Modularity: An interdisciplinary history of an ordering concept

Information and Culture

Volumn 47, Issue 2, 2012, Pages 257-287

  Russell, Andrew L ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 84912030409     PISSN: 21648034     EISSN: 21663033     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/lac.2012.0013     Document Type: Review

References (144)

1. David D. Clark, "Modularity and Efficiency in Protocol Implementation," RFC: 817, July 1982, http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc817
2. David Beech, "Modularity in the Design and Standardisation of Open Systems," Computer Networks 8 (1984): 49-55
3. Ron Sanchez and Joseph T. Mahoney, "Modularity, Flexibility, and Knowledge Management in Product and Organization Design," Strategic Management Journal 17 (1996): 63-76
4. Carliss Baldwin and Kim Clark, Design Rules, Volume I: The Power of Modularity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000)
5. Stefano Brusoni and Andrea Prencipe, "Unpacking the Black Box of Modularity: Technologies, Products and Organizations," Industrial and Corporate Change 10 (2001): 179-205
6. Richard N. Langlois, "Modularity in Technology and Organization," Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 49 (2002): 19-37
7. Timothy Sturgeon, "Modular Production Networks: A New American Model of Industrial Organization," Industrial and Corporate Change 11 (2002): 451-96
8. Raghu Garad, Arun Kumaraswamy, and Richard N. Langlois, eds., Managing in the Modular Age: Architectures, Networks, and Organizations (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2003)
9. David E. Lightfoot and Clemens A. Szyperski, eds., Modular Programming Languages: 7th Joint Modular Languages Conference (New York: Springer, 2006).
10. This hypothesis-where modularity is linked to the hegemony of late modern capitalism and the splintering of the modern subject-is the topic of Rheinhold Martin, The Organizational Complex: Architecture, Media, and Corporate Space (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005)
11. and, to a lesser extent, William J. Rankin, "The Epistemology of the Suburbs: Knowledge, Production, and Corporate Laboratory Design," Critical Inquiry 36 (2010): 771-806.
12. Jerry Fodor, The Modularity of Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983)
13. Ignatius G. Mattingly and Michael Studdert-Kennedy, eds., Modularity and the Motor Theory of Speech Perception: Proceedings of a Conference to Honor Alvin M. Liberman (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1991)
14. Richard M. Restak, The Modular Brain: How New Discoveries in Neuroscience Are Answering Age-Old Questions about Memory, Free Will, Consciousness, and Personal Identity (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994)
15. Gerald A. Cory Jr., The Reciprocal Modular Brain in Economics and Politics: Shaping the Rational and Moral Basis of Organization, Exchange, and Choice (New York: Kluwer, 1999)
16. Gerhard Schlosser and Gunter P. Wagner, eds., Modularity in Development and Evolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004)
17. Werner Callebaut and Diego Rasskin-Gutman, eds., Modularity: Understanding the Development and Evolution of Natural Complex Systems (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005)
18. Peter Carruthers, The Architecture of the Mind: Massive Modularity and the Flexibility of Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006).
19. J. A. Large, ed., A Modular Curriculum for Information Studies (Paris: UNESCO, 1987)
20. National Workshop on the Use of Modular Approach in the Teaching of Science for Rural Transformation (Lahore, Pakistan: Institute of Education and Research, University of the Punjab, 1977)
21. J. Foort, "Modular Prosthetics-a Philosophical View," Prosthetics and Orthotics International 3 (1979): 140-43
22. Donald E. Marlowe, Jack E. Parr, and Michael B. Mayor, eds., Modularity of Orthopedic Implants (West Conshohocken, PA: American Society for Testing Materials, 1997)
23. Roger MacBride Allen with an essay by Isaac Asimov, The Modular Man (New York: Bantam Books, 1992)
24. Ellen Spolsky, Gaps in Nature: Literary Interpretation and the Modular Mind (Albany: State University Press of New York, 1993)
25. Judith Copeland, Modular Crochet: A Revolutionary New Method for Creating Custom-Design Pullovers (New York: M. Evans, 1978)
26. Allen Hurlburt, The Grid: A Modular System for the Design and Production of Newspapers, Magazines, and Books (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1982)
27. Iris Schreier, Modular Knits: New Techniques for Today's Knitters (New York: Lark Books, 2005)
28. Michael A. Carrier, "Why Modularity Does Not (and Should Not) Explain Intellectual Property," Yale Law Journal Pocket Part 95 (October 2007): 117
29. William M. Donnelly, Transforming an Army at War: Designing the Modular Force, 1991-2005 (Washington, DC: Center of Military History, US Army, 2007).
30. I take inspiration from histories of modern ordering concepts such as classification, objectivity, truth, mechanization, and efficiency that are not confined to any single discipline or profession. See Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Routledge, 1974)
31. Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Star, Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000)
32. Theodore Porter, Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Public Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996)
33. Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995)
34. Siegfried Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command: A Contribution to Anonymous History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1948)
35. Jennifer Karns Alexander, The Mantra of Efficiency: From Waterwheel to Social Control (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008).
36. John G. Blair, Modular America: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on the Emergence of an American Way (New York: Greenwood Press, 1988).
37. David Hollinger, "Historians and the Discourse of Intellectuals," in In the American Province: Studies in the History and Historiography of Ideas, by David Hollinger (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 130-51
38. Anthony Grafton, "The History of Ideas: Precept and Practice, 1950-2000 and Beyond," Journal of the History of Ideas 67 (2006): 1-32
39. James A. Secord, "Knowledge in Transit," Isis 95 (2004): 654-72
40. Andrew Abbott, The System of Professions: An Essay on the Division of Expert Labor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988).
41. Oxford English Dictionary, 3rd ed., s.v. "module, n.," http://dictionary.oed.com (accessed October 28, 2011).
42. Ibid.
43. Ibid.
44. Alfred D. Chandler Jr., The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1977)
45. David F. Noble, America by Design: Science, Technology, and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977)
46. David A. Hounshell, From the American System to Mass Production, 1800-1932 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984)
47. Leonard S. Reich, The Making of Industrial Research: Science and Business at GE and Bell, 1876-1926 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985)
48. Thomas P. Hughes, American Genesis: A Century of Invention and Technological Enthusiasm (New York: Viking, 1989).
49. Greg Clancey, "The Balloon Frame Revisited: Mecha ni zation, Mass-Production, and Prefabrication in American Building-Carpentry" (unpublished paper, 1997, courtesy of the author)
50. Hounshell, From the American System, 303-30
51. Federated American Engineering Societies, Waste in Industry (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1921)
52. David M. Hart, Forged Consensus: Science, Technology, and Economic Policy in the United States, 1921-1953 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 96-116
53. and Miles Colean, Stabilizing the Construction Industry (Washington, DC: National Planning Association, 1945).
54. "Historical Note," Albert Farwell Bemis Foundation Records, 1926-54, Archival Collection 302, MIT Institute Archives & Special Collections; Albert Farwell Bemis, The Evolving House: Volume I: A History of the Home (Cambridge, MA: Technology Press, 1933)
55. Albert Farwell Bemis, The Evolving House: Volume II: The Economics of Shelter (Cambridge, MA: Technology Press, 1934)
56. Albert Farwell Bemis, The Evolving House: Volume III: Rational Design (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1936)
57. William C. Edgar, Judson Moss Bemis, Pioneer (Cambridge, MA: University Press, 1926).
58. Bemis, Evolving House: Volume III.
59. Ibid., xii.
60. A proposal for an eight-inch module, which also predates the publication of The Evolving House: Volume III, is the subject of Willard H. Bennett, "Modular Masonry and the Small House," Architecture, October 1934, 215. The earliest mention of the term "modular" that I can find is in John Ely Burchard, "Materials for Mass Production," Architectural Forum, October 1931, 507-14. In this article, Burchard discussed Bemis's modular patents, which he began to file as early as 1925. In volume 3 of The Evolving House, Bemis included a chapter-length defense of the patent system in general and of his personal decision to obtain patents on the modular method, which he viewed as a necessary step to protect his innovation from those who would try to profit from it. Bemis eventually collected at least twenty-eight patents from over two dozen countries, including Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Ceylon, Chile, Cuba, Denmark, France, Great Britain, India, Italy, Peru, New Zealand, Romania, and South Africa (Evolving House: Volume III, 282-93, 325). Many of these patents are held in box 3, Albert Farwell Bemis Foundation Records, 1926-54, Archival Collection 302, MIT Institute Archives & Special Collections.
61. Bemis, Evolving House: Volume III, 66-77.
62. Ibid., 88-91.
63. Ibid., 64.
64. The appendix to volume 3 is a lengthy survey, directed by John Ely Burchard, of American prefabrication initiatives that was based on a questionnaire sent to hundreds of American building firms. In 1938 Burchard, a noted architect in national and international circles, became director of the Bemis Foundation at MIT, where he directed several studies of prefabrication. Burchard later became director of the MIT libraries and the first dean of the humanities at MIT. See also Burnham Kelly, The Prefabrication of Houses: A Study of the Albert Farwell Bemis Foundation on the Prefabrication Industry in the United States (Cambridge, MA: Technology Press, 1951)
65. Gilbert Herbert, The Dream of the Factory-Made House: Walter Gropius and Konrad Wachsmann (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984)
66. Eric Mumford, The CIAM Discourse on Urbanism, 1928-1960 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000).
67. Bemis, Evolving House: Volume III, 14.
68. Ibid., 16.
69. Tim Putnam, "The Modern Home and the Evolution of the House," Journal of Architecture 9 (2004): 419-29.
70. Bemis, Evolving House: Volume III, 296-300.
71. See also Amy Slaton, Reinforced Concrete and the Modernization of American Building, 1900-1930 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001).
72. Bemis, Evolving House: Volume III, 297-302.
73. See also Slaton, Reinforced Concrete; Kelly, Prefabrication of Houses; and Herbert, Dream of the Factory-Made House.
74. Myron Adams and Prentice Bradley, A62 Guide for Modular Coordination: A Guide to Assist Architects and Engineers in Applying Modular Coordination to Building Plans and Details (Boston: Modular Service Association, 1946). The American Standards Association used the "A" designation for committees developing standards for civil engineering and construction.
75. Ibid.
76. P. G. Agnew and William Henry Deacy, "Standards-Key to Mass Production of Buildings," in Historical and Policy Papers (New York: American Standards Association, 1920-54), 7. The manuscript, dated April 1948, notes "Prepared for the Encyclopedia of Housing-not for publication elsewhere."
77. Andrew L. Russell, "'Industrial Legislatures': Consensus Standardization in the Second and Third Industrial Revolutions," Enterprise & Society 10 (2009): 661-74
78. JoAnne Yates and Craig N. Murphy, The International Organization for Standardization (ISO): Global Governance through Voluntary Consensus (New York: Routledge, 2008)
79. Robert P. Darlington, Melvin W. Isenberg, and David A. Pierce, eds., Modular Practice: The Schoolhouse and the Building Industry (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1962), x.
80. Alan J. Brookes, "Theory & Practice of Modular Coordination," in 13th International Group for Lean Construction Conference: Proceedings (Sydney, Australia: International Group on Lean Construction, 2005), 328
81. Eva-Marie Neumann, "Architectural Proportion in Britain, 1945-1957," Architectural History 39 (1996): 197-221.
82. European Productivity Agency, Modular Co-ordination: Second Report of EPA Project 174 (Paris: European Productivity Agency, 1961)
83. United Nations, Report of the Working Group on Modular Coordination in Housing, San Salvador, El Salvador (New York: United Nations, 1962)
84. Modular Building Standards Association, Modular Practice: The Schoolhouse and the Building Industry (New York: Wiley, 1962)
85. and Lennart Bergvall, ed., Modular Coordination in Building: Asia, Europe, and the Americas (New York: United Nations, 1966).
86. See, for example, J. A. Reidelbach, Modular Housing in the Real: A Study of the Industry & the Product, Focusing on the Wood Framed Sectional Unit (Annandale, VA: Modco, 1970).
87. See also Robert T. McCutcheon, "Science, Technology and the State in the Provision of Low-Income Accommodation: The Case of Industrialized House-Building, 1955-77," Social Studies of Science 22 (1992): 353-71
88. and N. B. Hutcheon and S. R. Kent, "Influence of Size, Function, and Design on the Standardization of Components," Modular Quarterly (1966): 20-21.
89. Gropius quoted in Herbert, Dream of the Factory-Made House, 318.
90. The first English translations were Le Corbusier, The Modulor: A Harmonious Measure to the Human Scale, Universally Applicable to Architecture and Mechanics, trans. Peter de Francia and Anna Bostock (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1954)
91. and Le Corbusier, Modulor 2: Let the User Speak Next, trans. Peter de Francia and Anna Bostock (London: Faber and Faber, 1958).
92. See also Mary McLeod, "'Architecture or Revolution': Taylorism, Technocracy, and Social Change," Art Journal 43 (1983): 132-47
93. and Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture (London: Architectural Press, 1927).
94. Michael J. Ostwald, "Le Corbusier (Charles Édouard Jeanneret), The Modulor and Modulor 2," Nexus Network Journal 3 (2001): 145.
95. Peter Collins, "Modulor," Architectural Review 116 (1954): 5-8
96. Judi Loach, "Le Corbusier and the Creative Use of Mathematics," British Journal for the History of Science 31 (1998): 185-215
97. Ezra D. Ehrenkrantz, The Modular Number Pattern: Flexibility through Standardisation (London: Tiranti, 1956)
98. Henry A. Millon, "Rudolf Wittkower, 'Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism': Its Influence on the Development and Interpretation of Modern Architecture," Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 31 (1972): 83-91.
99. For summaries of the aims of the Modulor, see Le Corbusier, The Modulor, 47, 55-56, 107
100. and Ostwald, "Le Corbusier."
101. Le Corbusier, The Modulor, 33-34.
102. Branden W. Joseph, "John Cage and the Architecture of Silence," October 81 (1997): 82.
103. Le Corbusier, Modulor 2, 134-35.
104. Mumford, CIAM Discourse on Urbanism.
105. For example, Burchard, Gropius, Neutra, and Giedion all contributed papers to Thomas H. Creighton, Building for Modern Man: A Symposium (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1949).
106. Le Corbusier, Modulor 2, 16.
107. Nicholas Fox Weber, Le Corbusier: A Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008).
108. Tom Wolfe, From Bauhaus to Our House (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1981).
109. Baldwin and Clark, Design Rules, 149.
110. This section draws on the account in ibid., 149-217. Baldwin and Clark, in turn, summarize several detailed investigations of System/360, including Emerson W. Pugh, Memories That Shaped an Industry: Decisions Leading to IBM System/360 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984)
111. Bob O. Evans, "System/360: A Retrospective View," IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 8 (1986): 155-79
112. Emerson W. Pugh, Lyle R. Johnson, and John H. Palmer, IBM's 360 and Early 370 Systems (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991)
113. Steven W. Usselman, "IBM and Its Imitators: Organizational Capabilities and the Emergence of the International Computer Industry," Business and Economic History 22 (1993): 1-35
114. and Frederick P. Brooks Jr., The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering, Anniversary Edition (Boston: Addison-Wesley, 1995).
115. Baldwin and Clark, Design Rules, 162.
116. Ibid., 162-63.
117. Brooks, The Mythical Man-Month; David L. Parnas, "On the Criteria to Be Used in Decomposing Systems into Modules," Communications of the ACM 15 (1972): 1053-58.
118. T. A. Wise, "IBM's $5,000,000,000 Gamble," Fortune 74 (September 1966): 118.
119. Steven W. Usselman, "Unbundling IBM: Antitrust and Incentives to Innovation in American Computing," in The Challenge of Remaining Innovative: Insights from Twentieth Century American Business, ed. Sally H. Clarke, Naomi M. Lamoreaux, and Steven W. Usselman (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 264.
120. Baldwin and Clark, Design Rules, 169-217
121. Usselman, "Unbundling IBM," 277.
122. Dick Higgins, A Book about Love & War & Death (West Glover, VT: Something Else Press, 1972)
123. Dick Higgins, Modular Poems (Barton, VT: Unpublished Editions, 1974)
124. Dick Higgins and Hannah Higgins, "Intermedia," Leonardo 34 (2001): 49-54
125. Dan Visel, "multimedia vs intermedia," November 22, 2005, http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2005/11/multimedia_vs_intermedia.html (accessed October 28, 2011).
126. "Project Tinkertoy: Modular Design of Electronics and Mechanized Production of Electronics," National Bureau of Standards Technical News Bulletin 37 (November 1953): 169.
127. Ibid., 161-70.
128. Ibid., 169. On April 1, 1958, the US Army Signal Corps awarded RCA a five-million-dollar contract to establish a "Micro-module" program to manufacture electronic components.
129. See Hyungsub Choi and Cyrus Mody, "The Long History of Molecular Electronics: Microelectronics Origins of Nanotechnology," Social Studies of Science 39 (2009): 11-50.
130. IBM Corporation, Military Products Division, On Guard! The Story of SAGE (1956).
131. See also Paul Edwards, The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 75-112
132. Thomas P. Hughes, Rescuing Prometheus: Four Monumental Projects That Changed the Modern World (New York: Vintage, 2000), 15-68
133. Peter Galison, Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).
134. Richard L. Best, Russell C. Doane, and John E. McNamara, "Digital Modules, the Basis for Computers," in Computer Engineering: A DEC View of Hardware Systems Design, ed. C. Gordon Bell, J. Craig Mudge, and John E. McNamara (Bedford, MA: Digital Press, 1978), 103-18
135. Kenneth Olsen, interviewed by David Allison, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, September 28-29, 1988, http://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/comphist/olsen.html (accessed January 3, 2012).
136. Best, Doane, and McNamara, "Digital Modules," 103.
137. Ibid., 103-4
138. Olsen, interview.
139. Hollinger, "Historians."
140. See, for example, J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975)
141. Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988)
142. Donald MacKenzie, Inventing Accuracy: A Historical Sociology of Nuclear Missile Guidance (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990)
143. Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000)
144. and Brusoni and Prencipe, "Unpacking the Black Box."