Industrial buildings and infrastructure aren’t sexy. Too many workhorses of the built environment—transportation hubs and factories, power plants and warehouses—are built to get the job done, not to win beauty contests. But as we all know, much of the industrial architecture that emerged in the late 19th and early 20th centuries expressed the most powerful and innovative ideas of modernism—exposing structural systems; pushing the limits of technology in steel, concrete, and glass; bringing in daylight—as their immense, dramatic forms muscled their way into rapidly changing cities and beyond.
The early editors of Architectural Record, going back nearly 125 years to the magazine’s founding, frequently covered this building type. At the turn of the 20th century, RECORD explored the new, improved methods of reinforced-concrete construction in factory buildings; in 1914, the critic Montgomery Schuyler extolled what may be the first corporate park in the U.S., General Electric’s sprawling headquarters in Cleveland, with its factory-like laboratory building and its own power plant with towering chimney. Schuyler called the Georgian-style architecture “a shining success” that had “the best brickwork this side of the water.” Into the 1920s, RECORD regularly visited new industrial structures by such giants as Albert Kahn, with his work for Ford, Goodrich, and other manufacturers. The editors also looked to the other side of the water for influential industrial architecture in Europe, including the Van Nelle Factory by Brinkman and Van der Vlugt in Rotterdam and the Boots factory in England, by Sir E. Owen Williams.
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