ABSTRACT
The work in commercial buildings has been reshaped even more quickly and completely than in houses. The transformation of workshops into factories and offices was made possible by more concentrated forms of power and information, which enhanced productivity by facilitating more specialized forms of work and hierarchical management structures. Commercial buildings increased in size, made from more refined materials and divided into highly specialized types and configurations. Buildings provide settings for the work that makes the wheel of the economy turn, where production and consumption are linked in the endless cycle of supply and demand. The distinction between production and consumption is something of an artifice, useful to economists for distinguishing between the work in businesses that create supply from the work of living that creates demand. Examining the building-as-setting, and its support of human activities, puts the many different acts of production or consumption in their full environmental context.
