus and Art Deco. An entire period of design adapted to expose a portrait of the economy.
This strikes me as a perfect example of how high uncertainty leads to not only organizational transformations, but innovation across multiple industries–ultimately, echoing through time. Scientific management enjoyed a resonance in management theory that–not unlike parallel developments in the field of architecture–is a sign of the times.
I recently mentioned to a friend that I would have loved if we delved into rich, cross-paradigms of this nature while in architecture school. Do architecture scholars no longer have the time or the confidence in students to venture beyond the status quo? Is this too ambitious for the go-go world of undergraduate studies?
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Bayer, P. (1992). Art Deco Architecture: design, decoration and detail from the twenties and thirties. Thames & Hudson: London.
Daft, R (2010). Organization Theory and Design. Mason, OH: South-Western Cengage.
Frank, M. S. (2005). The history of American management thought: A perspective and analysis. In C. J. Mann & K. Gotz (Eds.), The development of management theory and practice in the United States, (pp. 33-63). Boston, MA: Pearson Custom Publishing.
