Reinhold 2003
From UANotebook
citation
Reinhold, Martin, The Organization Complex: Architecture, Media and Corporate Space (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2003) 157-181.
notes
A great chapter dealing with IBM's transformation in the 1950s-1960s from a somewhat stuffy, very heirarchical (with no org charts) old manufacture of business machines --which founder Thomas Watson Sr. refused to allow to be called computers for fear that it would insinuate replacement of people with computers-- to a less stuff corporate culture and identity based on modularity and flexibility... with less heirarchy but with significant flattening out that it almost required org charts, which were instituted.
"Business management consultants... are coming to believe that a hierarchical method of command and control rarely parallels reality." (Kieran & Timberlake 2004. pp. 55)
The chapter opens with descriptions of the Eero Saarinen-designed training plant in Rochester, MN. It describes how the modularity of the building's design mirrored the firm's new business philosophy. The site plan accounted for future expansion by allowing the modules to be replicated and built as needed. From elevation and, especially, plan views, the site looked very much like an IBM punch card.
page 164:
for context, read the preceeding description of Saarinen's incredibly thin curtain wall set against the Minnesota winter and rolling landscape... and how it's blue color foreshadowed "Big Blue".
"To be sure, by 1958 IBM had not yet acquired the nickname uncannily encoded in Saarinen's wall, although the process of remaking the company's image had begun. Indeed, rather that merely dematerializing the industrial object into the ethereal, dissimulating haze of corporate spectacle, the thinness of Saarinen's wall and the primacy of its patterns subsituted for the reassuring solidity of structure a modulation, in which organizational logics are programmed into the very substance of the building itself. In order to recognize this subsitution, we must seek out evidence of a complex series of exchanges amoung different technological processes, including the cladding of a building, the organization and public image of a corporation, and the design of that corporation's products."
page 167:
on the redesign of the IBM logo
"...one of Noyes's earliest moves was to bring in Paul Rand to coordinate IBM's typographic output. Rand's first contribution was an IBM logo in a bolder typeface that permitted more variation in spacing and coloring, thus making it more adaptable to use in a wider range of situations. In this manner, the organicist mandate of 'flexibility' at work in modular planning attended the redesign of IBM even at the scale of its letterhead. This, coupled with Rand's own definition of the logo's function --'a logo does not sell (directly), it identifies'-- further confirmed the functionality of the corporate image as a technological effect designed to produce in turn a coherent identity."
page 175-6:
"The term architecture was insted applied as early as 1959 in an IBM report to the logical organization of computers independent of their actual physical configuration and hardware constraints, and it entered common parlance no long thereafter. Several years later, in a text precipitously entitled 'Architectural Philosophy," describing the logical organization of the IBM 7939 computer, Frederick P. Brooks Jr. asserted: 'Computer architecture, like other architecture, is the art of determining the needs of the user of a structure and then designing to meet those needs as effectively as possible with-in technological and economic constraints.' Thus, a nascent computer science internalized the notion of an architecture of abstract components performing specific operations, analogized to the organs of the human nervous system and addressing themselves to the needs of the humans making contact with the machine."
...
"Brooks further distinguished between computer architecture and engineering, delcaring that 'the emphasis in architecture is upon the needs of th user, whereas in engineering the emphasis is upon the needs of the fabricator'."
