Producing Non-Simultaneity
Eike-Christian Heine, Christoph Rauhut, Producing Non-Simultaneity. Construction Sites as Places of Progressiveness and Continuity, London and New-York, Rutledge, 2018.
Description
Producing Non-Simultaneity discusses how the processes of modernisation, driven by globalisation and market forces, change the political, economic and technological conditions under which architecture is realised.
The book looks beyond the rhetoric of revolutionary innovation, often put forward by architects and engineers. It shows how technological change during the last 200 years was only possible because traditional skills and older materials persisted. The volume argues that building sites have long been showcases of non-simultaneities.
Shedding light on construction of the past and exploring what may impact construction in the future, this book would be a valuable addition for students, researchers and academics in architecture, architectural history and theory.
Table of Contents
Part 1: Across Borders, Beyond Epochs
1 Non–Simultaneity in the Construction of the Canal du Midi
2 The non-simultaneous as a research tool for late nineteenth-century construction sites
3 Siting Construction: Agency, Reflexivity and Temporality at the Glocal Construction Site
Part 2: The Persistence of Bricolage
4 Steel as Medium: Constructing WGC, a Tallish Building in Postwar Sweden
5 Between Technological Effectiveness and Artisanal Inventiveness: Concreting Torres Blancas
6 Constructing Brutalism: In-Situ Knowledge and Skill on London’s South Bank
Part 3: Intermediaries
7 General Contractors on Site. Contractors’ Discourses on their Position and Organisation, Belgium 1874 – 1958
8 Between Bourgeois Traditionalism and Extreme Environmental Conditions. « Alpenvereinshütten » and their Construction Sites in the High Mountains
Part 4: Hand and Head: Construction and the Imaginary
9 Contradictions between Artisan and Wage Labour Production: Non–Simultaneity in the Building of Somers Town from the End of the Eighteenth Century
10 Mixing Time: Ancient: Modern Intersections along the Western Anatolian Railways
11 Cathedrals, Pyramids and Hitler’s Highways. The Construction Site of the German Autobahn under National Socialism (1933–1942)
Eike-Christian Heine, since 2016, is an Assistant Researcher at the Department for the History of Science and Technology at the TU Braunschweig, where he is currently on leave with a Gerda Henkel research scholarship. His current research project explores a colonial, technological and knowledge history of archaeology by focusing on Germans, French and British travellers and their careers in the Ottoman Empire before 1940.
Christoph Rauhut was Senior Research Assistant at the Institute of Historic Building Research and Conservation of the ETH Zurich from 2009 to 2015 and now works as Policy Advisor to the German Cultural Heritage Committee. He studied architecture at RWTH Aachen University and at ETH Zurich and received a PhD in 2014.
