ABSTRACT
Electrification brought two main changes to the factory; namely, electrical lighting and heating that enabled the extension of the working day, and electrical drive that made possible the transition to electrical power transmission, which is the primary focus of this chapter. To explore its impact on the spatial aspects of the organisation of industrial production this chapter makes use of a remarkable and revealing series of articles on electrification written by Oskar Lasche, the first director of Peter Behren's AEG turbine factory, and published in trade journals of the time. Through Lasche's writings, then, people begin to understand that the electrification of the factory was one of the material preconditions for spatial planning to occur and to be meaningful in the factory, especially as a part of the planning and supervising of work. At the AEG factories they can observe the relocation of the spatial location of the supervisor of the work process.
