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- Title
Den stora skalan: Volvo Torslandaverken och massproduktion som mål och mening i 1960-talets Sverige.
- Authors
Houltz, Anders
- Abstract
2014 marked the fiftieth anniversary of the Volvo Torslanda plant. "When opened in 1964, it was the biggest factory in Scandinavia and one of the clearest instances of Swedish industrial mega-projects in the 1960s, informed by efficiency thinking, automation and optimism. This article discusses the genesis of the Torslanda factory, its preconditions, implementation and consequences, the aim being to analyse the significance of this big factory as a symbolic expression of high-industrial modernity. The article sets out to answer the following questions. Which factors and influences were decisive in bringing about the creation of the plant? How was high-industrial modernity physically expressed in the Torslanda factory? What were the implications for employees of the largeness of scale and the new modes of production which the Torslanda plant ushered in? How did industrial ambitions interact with other societal "mega-projects" in the region? This article sets out to test the hypothesis that largeness of scale has to be understood as more than a means of financial profitability in industrial mega-projects like the Torslanda plant; largeness of scale was in fact a vital part of the objective. The article analyses industrial mega-projects as expressions of what historian of technology David Nye has called "the technological sublime", and links them to ideals of largeness of scale in politics, urban planning, housing construction and infrastructure.
- Subjects
AUTOMOBILE factories; AB Volvo; ANNIVERSARIES; MODERNITY; PROFITABILITY; INDUSTRIAL development projects
- Publication
Bebyggelsehistorisk Tidskrift, 2014, Issue 68, p61
- ISSN
0349-2834
- Publication type
Article