Week 08: Critical Text Analysis #2

In Week 08, we finished analyzing the text for Michael Osman’s writing “Specifying- The Generality of Clerical Labor”.

For Tuesday 03.16 students in Jessica’s section will combine the two (2) reflections from Week 08 and Week 07 into a 500-600 word synthesis. How to project from a single text was at the core of today’s discussion and notes are included below:

Notes on the second reflection are included in your Box Folder. How do we expose gaps or methods for extending Osman’s writing? What do we want to know more about? How do we project from a single text?

1- Discuss in the detail the texts and/or specifications referred to in the text. These include Woodward’s National Architect from 1869.

To be continued…

For Thursday 03.04 students in Jessica’s section will write a 300 word reflection answering the question “How did architectural work shift to something both clerical and creative? (page 153)

Below are a few notes from our conversation:

1- Osman organizes the second half of the text according to authors of carpentry manuals in the nineteenth century, pointing to the standardization of carpentry and how it led to balloon framing in the United States (Dorcas).

2- Standardization of carpentry (19th century) and its components occurred before the the standardization of specification writing (1948-CSI) in the United States (Garret).

3- What is clerical work in architecture (Jocelyn)?

• “Despite the seeming antagonism of qualitative design ideas to the quantitative world of industrial data, architects became increasingly enmeshed in the bureaucracy of paperwork precisely to clarify the place of their work in industrial society.” (Osman, page 153)
• Clerical work in architecture refers to the paperwork and standards associated with architects placing themselves in industrial society
• We discussed “Taylorism” briefly through Frederick Winslow Taylor’s “The Principles of Scientific Management” as a for of producing quantitative industrial data.