Factory Made

Factory Made: Warhol and the Sixties is a fascinating look at the avant-garde group that came together—from 1964 to 1968—as Andy Warhol’s Silver Factory, a cast that included Lou Reed, Nico, Edie Sedgwick, Gerard Malanga, Paul Morrissey, Joe Dallesandro, Billy Name, Candy Darling, Baby Jane Holzer, Brigid Berlin, Ultra Violet, and Viva. Steven Watson follows their diverse lives from childhood through their Factory years. He shows how this ever-changing mix of artists and poets, musicians and filmmakers, drag queens, society figures, and fashion models, all interacted at the Factory to create more than 500 films, the Velvet Underground, paintings and sculpture, and thousands of photographs. Between 1961 and 1964 Warhol produced his most iconic art: the Flower paintings, the Marilyns, the Campbell’s Soup Can paintings, and the Brillo Boxes. But it was his films—Sleep, Kiss, Empire, The Chelsea Girls, and Vinyl—that constituted his most prolific output in the mid-1960s, and with this book Watson points up the important and little-known interaction of the Factory with the New York avant-garde film world. Watson sets his story in the context of the revolutionary milieu of 1960s New York: the opening of Paul Young’s Paraphernalia, Truman Capote’s Black and White Ball, Max’s Kansas City, and the Beautiful People Party at the Factory, among many other events. Interspersed throughout are Watson’s trademark sociogram, more than 130 black-and-white photographs—some never before seen—and many sidebars of quotes and slang that help define the Warholian world. With Factory Made, Watson has focused on a moment that transformed the art and style of a generation.

Originally published in 1946, when Britain was facing a post-war housing crisis, this book dealt with the issue of the factory-produced house in being part of the solution for housing people in an affordable manner and a short time-scale. The book, aimed at both lay-people and technicians discusses aspects of pre-fabricated housing such as comfort, standardisation and aesthetics. The book is illustrated with 48pp of black and white plates.

This is the story of what came to be known as the "packaged house," one of the few architect-inspired attempts to manufacture and market a prefabricated home. The plan began in the 1940s as a major collaborative effort between Walter Gropius, then at the height of his fame, and Konrad Wachsmann, a rising star-both in exile from their native Germany. For both men, this was the culmination of many years of experience in the field of industrialized housing and an unparalleled opportunity to make their long-cherished dream of a factory-made house a reality. How did this venture, which seemed to have everything going for it, turn out to be such a dismal failure? The answers to that question make this one of the most fascinating studies in the annals of modern architecture. Gilbert Herbert's analysis of the bold undertaking has within it not only the elements of personal drama, as far as Gropius and Wachsmann are concerned, but it unfolds consequences of more drastic significance for the development of industrially-produced housing the world over. Both architects represented a formidable combination of ability and experience; both had contributed significantly to the theory and practice of prefabrication, and had devised a system that was technically impeccable. That "only a small number of these immaculately conceived and engineered houses was actually sold" was not only a great disappointment for them, it was a grave shock to the whole movement for industrially-produced housing. The facts of the Gropius-Wachsmann case—now fully disclosed with extensive visual documentation—are instructive in themselves. But the real significance of this book lies in its ability to relate the facts to the history of industrialized housing and to the modern architect's confrontation with technological, economic, and social forces.

As China has evolved into an industrial powerhouse over the past two decades, a new class of workers has developed: the dagongmei, or working girls. The dagongmei are women in their late teens and early twenties who move from rural areas to urban centers to work in factories. Because of state laws dictating that those born in the countryside cannot permanently leave their villages, and familial pressure for young women to marry by their late twenties, the dagongmei are transient labor. They undertake physically exhausting work in urban factories for an average of four or five years before returning home. The young women are not coerced to work in the factories; they know about the twelve-hour shifts and the hardships of industrial labor. Yet they are still eager to leave home. Made in China is a compelling look at the lives of these women, workers caught between the competing demands of global capitalism, the socialist state, and the patriarchal family. Pun Ngai conducted ethnographic work at an electronics factory in southern China’s Guangdong province, in the Shenzhen special economic zone where foreign-owned factories are proliferating. For eight months she slept in the employee dormitories and worked on the shop floor alongside the women whose lives she chronicles. Pun illuminates the workers’ perspectives and experiences, describing the lure of consumer desire and especially the minutiae of factory life. She looks at acts of resistance and transgression in the workplace, positing that the chronic pains—such as backaches and headaches—that many of the women experience are as indicative of resistance to oppressive working conditions as they are of defeat. Pun suggests that a silent social revolution is underway in China and that these young migrant workers are its agents.

To say that history's greatest economic experiment--Soviet communism--was also its greatest economic failure is to say what many consider obvious. Here, in a startling reinterpretation, Robert Allen argues that the USSR was one of the most successful developing economies of the twentieth century. He reaches this provocative conclusion by recalculating national consumption and using economic, demographic, and computer simulation models to address the "what if" questions central to Soviet history. Moreover, by comparing Soviet performance not only with advanced but with less developed countries, he provides a meaningful context for its evaluation. Although the Russian economy began to develop in the late nineteenth century based on wheat exports, modern economic growth proved elusive. But growth was rapid from 1928 to the 1970s--due to successful Five Year Plans. Notwithstanding the horrors of Stalinism, the building of heavy industry accelerated growth during the 1930s and raised living standards, especially for the many peasants who moved to cities. A sudden drop in fertility due to the education of women and their employment outside the home also facilitated growth. While highlighting the previously underemphasized achievements of Soviet planning, Farm to Factory also shows, through methodical analysis set in fluid prose, that Stalin's worst excesses--such as the bloody collectivization of agriculture--did little to spur growth. Economic development stagnated after 1970, as vital resources were diverted to the military and as a Soviet leadership lacking in original thought pursued wasteful investments.