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Episodes in Industrial Urbanism
Nina Rappaport
[Multimedia content blocked]
Listen to a 58 minute recording, or download the file
Friday, October 30, 2009
Slought Foundation
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Slought Foundation is pleased to invite you to join us for "Episodes in Industrial Urbanism," a lunchtime conversation with architectural critic Nina Rappaport on October 30, 2009 from 12:30-2:00pm. Rappaport will discuss architecture of production spaces in the urban environment of a post-industrial world and the return to the vertical urban factory. The event, introduced by Aaron Levy and moderated by Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss, is free to the public and will take place in the Slought Foundation galleries.
Throughout architectural history, the factory has provided a place of design innovation for engineers and architects, while it was often sequestered into separate zones. This once-new building type provided a freedom to explore the spatial, structural, and organizational ramifications of machines and production from vertical systems dependent on gravity flow and centralized power sources to hermetically sealed horizontal sheds in suburban fields. In the post-war years industrial landscapes evolved from vertical dense urban agglomerations to horizontal suburban greenfields where land was cheap and abundant. As in other building typologies, the factory corresponds to cultural and spatial practices in urbanism and architectural design, influenced by social and economic organizational systems, resulting in a form that -follows -the functional logic of both the internal operations and the manufacturing process. Nina Rappaport will discuss this changing manufacturing practice as it influences the design of production spaces showing how economic systems—from Fordist economies of scale to Toyota’s flexible just-in-time (JIT) inventory strategy—influenced the shape of production.
Now that the effects of globalized infrastructure, have been assessed, manufacturing could shift again to the local within the global marketplace, as more ecologically-minded companies build factories closer to their consumers. New industries have the potential to develop innovative architecture that vastly improves upon prevailing patterns of urban industrial zoning and clustered production areas through a return to the vertical urban factory as a space of innovation and renewed urbanization. As the sociologist Henri Lefebvre has observed, functional efficiency, and the goal towards rational systems influences architecture and the shape of cities as spatial products, which can easily be applied to the industry-scape.
Nina Rappaport is an architectural critic, curator, and educator. She is publications director at Yale School of Architecture and editor of the biannual publication Constructs, the exhibition catalogs, as well as the school’s book series. She is currently working on the exhibition, the Vertical Urban Factory, which will open in New York in spring 2010 and travel. She is author of the book Support and Resist: Structural Engineers and Design Innovation (The Monacelli Press, 2007), for which she received New York State Council on the Arts and Graham Foundation in the Fine Arts. She has contributed essays to Perspecta, Praxis, 306090, Architecture, Architectural Record, Praxis, Future Anterior, and Tec21 among other architectural publications. She was a Design Trust for Public Space Fellow and co-author of Long Island City: Connecting the Arts (Episode Books, 2006). She teachers seminars on the post-industrial factory and on innovative engineers at Barnard College, City College, and Yale School of Architecture, Parsons School of Design and is currently teaching the seminar, Alternative Urbanisms in the Syracuse in NYC program.
This program was made possible in part through the generous sponsorship of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and the Society of Friends of the Slought Foundation. Presented in conjuction with the seminar in architectural theory at Tyler School of Art, Department of Architecture, Temple University.
Media files on the Slought.org website are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.
MLA Style:
Nina Rappaport. "Episodes in Industrial Urbanism." Slought Foundation Online Content. [30 October 2009;
Accessed 8 February 2012]. <http://slought.org/content/11436/>.
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