1. This article resulted from our initial work together as members of the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.). We are extremely grateful to all the fellows and staff at CASVA who were so generous with their feedback and critique, especially Robert Bork, Angela Miller, Iain Boyd Whyte, Mabel Wilson, and Ben Zweig. Given our time at CASVA, our work owes a profound debt to the support and engagement of Elizabeth Cropper, Peter Lukehart, and Therese O'Malley. We are also thankful to the anonymous reviewers for their trenchant analysis, as well as to the participants of “Apps, Maps, and Models: A Symposium on Digital Pedagogy and Research in Art History, Archaeology, and Visual Studies” at Duke University, where the first version of these ideas was originally presented and discussed. In addition, we are very grateful to Patricia Morton for her interest and critical editorial input. Finally, we would like to thank Robert Buerglener, Alberto Giordano, Anne Kelly Knowles, and Mathew Lincoln for their advice and editorial feedback on various stages of this project.
2. Most recently, Joanna Merwood-Salisbury, among others, has argued for the cultural significance of the technological development of the Chicago skyscraper. See Joanna Merwood-Salisbury, Chicago 1890: The Skyscraper and the Modern City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). For the history of concrete, see Adrian Forty, Concrete and Culture: A Material History (London: Reaktion Books, 2012).
3. Among many examples of discussions of materials and Weimar architecture, see Kathleen James, Erich Mendelsohn and the Architecture of German Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). For the Nazi period, construction and building materials have also been an important subtheme, such as in Angela Schönberger, Die neue Reichskanzlei von Albert Speer: Zum Zusammenhang von nationalsozialistischer Ideologie und Architektur (Berlin: Mann, 1981). On the continuity of the meanings of materials between the Weimar era and the Nazi period, see Christian Fuhrmeister, Beton Klinker Granit: Material Macht Politik (Berlin: Verlag Bauwesen, 2001).
4. Arnold Hauser, a founder of the discipline of the social history of art, suggested a variation on this question when he addressed the making of a work of art: “We should consider that in art, besides the factors rooted in social reality or determined by the desire for self-expression, there is the whole apparatus of the craft, of instruments that are gradually and progressively perfected, as in any other technique. This apparatus has its own history, which is on the whole one of continuous progress attributable to immanent causation. Though the production of these instruments is not altogether independent of the general conditions of life, and is subject to interruptions and regressions, it is still quite reasonable to speak of an autonomous development here.” Arnold Hauser, The Philosophy of Art History (1958; repr., Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1985), 126. Our essay is very much meant to suggest that digital mapping methods extend the social art historical project in important ways.
5. Marvin Trachtenberg, Building-in-Time: From Giotto to Alberti and Modern Oblivion (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2010). Notably, accounts of the construction process are more common in studies of premodern architecture, given that the separation of design from construction is rarely neat for premodern structures. See, for example, Robert Bork, “Plan B and the Geometry of Façade Design at Strasbourg Cathedral, 1250–1350,” JSAH 64, no. 4 (Dec. 2005), 442–73. We are indebted to Bork for many fruitful conversations on the issue of visualizing construction.