Invited Talk at Ross School of Business, University of Michigan

Description

Presented: Design Changes: Aesthetic Legitimacy and the Rise of Concrete
ABSTRACT: Legitimacy focuses on appropriateness but less often on aesthetics that inform appropriateness and how changes in aesthetics transform what is appropriate. I examine the new market for reinforced concrete from 1891 to 1939, where perceptions of an ugly material were transformed and institutionalized into the de facto standard for building and beauty in the 20th century. With the rise of concrete, the institutional aesthetic code that shaped aesthetic judgements about buildings, which had been tightly woven around stone, was systematically replaced by a few key aesthetic criteria that were attached to concrete. The findings reveal aesthetic legitimacy involved two distinct legitimacy processes and outcomes: imitation to substitution versus imitation to innovation. In imitation to substitution, social actors—architects and manufacturers primarily—crafted concrete to imitate stone, both in linguistic framing as “artificial stone” and materially (color, texture, shape). They positioned concrete as a cheaper substitute for stone. The combination of contemporary consecration by peers and the depression successfully shifted concrete construction to mass production and toward more banal buildings (warehouses, industrial buildings and low-cost housing) and more similar to stone construction. In contrast, with imitation to innovation, social actors, primarily engineers and architects, rejected concrete’s imitation of stone and sought innovation, such as cantilevers and curved shapes, based on its material affordances, which had higher construction costs and more unique buildings were retrospectively consecrated by peers as standards of beauty.

Period	21 Jan 2022
Held at	University of Michigan, Ross School of Business, United States
Degree of Recognition	International