"This book examines the factory in a number of incarnations: as image, as icon, as innovator and as laboratory. It traces the history of the modern factory from the utopian schemes of Robert Owen and Claude Ledoux in the early 19th century, through the great modernist 'cathedrals of industry' of Peter Behrens, Albert Kahn and Frank Lloyd Wright, to the post-industrial revival of former factories, such as Renzo Piano's reconstruction of the Fiat Lingotto factory in Turin, or the landscaped industrial parks created out of former steel mills in the Ruhr area of Germany."--Jacket.