Chapter 1 | Introductionon capacity and expertise: engineers, captains of industry, bankers and artists would
live in the centre of the city, while other actors were housed on the periphery of the
town. McLeod pointed out that in Taylorism it was the pursuit of efficiency rather than
equality that paved the way for social reform.^121
Taylorism and Fordism resonated widely in the architectural circuit in Germany.
Rationalist management methods were adopted in German architecture and construction
before they gained a foothold in the Nordic countries.^122 In 1925, Ernst May, the director
of Frankfurt am Main’s Municipal Building Department, assembled a multi- professional
team of architects, sociologists, engineers and manufacturers to realise May’s massive
social housing programme. May aimed to industrialise the building process by using
pre-fabricated building parts, and extensive studies were carried out on his initiative to
investigate how residential houses were used. As a result of this strategy, innovations such
as the Frankfurter Küche (the Frankfurt Kitchen)^123 were conceived, with which Aalto was
able to familiarise himself when attending the CIAM conference in October 1929. Gro-
pius’ experimental housing projects during and after his Bauhaus period were also mostly
inspired by Fordism. He wanted to develop housing design so that dwellings could be
produced with light-weight parts and at a low cost, just like in the automotive industry.^124
Gropius also made building site organisation schemes.^125 The generation of architects
who were interested in the rational use of buildings could not avoid applying Taylorist
ideas, which promised savings in both space and time. Adopting the new method led to
the development of new spatial formats. Movement within a space became a central fac-
tor in design. Architects, who designed and organised action, acquired new kinds of tools
for designing production.^126 While Le Corbusier’s dedication to scientific management
methods was reflected in a wide circle of urban planners, architects and urban planners
only adopted the new thinking for the exclusive purpose of creating efficient floor plans
and ignored the aspect of mass production.^127
Elina Standertskjöld’s book The Dream of the New World contributed to the debate on
Americanisation in the Nordic countries and, in particular, Finland of the early 1900s.
Taylor’s two works were translated into Finnish as early as the 1910s^128 and Henry
121 McLeod 1983, pp. 138–139.
122 See Pehnt 2011, pp. 99–109.
123 The model was mainly created by Grete Schütte-Lihotzky, who applied Lillian Gilbrecht’s and Christine Frederick’s
studies in her work. The kitchen was based on ergonomic movement paths and standardised furniture and equip-
ment. Cohen 1995, p. 78.
124 See e.g. Cohen 1995, pp. 78–79.
125 See e.g. Gropius 1976 [1926].
126 Cohen 1995, pp. 78–79.
127 McLeod 1983, p. 137.
128 Suomen Teollisuuslehti (The Finnish Industrial Journal) featured Taylor’s methods for the first time in 1903 and
Rakennustaito (The Finnish Construction Magazine) discussed Frank Gilbreth’s methods in 1909. Between 1913
and 1914 Rakennus taito published a series of articles written by the Finnish J.J. Sederholm entitled “Scien-
tific management – American innovation in the field of management”. A year later, Rakennustaito introduced
Taylor’s Principles of Scientific Management, which had been translated into Finnish by Jalmari Kekkonen. In
1915, another work presenting Taylor’s ideas was Sederholm’s Työn tiede (The Science of Work), which was
also reviewed in Rakennustaito. The work by Theodor Anton Bergen, a Swedish proponent of rationalisation
and a designer of factories, Industribyggnader (Industrial Buildings) gained wide publicity at the 1919 Building
Forum in Helsinki, where it was presented. Standertskjöld 2010, pp. 43–45.