Unless. The Seagram Building Construction Ecology

The Seagram Building Construction Ecology

UNLESS

This book presents a terrestrial description of the Seagram Building.

It doing so, it aims to describe how humans and nature interact with the thin crust of the planet through architecture. Architecture reorganizes nature and society in particular ways that today demand overt attention and new methods of description. In particular, the immense material, energy and labor involved in building require a fresh interpretation that better situates the ecological and social potential of design.

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KIEL MOE

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Unless architects begin to describe buildings as terrestrial events and artifacts, architects will—to our collective and professional peril—continue to operate outside the key environmental dynamics and key political processes of this century.

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The book mixes construction ecology, material geography, and world-systems analysis through architecture to help articulate all the terrestrial activities that engender building generally, and more specifically through the example of a most modern of modern architectures: the Seagram Building.

UNLESS

The Seagram Building Construction Ecology

KIEL MOE

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KIEL MOE

A trophy

The Seagram Building New York City

Atrophy

A house crushed by tailings in the company town adjacent to the Chuquicamata Copper mine, where copper for the Seagram Building’s brass facade was extracted.

Calma, Chile

Trophic

The Seagram Building is the hardened face of a planetary metabolic flux of material and energy exchange.

Those exchanges reflect unequal ecological exchanges in the world-systems of the Seagram Building.

Atrophic

Those exchanges also reflect unequal economic exchanges and result in the underdevelopment far-flung places.

The former site of Franklin Glass, manufacturer of plate glass for the Seagram Building.

“Each material has its specific characteristics in which we must understand it if we want to use it. In other words, no design is possible until the materials with which you design are completely understood�

Mies van der Rohe

Seagram Building brass extrusions being hand-dyed to look like bronze.

The fetishization of architectural materials occludes the complete understanding of materials.

“Technology is far more than a method, it is a world in itself�

Mies van der Rohe

So what, exactly, is that world itself then?

What are the world-systems of a technology, any material, and energy flux?

SS RA B &

ER MA PP RD, O E C FO

R D VE BE E W R

NE

CICERO, IL

T L BE ETH

B

L EE ST A

EM , P EH HEM L H E

CHASE COPPER & BRASS MONTPELIER, OH

IN KL N A FR

CHICAGO EXTRUDED METALS

REVERE COPPER & BRASS NEW BEDFORD, MA

Y AN, PA P M

R CO TLE S U AS B GL

“The principle behind all technology is to demonstrate that a technical element remains abstract, entirely undetermined, as long as one does not relate it to an assemblage it presupposes�

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari

Building assemblies and enclosures enclose far more than a building’s interior.

Every building process is also a form of social, economic and ecological enclosure of far-flung places.

“It is no linguistic accident that ‘building,’ ‘construction,’ ‘work,’ designate both a process and its finished product. Without the meaning of the verb that of the noun remains blank” John Dewey

Hand-straightening brass extrusions at Chicago Extruded Metals.

Without the social and ecological meaning of the Seagram building processes, its nouns—extruded bronze facade, amber-colored glass, granite plaza—remain relatively blank.

“The incontrovertibly asymmetric and thus troubling global flows of embodied land, labor, energy, and material remain conveniently outside mainstream economists’ field of vision” Alf Hornborg

The incontrovertibly asymmetric and thus troubling global flows of embodied land, labor, energy and material also remain conveniently and problematically outside mainstream architects’ field of vision.

“Rather than negating its materialist base, the architecture of the Seagram Building was widely understood as elevating it. But, as a monument to commerce and technology, it could also be accused of obscuring the problems of its economic base and its role in a system of exploitation.�

Detlef Mertins

Every process of building and urbanization includes systems of ecological and social appropriation and exploitation.

These processes are designed and specified by architects, such as the annual dyeing of the Seagram Building brass.

“God is in the Details.�

Mies van der Rohe

Through their fetishization, modern details occlude more than they reveal about the composition of a building.

Nonmodern details design and specify the recursive formation of building and world-building. Gaia is in the details.

PROLOGUE

26

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INTRODUCTION

50

The Terrestrial Life of Large Urban Spaces

FRAMEWORK

68

The Architecture of Uneven Exchange

FRAMEWORK

94

Construction Ecology

TERRESTRIALS

150

Technomass and Technofossils

PRODUCTION

174

Dies, Dyes and Dies

PLACE

226

Transparency: Literal and Terrestrial

PEOPLE

252

Getting Stone

CONCLUSION

274

Gaia is in the Details

290

Acknowledgments

292

List of Illustrations

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TRANSPARENCY: LITERAL AND TERRESTRIAL

TRANSPARENCY: LITERAL AND TERRESTRIAL

As noted in the “Construction Ecology” chapter, the 400,000 pounds of pink-grey

glass rising above the ground floor of the Seagram Building is statistically insignificant in terms of both its mass and emergy content. The implications of the Seagram glass technomass are grasped less in the material itself and more in the relations of nature and society that produced the glass and the consequences of this production for the

company, town, and region supporting it. The raw emergetic quantification of the glass is not as suggestive of the kind of unequal exchanges inherent to the architectural

bronze/brass that we saw in the last chapter. Methodical system boundary questions

and mapping of the Seagram Building, however, do help to identify and frame relevant forms of historical and social analysis for the terrestrial account I am pursuing,

especially when critical questions about the temporal systems boundaries of the

building are made intrinsic to its terrestrial description. In this case, the history of a

glass factory town is a salient point of focus in the Seagram Building’s environmental history and construction ecology.

Once again, all architecture is geological. The key substrate of most transparent glass

material is silica (or silica dioxide, SiO2), a primary component of the granular product of erosion we call sand. Also known as quartz, silica is the second most abundant mineral in Earth’s Critical Zone after oxygen. Quartz is composed of silicon and

oxygen atoms in a tetrahedral matrix (SiO4), though the oxygen atoms are shared between two tetrahedra resulting in the SiO2 composition of quartz.

As part of a terrestrial account of building, it is productive to imagine the very longue durée travel of certain minerals through geo-chemical conveyance, mixture, and

formation that would result in geographically specific deposits of the base materials for glass. Consider the immense, almost unimaginable, amount of telluric material

and energy—as manifest in friction, deep-earth heating, velocity, folding, earthquake,

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00.3% mass

GLASS

00.1% emergy

Fig. 7.01: Seagram Building Glass Mass and Emergy

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TRANSPARENCY: LITERAL AND TERRESTRIAL

etc.—of the earth over millions of years of geologic tumult that lands a particular

formation of terrestrial geomorphology as the bedrock base of what we now identify as western Pennsylvania. Then imagine a long history of terrestrial processes that

slowly but actively erode the ancient geologic formation of this region. A dendritic

pattern of rivers form and carry the effects of erosion from mountain and hilltops into valleys below. Hundreds of millions of years of sediment accumulate, resulting in a new surficial geology, leaving pockets of readily accessed deposits of silica sands.

In the course of this geological history of tectonic dynamics, human-involved history is but a blink. Human involvement through extractive mining—which otherwise

might seem to be the largest scale of human incursions into the Critical Zone—are a

flash in geologic time. Mining was a primary exosmotic innovation that helped make

humans human, but even the biggest holes on the planet—such as the Chuquicamata

copper mine—are tiny pecks relative the immense cycling of terrestrial material in the very long history of the planet.

The geographic propensity of mineral deposits such as quartz is itself not sufficient for the emergence of a burgeoning glass industry, especially in modernity. Another necessary condition is the simultaneous regional availability of ample natural gas

or other fuel for the intense combustion associated with heating the components

of glass to a molten state. As part of this bedrock and surficial geology of western Pennsylvania, pockets of petroleum and gas also formed in this region. Both are geological preconditions for glass industry.

The geophysical conditions of the right minerals and abundant natural gas in

western Pennsylvania prompted humans to reorganize nature and society there in

a specific way. Systems of fuel and sand extraction were coupled with infrastructure for the movement of these resources. Elements once originally dispersed in the

environment—such as solar energy captured in ancient biomass that is compressed into natural gas or erosion sediment and sedimentary stone—are extracted and

converge in sites of transformation. This convergence of matter and energy requires labor and thus a related movement of people, many from far-off places in Europe,

to rally the necessary expertise otherwise not available in the area. The nexus of sand

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and natural gas in this region in turn triggered the fateful convergence of otherwise

dispersed materials and people, resulting in a specific form of extraction, accumulation, concentration, production, and distribution.

The Standard Plate Glass Company One way that the terrestrials of western Pennsylvania, as well as Europe, were

reorganized was in the form of a glass manufacturer in Butler, Pennsylvania. The

Standard Plate Glass Company was founded in 1887 on a riverside site southeast of

downtown Butler. The selected site was adjacent to a river and railway, just outside of

a growing town. The increased extraction and distribution of natural gas in the area, in particular, made plate glass production profitable and competitive at a national scale

well into the twentieth century.1 It was the third such facility in the Pittsburgh region, and only the sixth such facility in the United States at the time of its establishment.2 The burgeoning glass production industry in the United States required a lot of

immigrant knowledge and labor. In 1887, the local newspaper, the Butler Citizen, noted the remarkable influx of people: “So many new faces are among us that the old citizens seem as if they are strangers. Business is also correspondingly increasing. A large

number of buildings have been erected and many others are being built. [‌] This may be attributed to the erection of the large Glass Works. These works will be as large as any in this country of the kind and will employ, it is said, near a thousand persons.�3 The Standard Plate Glass Company was indeed rapidly reorganizing nature and

society around Butler and beyond in many simultaneous ways. Specialty refractory

bricks from England, as well as workers from England, France, Belgium, and Germany converged on Butler in this period. Even in the late nineteenth century the process of

urbanization was decidedly planetary. In 1900, there were more foreign workers in the Standard Plate Glass Company factory than workers born in America.4 Most were

from a relatively small territory where Belgium, western Germany, and northeastern

France meet. Converging their specialized knowledge and labor in Butler, they would

manufacture, alongside many tons of architectural plate glass, a 60-inch telescope lens.5

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Birdseye view of Butler, Pennsylvania in 1896, Standard Plate Glass Factory in bottom right

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Birdseye view of Butler, Pennsylvania in 1896, Standard Plate Glass Factory detail

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In the subsequent decades, the Standard Plate Glass Company would maintain

relatively stable operations. It would build housing for its workers, located just south of the factory. The diverse labor force would increasingly interact, especially through

the cohesion afforded by their largely shared Catholic faith. Not only the glass works, but Butler too, would continue to grow, as fire insurance maps document well. In the

aftermath of the Great Depression, however, the Standard Plate Glass Company was on the verge of failure. In 1932, the French glassmaker Saint Gobain purchased the

factory and, along with the Belgian glass company Saint-Roch, organized the Franklin Glass Company to continue production at the Butler facility.6

The Franklin Glass Company The base materials to produce the glass at the Standard Plate Glass Company and

Franklin Glass Company were relatively local. Base minerals and chemicals of window glass like those produced at this facility included silica (71%), sodium oxide (13%),

lime (12%), magnesia (2%), and alumina. Franklin Glass Company maintained its own sandstone quarry in Cabot, PA, several miles south of Butler. Along the Little Buffalo Creek, Franklin Glass extracted sand and washed it in ponds made with sandstone

blocks that dammed the creek. What is now the Butler-Freeport Community Trail

was initially a horse trail, and later a railroad bed, for the movement of materials from

the silica/sand quarries to the factory in Butler. Other companies, too, such as the Ford Motor Company operated sand pits and ponds along the creek.

Franklin Glass would remain largely unchanged, with a similar factory and

metabolism in the decades between its establishment during the Great Depression

and when the prospect of producing glass for the Seagram Building emerged a couple decades later. For the Seagram project, the company reportedly “was goaded into

producing a subtly tinted glass� on account of the unusual specification and associated production process.7 Like the brass envelope, the custom glass required a unique,

non-standard process. Like the brass, this resulted in an unequal exchange for the glass company. An advertisement by Franklin Glass, however, conveyed a more ebullient

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spirit about its product in the Seagram Building: “Scores of pleased executives, and thousands of their fortunate employees are going to enjoy new beauty and comfort and better than ever, behind these lovely new, glare-reducing windows.”8

The Seagram Building contains 3,676 panes of glass as part of its enclosing surfaces,

all produced at Franklin Glass. For the upper portion of the tower, each pane weighs

109 pounds, for a total of about 400,684 pounds. More specifically, the glass panels are single-pane plates of “specially devised pinkish-gray heat and glare resistant glass.”9 The glass is also often described as amber-tinted, and generally accompanied by an allusion to the amber-colored beverages that engendered the Seagram Company’s capital that paid for the building. The hue, and thus the chemical composition, of

the glass used in the Seagram was the product of “long consultations between the architects and the Franklin color glass experts.”10

To attain its pinkish-amber tint, the mixture for the Seagram Glass likely included

manganese and sulfur.11 This specific type of glass could not be produced in the nowstandard Pilkington float method—which was not developed until the 1960s—in

which molten glass is floated upon a stream of molten tin. The Pilkington process

gives contemporary glass its particular flatness and uniform thickness. Instead, plate glass for large buildings prior to the Pilkington method would use a “batch casting” technique developed by the Ford Motor Company in the 1920s. Given the size and custom specification of the Seagram glass, its plates required a third process which involved a somewhat archaic “pot” method for their production.

Unlike a modern floating process, in the “pot” method used in batch casting a cauldron with the necessary silica, soda, arsenic, and lime was heated and then spread over

a casting table.12 This process affords the production of smaller batches of glass as

opposed to floating the glass in a tank.13 Ultimately, some 3,650,000 square feet of

the glass was produced at Franklin Glass using this method for the Seagram Building.

The almost medieval process of casting the Seagram Building glass plates was well

documented by photographer Frank Scherschel when he visited the Franklin facility on November 1, 1956 during one of the Seagram glass pot pours.

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TRANSPARENCY: LITERAL AND TERRESTRIAL

1896 Sanborne Fie Insurance Map, Standard Plate Glass company factory plan

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Standard Plate Glass from north, 1900

Grinding hall illustration of apparatus used to grind plate glass in the “pot� method

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TRANSPARENCY: LITERAL AND TERRESTRIAL

Against the conception of the Seagram Building as “a monument to

standardization,”14 the “pot” method of plate glass production deserves further

articulation. It begins with the production of the pot itself which entailed a three-year process to prepare and season the clay for the pots. First, mined clay was exposed to weather to reduce impurities in the clay mix. Then the clay was ground and screed

while mixed with additives through kneading. This refined clay mix was then stored

for six months to “ripen.” At this point, it was shaped into the final pot form, roughly a four-foot cube weighing 3,000 pounds. Once fired hard, the pot would be stored

up to a year to fully harden before entering the glass production process. Ready for production, the pot was first tested empty. A successful pot could then be used for

about twenty days of production before being discarded. In short, an immense amount of idiosyncratic, nonstandard human, and geological work was the basis of the pot used in the cast glass production method.

The glass production itself begins with the above-mentioned mining of silica sand.

The silica would be mixed with soda ash, lime, sulfate of soda, and salt in a pot. The

composition of this mixture was deemed a trade secret and closely guarded. The pot

was lifted into a furnace and fired until the mixture was molten. Once slag and other impurities were removed from the top of the pot, the pot was then positioned over casting tables and poured onto the casting surface, which was about twelve feet by

twenty. A water-cooled, five-ton iron roller flattened the molten material. The cast

sheet of glass was then placed into a furnace to slowly cool and thus anneal, a process which took one to two days.

Once annealed, the cast glass was still rough. Thus the next step was to mount the cast

glass onto large circular steel polishing tables. A layer of plaster-of-Paris held the glass sheet in place. Placed under large steam-powered grinders, the lower polishing table would spin in one direction while the upper grinding wheels spun in the opposite

direction. Using successively finer sands and emery, the grinding wheels would yield a satin-like finish after eight hours of work. At this stage, the glass stock was ready for polishing, a process which consisted of felt pad disks and an iron oxide paste. Once polished, the sheet stock would be flipped and the entire process of grinding and

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Kilns, Franklin Glass Company, 1956, Frank Scherschel, Photographer

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TRANSPARENCY: LITERAL AND TERRESTRIAL

Pouring and rolling cast glass, Franklin Glass Company, 1956, Frank Scherschel, Photographer

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Pouring and cutting plate glass, Franklin Glass Company, 1956, Frank Scherschel, Photographer

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TRANSPARENCY: LITERAL AND TERRESTRIAL

Glass sheet heading to annealing oven, Franklin Glass Company, 1956, Frank Scherschel, Photographer

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polishing would be repeated. Once both sides were polished, the sheet was lifted from the round grinding tables and stacked in wash racks. The washing process involved a bath of muriatic acid to remove any remaining plaster-of-Paris. The

glass was finally washed by hand with soap and water before heading to be cut to

dimension and on to a boxing shop and packed with straw for rail shipment to its

destination. In this process about half the thickness of the original glass sheet was

removed and some twenty percent of the glass would be lost to breakage.15 Half of the glass material for the Seagram Building was grinded away, the entropy of an ancient, non-standardized method of glass production.

In short, the production method for the Seagram Glass was idiosyncratic and laborintensive. It was thus expensive. With is finicky clay cauldrons and nineteenth-

century grinding and polishing, it is also intensely geological and non-modern in mechanical terms. That Franklin Glass only begrudgingly accepted the job is an indication of its challenges. Like the brass for the envelope, the intensity of the

process in terms of labor and expertise is ultimately part of the unequal exchange

and underdevelopment of the company and the town, as the changes in Butler in the decade after the Seagram glass job evidence.

Underdevelopment and Atrophy in Butler Not long after the Franklin Glass Company produced the custom glass for the Seagram Building, now-displeased Franklin executives and hundreds of their

unfortunate employees ceased operations at their Butler facility at some point in the early-to-mid-1960s. The challenges and scale of the Seagram Building production may have impacted the operations of Franklin Glass at a critical point in the

history of glass production. The final demise of the company is most likely also

associated with the development of the more efficient Pilkington float glass process which required far less labor and yielded more consistent results in less time. This technique all but made the sixty-year-old plate glass manufacturer and its fixed infrastructure obsolete.

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Rough, annealed sheet ready for polishing, Franklin Glass Company, 1956, Frank Scherschel, Photographer

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While the Seagram job may not have directly put Franklin Glass out of business, it is important to acknowledge how the specificity of the Seagram glass required

intense labor and expertise and engendered a specific type of underdevelopment.

In an ecosystem view, resources directed to development in one part of the system

mean that the resources are not directed toward development in other parts of the

system. Retrospectively, while the Franklin Glass Company directed their intellectual and labor resources into the Seagram glass, it is arguable that they would have done better directing those resources toward updating the infrastructure of their facility.

This is a small-scale example of underdevelopment processes that Stephen Bunker describes in his analysis of the Amazon. That is, one effect of unequal exchanges is

that not only is material and energy extracted from the periphery and concentrated in the core—in this Seagram glass—but moreover the real wealth of the material,

energy, and information (in this case the Euro-American expertise of glass chemistry and idiosyncratic production technique) is what is actually concentrated in the core.

This concentration occurs at the price, literally, of the periphery since the unevenness is transacted through money, which does not fully value the energy and knowledge extracted from this region. Further, given how the periphery organizes nature and

society—and dissipates its real wealth through market mechanisms and exchanges—

there is an upper limit to its capacity for higher social organizations and its capacity to

regenerate its environments of extraction and the degradations that occur. As such, the periphery is seemingly locked into a pattern of underdevelopment. With the Seagram

Building, Franklin Glass doubled-down on extant, imminently obsolete infrastructure to take on the expensive, resource-intensive Seagram work.

Not long after the Franklin Glass factory closed, the facility burned to the ground.

The firm declared bankruptcy, but environmental and social costs persisted. The

charred remains of the factory would thereafter sit idle as a brownfield site until the early 1980s, when Ronald E. Forcht, one-time mayor of Butler, PA and chair of its

Redevelopment Authority, led the conversion of the brownfield parcel to a recreational park and site of low-income housing.16 This is an active attempt to introduce,

in thermodynamic terms, order back into the entropic remains of the Franklin

Glass company site toward the end of increasing social organization of Butler by

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Franklin Glass Company factory plan overlaid on Butler, PA aerial image

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Father Marinaro Park, former site of Franklin Glass Company factory

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TRANSPARENCY: LITERAL AND TERRESTRIAL

reintegrating that blight back into the life of the town. The park was named in honor of Father Marinaro, a priest at of Saint Michael’s Roman Catholic Church which

served many of the factory workers.17 The turf terraces that cascade through the park are the remnants of the factory footprints.

Aspects of glass production, and its associated underdevelopment process, are not as easy to sweep under a turf rug, however. The arsenic used for the glass production,

including that of the Seagram Building, more recently became a source of concern.

A Commonwealth of Pennsylvania press release in 2009 signaled that “Investigations of high levels of arsenic, used for removing bubbles and color, are underway” at the

former Franklin Glass Company site.18 This investigation included aerial photographs which “indicate that there were two lagoons and another waste area in addition to the Franklin Glass facility that covered about 30 acres along Coal Run. It appears that housing was built on some of the former industrial property.”19 In other

words, part of the unequal exchange between periphery and core is that social and

ecological organizations are degraded in the processes of extraction, production, and concentration. In the case of arsenic, the “waste” chemical has long-term impacts on

both environmental and social organization. If left unaddressed, as it was for decades, exposure to people—especially children—adversely affects their health and (under) development as humans. It introduces social costs that impose certain limits on an

already resource limited context. If addressed and “cleaned up,” there are physical costs, including directing few available fiscal resources toward remediation rather than the development of other social or environmental infrastructures in Butler.

Some might reductively argue that the periphery ought to better value its energy,

material, and informational inputs into the system. This is difficult, if not impossible, or more immediately self-destructive, in a market context which only encourages peripheral firms to undervalue aspects of its real wealth through a low bid in the

hope of obtaining work so as to maintain its labor force and keep its infrastructure in

operation. In other words, there are inherent upper bounds of valuation imposed at the periphery given the way markets value both systems of engenderment and systems of production. A revaluation of the real wealth and costs of, in this case a sheet of glass,

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would require a much larger method of valuation in the system as a whole. Given the

power geometries of unequal exchange and underdevelopment, this larger revaluation is much more likely to emerge from the core of world-systems than a periphery.

In an architectural context, this revaluation can occur through architects’ specifications of certain world-systems dynamics over others. Architects are directly implicated in

processes of unequal exchange and underdevelopment. Their specifications will either reinforce and amplify or degrade the world-systems. When such effects are deemed

external to the discipline, degradation is the likely result. When such effects, or better such potentials, are made intrinsic to the discipline—as they were form Vitruvius

onwards until the abstractions of modern architecture—then, and only then, might more intentional valuations and more even exchanges be possible.

Terraced turf fields never appear in descriptions of the Seagram Building. Yet,

these grass terraces in Father Marinaro Park are part of the terrestrial activities and

systems of production that created materials concentrated in the Seagram Building.

The accumulation of the glass plates at 375 Park Avenue, and their ongoing care

and maintenance, are the lasting product of an economic and ecological exchange.

By contrast, the grass terraces—along with arsenic-contaminated soil, and likely

people—in Father Marinaro Park are now the longest lasting local outcome of a large glass works that appeared and disappeared in less than a hundred years in

Butler, Pennsylvania. The glass fixed into the Seagram Building reflects not just an economic and ecological exchange, but unequal exchanges and is an example of underdevelopment in an architectural context.

Again, I am not claiming a direct causal link between the Seagram Building and the underdevelopment of Butler, Pennsylvania. However, we must recognize that the

Seagram Building glass is directly implicated in larger process of unequal exchange and underdevelopment. Its specification led to specific production processes that

are implicated, and perhaps even exaggerated, the effects of unequal exchanges and underdevelopment through the specification of imminently obsolete infrastructure and processes. What I am more directly and causally implicating is architecture’s

indifference to processes of unequal exchange and underdevelopment through its

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externalization and the enabling fictions of autonomy. Quite simply, environmental

and social degradations will continue unless architects attune themselves to the effects of their designs and specifications of world-systems construction ecology.

As terrestrial technomass, the glass in the Seagram Building is an example of the

way the Franklin Glass Company reorganized nature and society in specific ways. Its nexus of sand and natural gas became the nexus for a diverse group of people who converged and shaped the town of Butler. When a different way of reorganizing

nature and society—in this case the Pilkington float glass process—the Franklin

Glass factory and its workers became obsolete almost overnight. As a consequence,

the town, too, slunk into a challenging economic state, now beset by environmental

degradations and pollution, declining social organization and the burden of fixed, but

obsolete infrastructures of its underdevelopment. This absolutely limits the capacity of this periphery to evolve in environmental, social, and technical ways. Consequently— as with so many regions in the Midwest—a factory became a contaminated park, railroads became bike paths, and the forces that once concentrated material and

population eventually dissipate; all the while the core feeds on the order extracted

from its periphery. The Seagram Building, as an act of lavish development, persists in a protected state.

The system we might call Butler, Pennsylvania rapidly developed levels of material and social organization as the glass works, as well as steel works and other manufacturers

in the town, were established and developed in the late nineteenth century. Operating in competition with other manufacturers and towns, the real wealth of the ecological

content of the glass and steel were systemically undervalued, as is labor in competitive market contexts. Equally important, the value of social organization is undervalued

in extraction economies such that when one or two of the main extraction products becomes obsolete, the town slumps into recession or depression. Such is the

architecture of unequal exchange and underdevelopment that underlies the glass of the Seagram Building.

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15. Hoffman, p. 8.

Endnotes

16. Alisha Hipwell, “One-time mayor helped shape profile of downtown Butler,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Wednesday, April 17, 2002.

1. Ray D. Hoffman, The Standard Plate Glass Company: Butler Gets its First Company Scaled to Compete Nationally, Butler County Historical Society, Chicora, PA: Mechling Bookbindery, 2003.

17. Hoffman, p. 3.

2. ibid., p. 9.

18. “State Launches Detailed Investigation of Hazardous Waste Found in Butler,” Commonwealth of Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection Press Release, May 5, 2009. <http:// files.dep.state.pa.us/RegionalResources/ NCRO/documents/rls-DEPFranklinGlassButler-050509.pdf> accessed February 25, 2019.

3. The Butler Citizen, May 6, 1887.

4. Hoffman, p. 29.

5. ibid., p. 32.

6. Mira Wilkins, The History of Foreign Investment in the United States, 1914–1945, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004.

19. ibid.

7. “Emergence of a Master Architect,” LIFE Magazine, March 18, 1957, pp. 60–68.

8. “3,676 Colored Plate Glass Windows,” New York Times special advertising supplement, April 7, 1957, p. 7.

9. “Franklin Glass New Boon to Architecture,” New York Times special advertising supplement, April 7, 1957, p. 13.

10. ibid.

11. Charles Reinhardt Fettke, “Glass Manufacture and Glass Sand Industry of Pennsylvania,” Topographic and Geological Survey of Pennsylvania, Issue 12, 1919, p. 124.

12. Phyllis Lambert and Barry Bergdoll, 2013. Building Seagram, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013.

13. “Franklin Glass New Boon to Architecture,” p. 13.

14. Mario Carpo, The Alphabet and the Algorithm: Form, Standards, and Authorship in Times of Variable Media, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011, p. 96.

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This book presents a terrestrial description of the Seagram Building.

It doing so, it aims to describe how humans and nature interact with the thin crust of the planet through architecture. Architecture reorganizes nature and society in particular ways that today demand overt attention and new methods of description. In particular, the immense material, energy and labor involved in building require a fresh interpretation that better situates the ecological and social potential of design.

9 781948 765398

9 781948 765398

KIEL MOE

53495 53495 53495

Unless architects begin to describe buildings as terrestrial events and artifacts, architects willâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;to our collective and professional perilâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;continue to operate outside the key environmental dynamics and key political processes of this century.

9 781948 765398

The book mixes construction ecology, material geography, and world-systems analysis through architecture to help articulate all the terrestrial activities that engender building generally, and more specifically through the example of a most modern of modern architectures: the Seagram Building.

UNLESS

The Seagram Building Construction Ecology

KIEL MOE