Riveting: Steel technology, building codes, and the production of modern places

This dissertation explores the ways in which changing technical requirements, industrial conflicts, and competing notions of technological, architectural, geographic, and social progress were implicated in early US building codes and building technology. Between the years of great urban fires and the Depression (1880–1930), Chicago and New York witnessed tremendous growth. Various groups debated how the cities' buildings would reflect that growth, and who would control building means and methods. These included urban welfare advocates, architects, civil engineers, contractors, and labor unions. These debates played themselves out in many ways, one being the technical form and content of building and building law. Indeed, physical artifacts, work practices, industrial strategies, technological visions, urban social ideals, and battles over city spaces were all connected through these practices. Codes also imparted more profound perceptions regarding the belief in technological advancement and the subsequent role of architectural progress in broader social change. Specifically, I trace the simultaneous growth in advanced building techniques in structural steel products and methods, technical building laws, and the records of professional building associations, labor unions, code officials, and urban welfare advocates from the 1870s to the 1930s in Chicago, New York and in national policy-making. Further, I link these technical, urban, and labor histories with contemporary spatial theory and construction practices. I suggest how historical accounts shed light on current debates over technological and social change in the building industry and urban environments. By assuming a historical and geographic approach to building technology within the practical environment of construction management scholarship, this dissertation balances many concerns. The work is divided into three primary projects that relate contemporary professional uses for building technology to its social and spatial study: (1) how building technology matters historically (to the industry and civil engineering scholarship); (2) how building technology matters socially (to work investigating the history and sociology of technology); and, (3) how building technology matters geographically (to urban and national histories, and to theoretical studies of spatial and architectural relations).