‘As Efficient as a Factory’: Architectural and Managerial Discourses on Government Office Buildings in Belgium, 1919-39
This article investigates the impact of managerial ideologies on projects for new
governmental office buildings in Belgium in the 1920s and 1930s. Following the prewar
publication of F. W. Taylor’s ‘scientific management’ theories, the scientisation of
office activities was propagated by efficiency experts throughout the western world. In
Belgium, as in France, the work of the mining engineer Henri Fayol was particularly
influential. According to Fayol, private and public bureaucracies had to follow identical