BOOK REVIEW
Not Artifacts, but Acts
Emily Thompson
Human-Built World: How to Think about Technology and
Culture. Thomas P. Hughes. xii + 223 pp. University of Chicago
Press, 2004. $22.50.
In Human-Built World: How to Think about Technology and
Culture, Thomas Hughes draws on the breadth and depth of his
long career as one of the 20th century's most eminent historians of
technology. This concise book not only charts a course through a
rich sea of intellectual engagements with the subject, it also
implicitly documents Hughes's own intellectual journey.
Human-Built World opens by examining the idea of
"technology" as expressed through the history of the word.
Its currently popular meaning became fixed only after the Second
World War, but even today, Hughes laments, too many people
understand the concept too reductively, as the ingenious output of a
serial patrimony of heroic inventors, a chronological progression of
artifacts, each more outstanding than the one before. For Hughes,
technology consists not primarily of artifacts but of acts: It is
constituted through the creative actions of people engaging with
their natural environment to build a new one; it is an ongoing
process that is anything but straightforward. What follows is not
really a historical survey of this complex process but rather a
thematic and selective pass through the new world that resulted, a
story told as much by the writers who have influenced Hughes as by
Hughes himself.
The first theme presented is "Technology and the Second
Creation." Here Hughes focuses on the 19th-century
transformation of America from a natural landscape into a
"human-built world." He situates this transformation
within a long tradition of Christian culture that ascribed meaning
to technology by understanding it as a reenactment of God's own
primary act of creation. Hughes then explores variations on this
theme by cataloguing the works of a range of writers past and
present, enthusiastic and critical, from Thomas Jefferson and Ralph
Waldo Emerson to historians Perry Miller and David Nye.
With the second theme, "Technology as Machine," Hughes
moves into the 20th century and draws equally upon American and
German sources to chart the new attitudes toward technology that
accompanied the rise of modern systems for electricity,
communication and mass production. Hughes notes a pervasive and more
secular enthusiasm for the technologies that define this era. He
then examines the works of intellectuals such as Oswald Spengler,
Lewis Mumford, and Charles and Mary Beard, all of whom looked
beneath the gleaming metal surfaces of the Machine Age to plumb the
opportunities and dangers inherent in the artificial environment.
The third theme, "Technology as Systems, Controls, and
Information," addresses the large-scale complexity that defined
engineering in America after the Second World War. Perhaps because
the technology in this chapter is more recent, Hughes focuses less
on analyses by thoughtful outsiders and more on the ideas of the
system-builders themselves. He charts the rise of the
military-industrial-university complex and presents the origins of
operations research and theories of feedback and control. He surveys
the newly pervasive critiques of technology that emerged out of the
countercultural movements of the 1960s, and follows with an account
of the origins of the information revolution. The chapter closes
with an examination of the recent scholarship of Manuel Castells,
Paul Edwards and others on the promises and pitfalls of the digital
world we inhabit today.
The book then changes tack, returning to the early 20th century to
survey how architects and painters in America and Germany have
engaged with technology. According to Hughes, architects such as
Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright "came tantalizingly
close" to developing an architecture that reflected the
technological nature of America. But it was left to Germans such as
Peter Behrens and the architects of the Bauhaus school to articulate
fully the aesthetic possibilities of the Machine Age. Hughes depicts
the stark, engineered style of German artist Carl Grossberg and
shows how Grossberg's paintings subtly undermined the enthusiasm of
his architectural colleagues. Hughes documents how American artists
and industrial designers from Marcel Duchamp and Charles Sheeler to
Margaret Bourke-White and Raymond Loewy were inspired by and
celebrated the engineered world that surrounded them.
Hughes then shows how a more complex and often contentious
relationship to technology characterized the work of postwar artists
such as painter Willem de Kooning and musician John Cage. These men
reacted against the technological values of order and control,
choosing instead to use their art to celebrate the disorder that
engineers were dedicated to eradicating. The chapter closes by
returning to architecture, arguing that postwar American architects
such as Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Frank Gehry have
achieved a kind of tenuous balance, embracing the tools of modern
technology while simultaneously using those tools to create
buildings that celebrate a more humane environment of
"complexity and contradiction."
Human-Built World concludes with Hughes's call for
technologists to strive for the same kind of balance, to create an
"ecotechnological environment" that is sensitive to the
diversity and complexity of the natural world. He cites the
Everglades Restoration Plan, which calls for the U.S. Army Corps of
Engineers to reengineer the region back toward its original state in
order to increase the flow of pollution-free water into the
Everglades, and he lauds the Central Artery/Tunnel in Boston as an
exemplar of an engineering project that is as socially and
environmentally responsible as it is technologically ambitious and proficient.
Readers who are new to thinking about engineering as it relates to a
larger cultural sphere will find this book—particularly its
concluding bibliographic essay—a useful introduction to the
works of writers and artists who have been inspired or informed by
the accomplishments of engineers. Those already acquainted with
Hughes's work will find much that is familiar here. Indeed,
Human-Built World can be read as an implicit
intellectual autobiography.
Hughes, who originally trained as an engineer, effectively initiated
his career as a published historian in 1971 with a biography of
Elmer Sperry, inventor of gyroscopic controls. Starting from the
then-current (and still pervasive) notion that the history of
technology is made up of the accomplishments of exceptional men,
Hughes used Sperry to present a more nuanced and complicated account
of the rise of systems of feedback and control. In his next major
work, Networks of Power (1983), Hughes described the
development of electric power in America and Europe, painstakingly
elaborating the idea that technology consists fundamentally of
systems, not freestanding artifacts. He showed how these systems
incorporate not just the technological choices embodied in hardware
but also the social choices embodied in politics and other
extratechnical factors such as environment. His work opened a rich
vein, and a slew of subsequent case studies on the social
construction of technological systems resulted, as historians and
sociologists mined more fully this valuable intellectual resource.
Hughes followed with the popular survey American Genesis
(1989), which brought his approach to a wider audience, and he
extrapolated his method into the postwar period through a series of
case studies of engineering projects published as Rescuing
Prometheus (1998).
Many of the scholars who have been inspired by Hughes have led the
history of technology in directions that he has chosen not to
pursue. Aspects of technology located outside the spheres of
activity that were formally codified in the 19th century as
"engineering" play no role in his accounts, and he remains
a historian of engineering and design. Issues of use or consumption
are thus of little interest to him, and his "human-built
world" is strictly a man-made world where women have virtually
nothing significant to contribute. He also works with a notion of
"culture" that is limited to the kinds of things that end
up in museums. Technology and culture come together for Hughes
primarily when great artists are stimulated by the former to produce
the latter in the form of aesthetically significant buildings and
pictures. There are many other ways to articulate connections
between technology and culture, but they are not encountered in this book.
So be it. Human-Built World is the third book in the
University of Chicago Press's series on science and culture, which
offers concise works for a general readership that embrace each
author's personal vision of his or her subject. Human-Built
World is just that, the personal perspective of a scholar who
has not only dedicated his career to understanding 20th-century
technology, but also exemplified the practice of the history of
technology in that century.—Emily Thompson, Visiting
Scholar, Program in Science, Technology, and Society,
Massachusetts Institute of Technology