The architecture of steel: Site planning and building type in the nineteenth-century American Bessemer steel industry

This dissertation is a study of the built environment of American steel works from experimental beginnings at Wyandotte, Michigan, in 1864 to maturity represented by the Gary, Indiana, works of 1910. The industry produced the Bessemer steel rails for the railroads as the nation experienced tremendous expansion after the Civil War. Mass production of steel required systematic methods of coordinating and controlling chemical and physical processes, machinery, and workers. It also required innovative approaches to architecture. This interpretation of the interaction of the diverse social forces that shaped steel mills employs a methodological approach that combines art historical analysis with the history of labor, business, and technology. It makes use of trade journals, archival collections, photographs, and engineering drawings to reconstruct the evolution of site plans and the Bessemer buildings of about a dozen of the most important works. Changing technical, geographical, labor, corporate organization, and economic conditions were the most important factors shaping the arrangement of buildings within steel works and the internal arrangements within the buildings themselves. By 1900, engineers, most notably Alexander Lyman Holley, John Fritz, William R. Jones, Frederick W. Wood, and Henry Wehrum, had adapted European steelmaking technology so thoroughly to American conditions that the United States almost outproduced Great Britain and Germany combined. Site planning was particularly influenced by preexisting construction, site topography, and the state of production and material handling technology. The arrangement of spaces and machinery inside the Bessemer building, where steel was actually made, was further shaped by market fluctuations, a constant drive for production volume, competitive pressures, engineer training, and patent rights. The steel industry's development of rationally laid-out single-story factories that both facilitated and became part of the production systems predated similar, if better known, developments in the automobile industry at Ford's Highland Park and River Rouge plants.