Architecture and the Rise of Industrial Society

 Dr. Zaky Jaafar, Faculty of Design and Architecture, Universiti Putra Malaysia

Desilo Architecture Lecture Series – 31 October 2025

Good afternoon everyone, and welcome to our second lecture in the Desilo Architecture series, titled Architecture and the Rise of Industrial Society.

This lecture examines the intertwined evolution of architecture, economy, and consciousness through the rise of industrial society. It situates architecture as both a mirror and a participant in the modern world’s transformation—shaping and being shaped by capitalism, mechanization, and technological rationality. Drawing upon key social theorists—Karl Marx, Thorstein Veblen, Henry David Thoreau, and Herbert Marcuse—it interprets industrial society not merely as a historical phase but as a worldview that privileges efficiency over meaning. Through critical and architectural responses such as the Arts and Crafts movement, Bauhaus humanism, and contemporary post-industrial experiments, the paper argues for a “desiloed” architecture that reunites ethics, aesthetics, and social purpose. The first part, as an introduction to the lecture series, explanation on Desilo Architecture will be given. Following this, the lecture will dwell on architecture and  industrial society.

This lecture is the first public lecture of the series. They are meant as a series of input lectures for the benefit of Master's of Architecture students in their final year. This session is part of a continuing exploration of how architecture does not merely respond to its time, but participates in shaping the very consciousness of a civilisation. Today, I want to trace the intertwined evolution of architecture, economy, and thought — how industrial society reshaped the built environment, and how architects in turn sought to respond, resist, and recover meaning.

DESILO ARCHITECTURE PROJECT

Let me begin with some context. This lecture series grows out of our Master’s studio at UPM, in 2024, which began under the theme of Responsible Architecture. We started with the idea that responsibility in architecture cannot be reduced to technical sustainability or the narrow arithmetic of carbon accounting. To be responsible is to be aware — of history, of philosophy, of economics, of theology, and of meaning itself. Architecture is not an isolated discipline. It is, by nature, a bridge between knowledge systems. Yet in the modern world, this bridging character is lost within silos — silos of expertise, silos of paradigms, silos of bureaucracy. We wanted to reawaken the exploratory, integrative spirit of architecture.

From there emerged the idea of Desilo Architecture. The term “Desiloisation” was inspired by Yap Ying Ying’s 2025 thesis titled “Investigating Silo Phenomenon And Its Spatial Impact On Knowledge Exchange Environment” (Master’s Thesis 2025).  and its spatial impact on knowledge exchange. Desiloing is not merely about collaboration or breaking boundaries between disciplines. It is about dismantling the very mental structures that prevent us from seeing wholes — the paradigmatic and philosophical silos that separate science from art, matter from meaning, and economy from ethics. To desilo is to traverse both vertically and horizontally — to rise from the operational to the philosophical, from technique to worldview. The higher one ascends, the more integrative one’s imagination becomes, and the richer the architectural possibilities.

This idea of desiloed thinking is beautifully illustrated by a story I read as an undergraduate student of Norman Foster’s Stansted Airport, completed in 1991. Foster’s design process was not only about technical innovation but also about resisting the compartmentalisation of design thinking. From the outset, Foster wanted for the airport, to achieve a direct, intuitive relationship between arrival, departure, and flight. His vision was a vast, clear glass volume — a single open space that visually connected the entrance hall to the aircraft beyond. He imagined travellers moving seamlessly from land to sky, beneath a canopy of light filtered through a delicate lattice of structural “trees.”

But two major problems arose. The first came from firefighting regulations, which required that large buildings be divided into enclosed compartments to contain smoke and fire. A single space of the scale Foster envisioned was, by conventional standards, impossible. The second obstacle came from engineering convention: mechanical and electrical services were expected to run above the ceiling, a practice that would have destroyed the clarity and openness of the hall.

Foster approached both challenges by traversing the silos of regulation and engineering. For the firefighting issue, he argued that because of the hall’s great height, smoke would naturally rise well above the occupants, buying valuable evacuation time. He then collaborated with engineers to embed suction fans within the hollow tree columns, quietly extracting smoke through the roof.

For the services problem, he challenged the norm altogether. “Why,” he asked, “must airport ducting always be overhead? Why not run it beneath our feet?” And so the building’s mechanical systems were rerouted through an underfloor plenum, entering the main space through the hollow trunks of the structural trees.

In doing so, Foster not only solved technical constraints — he overturned the very mindset that created them. By integrating architecture, engineering, and safety into one coherent system, he proved that beauty, function, and regulation need not be enemies. Stansted thus stands as a triumph of desiloed thinking made manifest in built form — a building where light, structure, and movement converge in a single spatial breath.

Now we will move on to the main title of the lecture. We begin with the genesis of Industrial society, the impetus, the birth of industrial revolution. But first a little bit of prologue.

ARCHITECTURE AND CIVILISATION

To understand how industrial society shaped architecture, we must first recall how earlier civilisations expressed themselves spatially. Under feudal and royal patronage, architecture was the theatre of power. The Forbidden City in Beijing projected imperial hierarchy through perfect symmetry. The Alhambra blended governance, art, and metaphysics into a single aesthetic of paradise. Versailles transformed the king’s body into an axis of absolute order. These were architectures of control and cosmic legitimacy. Similarly, in religious or theocratic systems, buildings like Karnak, the Parthenon, and Chartres Cathedral made theology tangible in stone and light. Each civilisation encoded its metaphysics into form.

But in the eighteenth century, a new actor entered the stage — the merchant. With the rise of mercantilism and urban wealth, architecture shifted its patronage from the divine to the bourgeois. The Georgian townhouse, the Parisian hôtel particulier, and the Palladian villa became emblems of a class whose power derived not from lineage, but from capital. Architecture now spoke the language of property, privacy, and display.

Then came the great rupture — the Industrial Revolution. It began not with machines, but with a mindset. The Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century transformed how Europe understood nature. Galileo, Newton, Bacon, and Descartes gave birth to a new epistemology — one based on observation, experiment, and control. Nature was no longer sacred or symbolic; it became measurable, predictable, and exploitable. Britain, unlike many of its continental neighbours, turned this scientific curiosity into practical technology. Steam power, metallurgy, and mechanical design laid the groundwork for industrial capitalism.

INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

The Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century—driven by Galileo, Newton, Bacon, and Descartes—redefined nature as measurable and controllable. Britain transformed scientific rationality into technological productivity: steam engines, metallurgy, and mechanical innovation.

Simultaneously, the Enclosure Acts (eighteenth century) privatised communal lands, displacing rural populations into industrial towns. Human life, land, and time became commodities. Peasants who once cultivated shared fields were driven out as land was fenced and commodified. Dispossessed and desperate, they migrated to industrial towns like Manchester and Birmingham, feeding the labor demand of new factories. The enclosure movement thus transformed peasants into proletarians and fields into capital. Industrial society was born from this dispossession — from turning land into property, time into wages, and human life into mechanical rhythm. The result was an urban proletariat that powered the factory system. Industrial architecture mirrored this transformation. Arkwright’s Cromford Mill (1771) and Paxton’s Crystal Palace (1851) marked a new aesthetic of iron, glass, and precision—monuments to production and spectacle. The modern city, exemplified by Manchester, revealed the dual face of progress: technological marvel and human misery. Architecture became both the infrastructure and the evidence of capitalism.

The architecture that followed mirrored this transformation. The factory became the first truly modern building type — designed not to symbolize power or belief, but to house machines and discipline labor. Richard Arkwright’s Cromford Mill in 1771 was among the earliest. Multi-storey, repetitive, rational — it was a space of control and productivity. Architecture became an instrument of industrial order. Engineers like Paxton, Telford, and Brunel led a new aesthetic of iron, glass, and precision. The Crystal Palace of 1851 embodied this spirit: an iron-and-glass cathedral not to God, but to industry itself. In Manchester, the industrial city became both marvel and misery — an engine of progress and a machine of human exhaustion. Overcrowded tenements, pollution, and disease revealed the shadow of progress. Architecture, in this era, was both the instrument and the evidence of capitalism.

THE ADVENT OF INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY

Sociologists later defined this transformation as the birth of industrial society. Giddens (1990) described it as a system driven by inanimate energy and wage labour; Bell (1973) saw it as an economy organised around industrial growth. Marx interpreted it as a historical stage of capitalism itself. In The Poverty of Philosophy (1847) he wrote: “The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist.” In Capital (1867), Marx analysed how mechanised production intensified alienation—the separation of labour from its product, from nature, and from the worker’s own humanity. Industrialism, he argued, created immense material wealth but also moral impoverishment. Yet Marx also foresaw within it the potential for collective emancipation: by revealing systemic exploitation, it sowed the seeds for social transformation. Max Weber (1905) extended this analysis through the concept of rationalisation—a world governed by efficiency, bureaucracy, and calculability.

Émile Durkheim (1893) described the parallel shift from mechanical solidarity, rooted in communal life, to organic solidarity, based on functional interdependence. Industrial society, therefore, is not merely an economic mode but a worldview: one that privileges instrumentality over meaning, quantity over quality, and control over contemplation.

What these thinkers reveal is that industrial society is not merely an economy — it is a worldview. It privileges efficiency over meaning, specialization over wholeness, quantity over quality. It produces order, but also alienation. It makes us powerful, yet fragmented.

ARCHITECTURAL RESPONSES

The architecture of capitalism soon reflected these values. Factories and offices were arranged for maximum efficiency. Workers’ housing was standardized like the machines they served. Urban space became a system of production and circulation. Meanwhile, at the other end of the social hierarchy, the leisure class turned architecture into theatre. Thorstein Veblen, in his 1899 book The Theory of the Leisure Class, described how industrial elites displayed wealth through “conspicuous consumption.” The Victorian and Edwardian mansions — ornate façades, decorative excess, imported materials — were not about comfort but about spectacle. Architecture became a currency of prestige.

Modernism arose partly as a revolt against this moral emptiness. Le Corbusier’s call for a “machine for living” and Mies van der Rohe’s “less is more” sought to strip architecture of vanity, returning it to function and honesty. Yet even modernism could not escape the industrial logic it critiqued. In celebrating the machine, it risked aestheticizing alienation. The sterility of Villa Savoye, Farnsworth house and the subsequent international style architecture soon invited reactions in the form of Post Modernism, deconstructivism and various other styles thereafter.

At the same time, socialist and reformist architects sought to rehumanize industrial life. Robert Owen’s New Lanark in early nineteenth-century Scotland combined housing, education, and production in one coherent plan — a moral experiment in welfare. Charles Fourier’s Phalanstère imagined communal palaces where work and life intertwined harmoniously. Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City, at the turn of the twentieth century, sought a third way — balancing industry, agriculture, and community, anticipating the later notion of sustainable urbanism. These were architectural attempts to heal the social wounds of industrial capitalism — attempts to design not only buildings, but societies.

After the devastation of two world wars, industrial production was harnessed again — this time for national recovery. Britain used prefabrication and mass production to address severe housing shortages. The New Towns Movement, from 1946 onwards, embodied the optimism of the welfare state. In America, mass suburban housing gave physical form to the so-called “American Dream.” Between the 1920s and 1950s, millions of homes were built on an industrial scale, promising prosperity, family, and ownership. Yet this dream was deeply tied to the logic of production and consumption. The detached suburban home was not only a dwelling but an industrial product, an object of ideology. It offered moral comfort to a civilization built on material excess.

THE AMERICAN DREAM

The American Dream became the myth that justified industrial modernity — the belief that happiness and virtue could be achieved through work, property, and consumption. As Daniel Bell (1976) observed, industrial capitalism required a cultural narrative that could reconcile productivity with moral legitimacy; the Dream fulfilled this by spiritualizing materialism — turning economic success into a sign of personal worth. It thus functioned as the ethical alibi of industrial society, masking inequality through the promise of meritocratic mobility. Yet, as Christopher Lasch (1979) and Richard Sennett (1998) later argued, this myth proved deeply ambivalent. While it delivered comfort, convenience, and consumption, it also produced restlessness, anxiety, and alienation — a culture in which self-worth became dependent on performance and display. The American Dream, far from liberating the individual, bound them to a new form of industrial discipline, where the pursuit of happiness became indistinguishable from the compulsion to produce and consume.

CRITICS OF INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY

Across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, four major thinkers offered profound critiques of this condition. Thoreau’s Walden (1854) rejected the illusion of progress defined by machines and markets. He argued that material abundance breeds moral poverty and that true advancement lies in simplicity, contemplation, and communion with nature. Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) examined how industrial capitalism produced not only goods but symbols of status. Industrial elites displayed wealth through conspicuous consumption, and architecture became its stage: Victorian and Edwardian mansions performed status through ornament and excess. For Veblen, genuine progress lay with engineers and craftsmen who used skill for utility, not display. Marcuse (1964) diagnosed industrial modernity as a subtle form of domination. In One-Dimensional Man, he argued that technological rationality suppresses critical thought by satisfying false needs—comfort, convenience, and entertainment—creating citizens who equate consumption with freedom. Liberation, he suggested, requires the recovery of aesthetic and imaginative reason. Fisher’s Capitalist Realism (2009) brought these critiques into the twenty-first century, describing a culture so colonised by neoliberal logic that alternatives appear unimaginable.

ARCHITECTURAL COUNTER RESPONSE TO INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY

Architecture, however, has often been the arena where these critiques take form. The Arts and Crafts movement, led by Ruskin and Morris, rebelled against industrial ugliness, reviving the dignity of craftsmanship and the joy of labor. The Bauhaus sought reconciliation — integrating art and machine, humanizing modern production. Alvar Aalto later brought warmth, nature, and empathy back into modernism, reasserting that architecture must serve the human spirit, not merely its functions.

In more recent decades, the search for meaning has taken new forms. Cohousing and intentional communities reimagine living as collective participation rather than isolated consumption. The BedZED project in London reconnected ecology and community. Francis Kéré, working in Burkina Faso, reclaimed local materials and participatory construction as acts of empowerment. Walter Segal taught citizens to build their own homes, breaking the monopoly of developers. Tiny living and off-grid design movements reject dependency, returning autonomy to the individual. Each of these is a quiet revolution — a rediscovery of architecture as moral agency.

Beyond architecture, entire counter-movements have emerged. The Venus Project, founded by Jacque Fresco, envisions a resource-based economy governed by scientific management rather than money. The Zeitgeist Movement extends this vision through global activism and education. And Solarpunk, an artistic and cultural movement of the 2010s, imagines hopeful futures where technology and ecology coexist in harmony. These may seem utopian, but utopia is, after all, the imagination’s protest against inevitability.

And so, we arrive at our conclusion. Architecture does not happen in a vacuum. It is a mirror of civilisation’s soul, reflecting the dance between material progress and moral purpose. From the temples of ancient kings to the factories of industrial capitalists, from the socialist experiments of New Lanark to the ecological optimism of Solarpunk, architecture has been both accomplice and critic, both instrument and conscience.

Our task today is to remain aware of this dance — to desilo our thinking, to see connections where others see compartments, and to recover meaning in an age of metrics. The industrial age taught us how to build efficiently. Now, we must learn again how to build meaningfully.

Thank you.

References

Aalto, A. (1957). The humanising of architecture. Helsinki: Otava.

Bell, D. (1973). The coming of post-industrial society: A venture in social forecasting. New York: Basic Books.

Bell, D. (1976). The cultural contradictions of capitalism. New York, NY: Basic Books.

Durkheim, É. (1893). The division of labor in society. Paris: Alcan.

Fisher, M. (2009). Capitalist realism: Is there no alternative? Winchester: Zero Books.

Giddens, A. (1990). The consequences of modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Gropius, W. (1935). The new architecture and the Bauhaus. London: Faber & Faber.

Howard, E. (1898). Garden cities of to-morrow. London: Faber & Faber.

Lasch, C. (1979). The culture of narcissism: American life in an age of diminishing expectations. New York, NY: W. W. Norton.

Marcuse, H. (1964). One-dimensional man: Studies in the ideology of advanced industrial society. Boston: Beacon Press.

Marx, K. (1867). Capital: A critique of political economy (Vol. 1). Hamburg: Otto Meissner.

Sennett, R. (1998). The corrosion of character: The personal consequences of work in the new capitalism. New York, NY: W. W. Norton.

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Veblen, T. (1899). The theory of the leisure class: An economic study of institutions. New York: Macmillan.

Weber, M. (1905). The Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism. London: Allen & Unwin.

Yap, Y. Y. (2025). Investigating silo phenomenon and its spatial impact on knowledge exchange environment (Master’s thesis). Universiti Putra Malaysia, Serdang.