House Building in the Machine Age, 1920s-1970s: Realities and Perceptions of Modernisation in North America and Australia.

This article investigates the benchmark for the building industry from the 1920s to the early 1970s in North America and Australia. During the 1930s and 1940s, the editors of Fortune ran a series of articles on the subject of the building industry, publishing an early collection as a book and a later group as a special issue in 1946. The following year they summarized their point of view in a catchphrase that caught the temper of the time. House building, they argued, was incidentally corrupt and inherently inefficient. In 1947 the building industry contained innumerable businesses. It was ruthlessly competitive. It consisted of all sorts of enterprises, of all sizes, operating methods and degrees of vertical integration. During the 1920s the achievements of the auto industry caught the popular imagination. The assembly-line production of cars raised productivity and reinforced a virtuous circle of declining costs, growing demand, larger production runs and further improvements in productivity. By the mid-1920s this method had become an ideal and was viewed as the benchmark against which house building was to be judged. Through the 1960s, innumerable discussions made this comparison explicit and in others it was an implied point of reference. This way of thinking has persisted, but from the 1970s has been called into question, first by the expansion of flexible methods in the mass production industries and then by an academic literature that has tried to tease out the logic of these developments.