Architecture and Real Abstraction
Notes on the Selz Schwab & Company Shoe Factory
Adler & Sullivan Chicago, 1886-87

Drawings as Objects of Knowledge III Symposium
KULeuven - TU Delft - Drawing Matter Archive
Shatwell Farm, Somerset
28-29 April 2023

The Selz Schwab & Company Shoe Factory, built in Chicago between 1886-1807, is not among the most impressive commercial projects of Adler & Sullivan. Nevertheless, the rationality of its floor organization, the rigor of its cast-iron joints and the heavy timber frame, and the austerity of its facade, devoid of any decoration and only mitigated by the stone sills and arched lintels, fully revealed the violence of the capitalist ethos at work — maximum productivity at minimum costs — which soon would reduce the architecture of production to a rational apparatus, anticipating the spatial challenges of the concrete daylight factory.

The construction drawings manifest how the abstraction of capitalism had become real, and tangible in Chicago at the end of the 19th century. What seems a generic, average building was not just the fruit of a technical improvement of the manufacturing layout but a worldly abstraction, directly emerging from the working conditions, the manufacturing process, and the logistical organization of machinery and raw materials, filtered through the homogeneous categories of time and space dictated by the rules of exchange of labor force, as Karl Marx and Alfred Sohn-Rethel have noted in their writings. With labor power becoming progressively abstract— uniform in quality and only varying in quantity despite its modes of expenditure — architecture and the space of production have become abstract too: the simplest and most flexible framework to exploit the human mental and physical capacities to work.

While the aesthetic and logical tripartition of the skyscrapers in the Chicago Loop aimed at symbolically masking the steel frame and the perversion of financial speculation and business, the Selz Schwab & Company Shoe Factory was stripped bare from any ideological mystification: not just a building or a node within an extended infrastructural network but a vital ganglion in the collective imagination and place of organization for hundreds of workers: a living repository of stories of opposition and solidarity. In this sense, the drawings preserved at the Drawing Matter Archive constitute a precious document to understand better not only the context of the project but also to reconstruct the memory of workers' resistance and emancipation within the long history of labor struggle in Chicago, which in those years affected all productive sectors and especially the building industry.