Building the Workingman's Paradise: The Design of American Company Towns

The company town is as old as industrial society. Unlike urban commercial centers, which sprang up more or less spontaneously along trading routes, the industrial-era company town was a more deliberate creation. Especially in the U.S., where early industrialists were often idealists who loathed the nasty, dirty industrial towns of England, company towns were often conceived as model communities. Crawford, chair of the history and theory of architecture program at the Southern California Institute of Architecture, points out that some of the earliest of these communities were deeply paternalistic affairs, with industrialists like Francis Cabot Lowell (Lowell, Mass.) and George Pullman (Pullman, Ill.) each creating communities that they believed would help their employees lead clean, moral lives. But strikes and civil strife intervened, as workers sought greater autonomy, and each succeeding generation of manufacturers learned--no matter the talents and sophistication of their hired architects and designers--the difficulty of molding a community subservient to a firm's interest. Though Crawford painstakingly details this story and provides useful insight into aspects of the design of these towns, her story suffers from its heavy reliance on facts and objective narrative. Without the softening effect of human voices flavoring the story, Building the Workingman's Paradise is a work more likely to satisfy specialists than general readers. (Apr.)