Martin Filler Quotes

At least since the Industrial Revolution, the world of design has been dominated by the rigors of manufacturing and mass production. Assembly lines have dictated a world made of parts, framing the imagination of designers and architects who have been trained to think about their objects as assemblies of discrete parts with distinct functions.

One of the most persistent yet elusive dreams of the Modern Movement in architecture has been prefabrication: industrially made structures that can be assembled at a building site.

It was exactly an assembly line. You could look into infinity down these rows of drawing tables.

Industrialization of the building trade is a question of material. Hence the demand for a new building material is the first prerequisite.

With production alone as the goal, industry in North America was dominated by the assembly line, standardization for mass consumption.

The world of design has been subjugated by the rigors of manufacturing and mass production.

Rome wasn't built in A.D.

In the Machine Age, the company itself became a machine - a machine for making money.

It makes sense that we came up with our public school system during the Industrial Revolution because it's like everybody is a factory worker, eating their terrible food and going back to the room where you're silent and listening to an idiot. That's an epitomizing idea, getting called 'Nothing' for your whole high school experience.

Kmart uses such mass production that they are able to lower their prices. My hose, for instance, is made by the same factory, the same machines, the same threads as the hose made by four top designers.

If we are indeed nostalgic for the weight of clock time, it is worth remembering that the standardized time that most of us know has only been around since the mid-nineteenth century. It was invented for the railroads.

Admiration of the proletariat, like that of dams, power stations, and aeroplanes, is part of the ideology of the machine age.

The United States as we know it today is largely the result of mechanical inventions, and in particular of agricultural machinery and the railroad.

There's an expectation these days that novels - like any other consumer product - should be made on a production line, with one dropping from the conveyor belt every couple of years.

The industrial revolution that defined the first half of the 20 century marked the start of modern business, typified by high-volume, large-scale organizations. Mechanization created a culture of business derived from the capabilities and needs of the time.

The genius idea of industrialism was the concept of the Model T: In exchange for something cheap and well-made, we'd forgo unique, lovely design.

Mechanization best serves mediocrity.

The fully developed bureaucratic apparatus compares with other organisations exactly as does the machine with the non-mechanical modes of production.

Industrial forces set in motion by steam and electricity have materially changed the structure of our civilization.

Steam and the telegraph and other machinery have required capital greater than any individual can furnish.

The only safeguard of order and discipline in the modern world is a standardized worker with interchangeable parts. That would solve the entire problem of management.

Instruments, machines, looms will increasingly supplement the strength and skill of men; will augment at the same time the perfection and the precision of manufactures by lessening both the time and the labor needed to produce them

The industrial revolution turned time into a commodity.

...industrialisation took centuries, rather than decades

Who is not rich to-day when compared with his ancestors of a century ago? The steamboat and the railroad bring to his breakfast table the coffees of Java and Brazil, the fruits from Florida and California, and the steaks from the plains. The loom arrays him in garments and the factories furnish him with a dwelling that the richest contemporaries of his grandfather would have envied. With health and industry he is a prince