Gil Kane Quotes

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

One cannot walk through an assembly factory and not feel that one is in Hell.

A great factory with the machinery all working and revolving with absolute and rhythmic regularity and with the men all driven by one impulse, and moving in unison as though a constituent part of the mighty machine, is one of the most inspiring examples of directed force that the world knows. I have rarely seen the face of a mechanic in the action of creation which was not fine, never one which was not earnest and impressive.

A laborer no longer makes whole articles. He receives raw materials, puts his touch on them, and passes them to another worker in the series. When the articles are quite finished they are carried out of sight by currents of commercial exchange. These currents are untraceable.

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.

Although prefabrication has a long history - the ancient Romans shipped pre-cut stone columns, pediments, and other architectural elements to their colonies in North Africa, where the numbered parts were reassembled into temples - the idea took on a new impetus with the technological advances of the Industrial Revolution.

The house is a factory.

I'm a Detroit kid who grew up with that assembly line mentality: You go to work to make money.

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.

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

What was worked out at Ford was the practice of moving the work from one worker to another until it became a complete unit, then arranging the flow of these units at the right time and the right place to a moving final assembly line from which came a finished product.

The man who places a part does not fasten it. The man who puts in the bold does not out on the nut. The man who puts on the nut does not tighten it. Every piece of work in the shop moves. It may move on hooks, on overhead chains …. It may travel on a moving platform or go by gravity.

It's easy to assume that just because you make something in small volumes, not using many tools, that there is integrity and care - that is a false assumption.

The factory is the machine that builds the machine.

Prior to the Industrial Revolution, hand-production methods were abundant. Craft defined everything. The craftsman had an almost phenomenological knowledge of materials and intuited how to vary their properties according to their structural and environmental characteristics.

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

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.

Where men had once howled and hacked at one another, and fought nip-and-tuck with nature as well, the machines hummed and whirred and clicked, and made parts for baby carriages and bottle caps, motorcycles and refrigerators, television sets and tricycles-the fruits of peace.

The industrial leader of the 20th century was a system-builder. He was a visionary in terms of what could be built; got the capital together; certainly convinced investors that it was possible; and then ran a high-volume production system that would spew out a vast array of almost identical goods and services. They would be changed from time to time; there was research and development, to be sure. But the system was built around production, not innovation.

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

I hate this fast growing tendency to chain men to machines in big factories and deprive them of all joy in their efforts - the plan will lead to cheap men and cheap products.

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.

Mechanization best serves mediocrity.