CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020
| Author | Nadibaidze, Levan |
|---|---|
| Title | The Birth of the Box: On the Origins of the Dominant Architectural Form |
| Summary | This thesis tries to answer two questions. One: why is it that in the last seventy years so many buildings around the world look the same? Two: why is it that this similarity takes the form of a glass and concrete box? To answer these questions, the thesis makes three arguments. First, that the technologies and organizations which gave birth to the box partly emerged in the 19th century as a result of developments in industry and commercial real estate in the UK and in the US—the need for large fireproof buildings in industry and the need for tall office buildings in commercial real estate, respectively. As part of these processes, the proto-box also appeared in second-tier industrial buildings, but did not yet gain prestige. Second, that the pure box both got built on a massive scale and got prestige in Germany in the 1920s as a consequence of post-WWI need for housing, the availability of large-scale government housing funding, and the presence in Germany of a sizable number of artists and architects who thought that the answer to the country’s housing problem was the box—even if the box, at the time, may not have been clearly better (that is, cheaper and faster to build) than its less boxy alternatives. And third, the thesis argues that the box achieved its present-day dominance in the 1950s and the 1960s in New York City, when it became the default way of building for large office developers: first the development of fluorescent lighting and air-conditioning removed the technological constraints that had made it expensive to build pure boxes bigger than a certain size; then several prestige buildings were built for non-economic reasons in the form of a pure box; and finally local laws, which had limited the building of pure boxes, were changed to actively encourage such forms. The thesis concludes by examining the hero-focused narratives that dominate the explanations of the rise of the box in both popular and academic accounts. |
| Supervisor | Trencsényi, Balázs |
| Department | History MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2020/nadibaidze_levan.pdf |
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