Construction Economics and Building Design

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 477 Construction Economics and Building Design: A Historical Approach. By R. Gregory Turner. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1986. Pp. 136; figures, tables, appendixes, bibliography, index. $27.95. In Tracy Kidder’s book, House (New York, 1985), the relationship between design and cost is brought home forcefully in the often tense negotiations among the construction manager, the architect, and the client. Design decisions were often intertwined with the combined costs of materials and labor; or, as it is putin one of the simple formulas given by Houston architect R. Gregory Turner in Construction Eco­ nomics and Building Design, “Technology plus Economics yields Style.” This formula is the basic message of a book intended for architects and architecture students but that historians of technology interested in construction will also find useful. Asserting that “the allocation of moneys to particular parts of the building is the primary basis of architectural style,” Turner sets out to examine in the broadest terms the history of cost allocation in buildings and its relationship to the major stylistic periods in Western architecture. He identifies five basic components of any building—podium (foundation), frame, envelope, machinery, and infill—and examines their historical evolution, the evolution of the costs associated with them, costs in the present day, and what may be future trends. A final chapter examines the corre­ lation between component costs and architectural design. Turner’s story is not really new: as the mass of the frame decreased, so did the costs associated with it. Functions once fulfilled by the frame have been assumed by the envelope, infill, and machinery, with these relative costs rising against those of the structure’s frame and podium. There are time lags between the development of a new technology and its large-scale application in construction projects and between large-scale application and the time when architects develop a style or stylistic details that fully express the characteristics of the new technology. Clients remain economically and technologically conser­ vative, and architects—hesitant to jeopardize their reputations and “marketability”—maintain aesthestic preferences that are “profes­ sionally profitable.” Of course, the design of major projects nowadays is often by the consensus of a “design team” rather than the “vision” of a single designer, and the result is that architects’ responsibilities are limited often to the envelope and infill. Turner admonishes prac­ titioners and students not to ignore “the very real aesthetic potential” in the 65 percent of any building comprising the podium, frame, and machinery. As evidence for these assertions, Turner offers information gleaned from the “standards” of the construction historian’s bookshelf—Condit , Cowan, Fitch, Giedion, and Mumford—supplemented by some newer works: Richard Goldthwaite, Robert Mark, and the late Reyner Banham. General histories of technology were also consulted—all use- 478 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE ful but generally dated—except in construction history, where more specialized studies of particular topics (adhesives, prefabrication, HVAC) remain sadly lacking. The author makes interesting use of a series of construction cost-estimating manuals published after 1851 in order to document the relative importance of machinery in struc­ tures. The book is copiously illustrated with many full-page line draw­ ings; for instance, one of an elaborate Baroque column with an arrow directed to it from its solitary label reading “Plaster.” What was the point? Must an example of infill be depicted with more infill? Nonetheless, there is much of value in this work. For the specialist, the author has collected and organized a great deal of historical in­ formation; most of the book’s many tables and charts are clearly pre­ sented, as are the five appendixes that chart the chronological development of the five components, simultaneously tracing different aspects of each in several columns on each page. Supplemented with historical anecdotes from other sources, these chronologies are useful frameworks for those who are preparing lectures on the history of building construction. For the historian of technology, the book high­ lights the relationship between technology and (at least supply-side) economics, especially among design alternatives, costs, and final de­ sign decisions, although a history of product planning and that hybrid group of economist-engineers known as product planners

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