Engineering as Symbolic Form: Oil and Refinement in the Gilded Age

At first glance, the Beaux-Arts architecture of the “American Renaissance,” and in particular, the residences and retreats built by the owners of industrial capital during the Gilded Age, might exemplify the aspirational tastes of a new patron class. But of greater interest to both aesthetics and political economy is the seeming anachronism of, for instance, the late, mannered classicism of Kykuit (Delano & Aldrich, 1913), the Rockefeller estate in Pocantico Hills, New York. This architecture, like similar estates designed by Richard Morris Hunt, McKim Mead and White, and others for prominent industrialists during the 1880s and 1890s, remained expressively indifferent to the technical infrastructures like oil refineries by which industrial capital was increasingly defined. With such incongruities in view, this paper will reconstruct historically the engineering of refined petroleum as a “symbolic form” during the later nineteenth century in the United States, with Rockefeller-led Standard Oil as a central case. Historians of art and visual culture will recognize this approach in Erwin Panofsky’s adaptation of Ernst Cassirer’s philosophy of symbolic forms—language, myth, the arts, science—in Panofsky’s treatment of early modern perspective as cognitive infrastructure. Further adapting Cassirer’s philosophical concept to technical phenomena that his thought barely touched, this paper finds oil, produced in what Marx called a “hidden abode” tended here by engineers, becoming an elemental, technologically mediated symbol that is also a mediating idea. Not because the monumental architecture of the Gilded Age represented oil or utilized it, but precisely because, in apparent anachronism, it did not.