This thesis develops a theory of the factory as a diagram of social, economic, and material relations, positioning industrial architecture within the broader historical transition from mercantilism to capitalism. Focusing on nineteenth-century British industrialisation, and particularly Manchester as an archetypal industrial city, it argues that the factory must be understood not merely as a building type or technological innovation, but as an organisational schema that spatialises and operationalises the abstract relations of capital. Drawing on the political economy of Karl Marx, the genealogical method of Michel Foucault, the concept of the diagram and abstract machine developed by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, and the theory of Mario Tronti, the project conceptualises the factory as both diagram and apparatus. In Marxian terms, as concrete labour is reduced to abstract labour, space itself can be understood to undergo a parallel abstraction and commodification. The architectural evolution of the factory toward larger, more generic, unobstructed, and surveillable interiors is understood here as materially facilitating the coordination of machinery, the management of technological change, and the discipline of labour. Flexibility and visibility emerge not as neutral formal qualities but as spatial responses to market competition and worker resistance. Extending beyond a typological account, the thesis advances a genealogy of the factory that situates it within a wider network of plantations, warehouses, prisons, workhouses, and civic institutions. These spaces collectively form an apparatus of production and discipline embedded in legal, colonial, and urban infrastructures. The factory’s transhistorical persistence will be explored here as lying not in the solely in the repetition of formal characteristics, but in its programmatic function.
George Jepson (Thu,) studied this question.