North American Industry and Architecture
Authors: Zimmerman Claire , Wheat Sarah 
Published: April 2024

Industrial architecture has attracted considerable recent interest as historians explore the root causes of the climate crisis and ongoing environmental degradation. This article examines industrial architecture in North America, where the steel and auto industries accelerated the growth of industrial building, changing the entire landscape of North America (and beyond) through mechanization and automobility. North American land colonization had given rise to significant logistical challenges. By the nineteenth century, these challenges yielded a maximalist, “industrial” approach—which is to say, an approach founded on systematic, coordinated, large-scale land calibrations and appropriations. Notable milestones of this process include the Northwest Ordinance (1789), the Homestead Act of 1862, and even the FHA mortgage insurance program of the 1930s that underwrote single-family home purchases, chiefly for white Americans working white- and blue-collar jobs in American cities and suburbs. Historians have defined American industrial culture in terms of practical knowledge and concrete results. Yet like the United Kingdom, with its overseas empire built in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the United States acquired imperial power through industrial might and military conquest in the twentieth. Industrial building manifests the effects of land colonization, political economy, and geopolitics. This bibliography therefore touches on environmental history, the plantation economy, systems development, and the history of labor and urbanization. We begin section 1 with general treatments, followed by subsections that help readers define and then better understand industrial architecture in North America. The section concludes with sources on laboring populations in factories. Section 2 focuses on contexts and infrastructures of industrial environments, expanding outward from company towns to urban factories and the assembly line, to environmental and plantation histories. Section 2 concludes at the largest scale, with source material on empire as it relates to the North American industrial juggernaut of the twentieth century. Section 3 narrows in on architecture’s discourses, beginning with early treatments of North American industrial construction, continuing with compendia of industrial architecture that mostly appeared around the middle of the twentieth century, and concluding with more recent material. The sections of the bibliography include architectural source material, but also provide synthetic resources for the study of industrial building as it constituted a new kind of continental infrastructure. Factories mark the site of industrial activity; they also mark the concrete emergence of an entire system of production that underpins their existence. A complex set of economic, material, and social relations are concretized in their often non-aestheticized forms. This article thus underpins the subject of industrial architecture in North America with contextual material that helps the reader make sense of its emergence. Eschewing subsections on Ford or New England mills, we emphasize instead the networked, repetitive, and recursive aspects of industrial architecture in the project of North American settlement. Please see also the Oxford Bibliographies in Architecture, Planning, and Preservation article “Albert Kahn.”