Mastering the Hard Stuff: The History of College Concrete-Canoe Races and the Growth of Engineering Competition Culture

This article details the history of college engineering competitions, originating with student concrete-canoe racing in the 1970s, through today’s multi-million-dollar international multiplicity of challenges. Despite initial differences between engineering educators and industry supporters over the ultimate purpose of undergraduate competitions, these events thrived because they evolved to suit many needs of students, professors, schools, corporations, professional associations, and the engineering profession itself. The twenty-first-century proliferation of university-level competitions in turn encouraged a trickling-down of technical contests to elementary-age children and high schools, fostering the institutionalization of what might be called a competition culture in engineering

Origins of a modern form: The reinforced concrete factory building in America, 1900-1930

This dissertation examines the emergence of the reinforced-concrete factory building, a vastly popular structure of great austerity and uniformity that helped to transform the American urban landscape after 1900. It explores the technological, social, and aesthetic agendas of the concrete experts and builders responsible for the building\u27s proliferation. All of these agendas supported an ongoing role for technical expertise in standardized, large-scale construction. The spread of reinforced-concrete factory buildings represents a systematic importation of scientific knowledge into a commercial production context, and this thesis recounts the occupations and cultural visions established and displaced by this modern architectural form. Chapter One contains a historiographic overview of literature on technology and architecture and a brief history of reinforced concrete prior to 1900. Chapters Two and Three follow the work of early twentieth-century materials scientists as they established university departments for concrete research, taught succeeding generations of experts in the field, and adapted their knowledge for application in the daily routines of concrete construction. Chapter Four describes the adoption of reinforced-concrete technologies by factory building firms and their integration of concrete into hierarchical structures of occupational authority and opportunity on the construction site. Chapter Five recounts the understanding that factory builders held of the modern functionalist aesthetic, associating their views with those of forward-looking architects and critics of the day. It also places this new architectural sensibility in the broader context of a culture ready and willing to celebrate in its architecture the accomplishments of technology and commerce. Chapter Six provides conclusions and a summary of the dissertation

Origins of a modern form: The reinforced concrete factory building in America, 1900-1930

This dissertation examines the emergence of the reinforced-concrete factory building, a vastly popular structure of great austerity and uniformity that helped to transform the American urban landscape after 1900. It explores the technological, social, and aesthetic agendas of the concrete experts and builders responsible for the building\u27s proliferation. All of these agendas supported an ongoing role for technical expertise in standardized, large-scale construction. The spread of reinforced-concrete factory buildings represents a systematic importation of scientific knowledge into a commercial production context, and this thesis recounts the occupations and cultural visions established and displaced by this modern architectural form. Chapter One contains a historiographic overview of literature on technology and architecture and a brief history of reinforced concrete prior to 1900. Chapters Two and Three follow the work of early twentieth-century materials scientists as they established university departments for concrete research, taught succeeding generations of experts in the field, and adapted their knowledge for application in the daily routines of concrete construction. Chapter Four describes the adoption of reinforced-concrete technologies by factory building firms and their integration of concrete into hierarchical structures of occupational authority and opportunity on the construction site. Chapter Five recounts the understanding that factory builders held of the modern functionalist aesthetic, associating their views with those of forward-looking architects and critics of the day. It also places this new architectural sensibility in the broader context of a culture ready and willing to celebrate in its architecture the accomplishments of technology and commerce. Chapter Six provides conclusions and a summary of the dissertation

Art or Data?

Held in the Cantor-Fitzgerald Gallery, Haverford College, November 2-December 2, 2007. Co-curated by Suzanne Amador Kane and Amy Slaton