Industry, Architecture and Engineering: American Ingenuity 1750-1950 [Hardcover]

I spotted this book in a bookstore, but ordered it online. For anyone interested in American economic history in terms of how our nation evolved via manufacturing and early technology, this book is incredibly interesting. Its coffee table size makes it a bit cumbersome to read continuously. Nonetheless its text is well written.

The real winners here, however, are the wonderful black and white photos of railroad terminals, factory exteriors/machinery, dams, power plants, and allied structures that really capture the collaborative genius that designed and built American industry.

The combined effect of "Industry, Architecture and Engineering" is almost narcotic. I keep going back to look at the photos and marvel at them. That's a far cry from any other large book I've ever seen. It is a brilliantly conceived and produced work.

Despite its title Industry, Architecture, and Engineering: American Ingenuity: 1750-1950 is not a history book. It is not an historical examination of two centuries of U.S. industrialization. Instead, it is a "coffee table" book with a peculiar history and a mixed message. It grew from a French exhibit of black & white photographs of U.S. industrial archeological sites designed to promote preservation of industrial artifacts. The text, which comprises perhaps 10 to 20 percent of the book, does draw heavily on historical scholarship in surveying the architecture and engineering of American industrialization. But this historical account is distorted by the need to build it around the photographs in the exhibit. Moreover, few of the hundreds of photographs date from the historic period identified in the title. Most photographs depict empty, often abandon buildings, bridges, railroad stations, ports or other industrial structures and are devoid of humans or human activity. The colorful, dynamic story of industrializing is incongruous with black & white photographic study of the relics of deindustrialization. The book's negative depiction of deindustrialization undercuts the positive message about architectural & engineering achievement of the past. Conversely, the text does little to enliven the pictures. Consequently the book as a whole--text & pictures--fails to make a clear case for historic preservation.

Metaphorically, this large, heavy book of pictures is poorly "engineered" and "architecturally" unsound. Consider the pictures. Instead of being numbered, titled and compiled in a table of contents, the pictures are identified by location only in relative terms: top, bottom, overleaf, below, above, opposite and so on. Moreover the captions are grouped together while the pictures, which vary in size by a factor of five, are spread across two pages. The arrangement makes finding the caption that goes with a specific photograph difficult on pages containing more than three images. The greater significance of this captioning system is that it prevented the authors form coordinating text with photographs. The authors cannot reference photographs by title or location. Consequently the connection between text and photographs is vague. The book's layout further separates text from photographs by segregating them spatially. The reader encounters three or four pages of text followed by up to twenty pages of photographs. Sometimes textual description precedes the relevant photographs; sometime text follows pictures. These design flaws make for a disjointed reading experience.

Generally the translated text reads well in English. The book is marred by a few minor factual errors. On page 159 the famous grain elevators in Hutchinson, Kansas are mistakenly located in Texas, an understandable mistake for European authors perhaps, but less acceptable for an American translator and publisher.

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