THE STEEL
During the twentieth century steel took its place as the primary material of the modern built environment. Plants were built on a scale never seen before, with thousands of workers at a single site manning furnaces, forges, and rolling mills around the clock. The cavernous mills rivaled the cathedrals of Europe and the skyscrapers of Manhattan in their monumental spaces. At the close of the twentieth century, many American steel plants had become obsolete, vast remnants of an earlier civilization. Near the end of its life the Bethlehem Plant was like a stage set: still working, but inhabited by workers spread thinly over the one thousand acre property.
Aware of the imminent demise of of the Bethlehem Plant, Elliott worked with historian Lance Metz to research and photograph the mills from 1989 until final shutdown in 1997. The work was conducted in collaboration the architects of the Historic American Engineering Record, an office of the National Park Service. While all of the work is be available for study and research through the Library of Congress, The Steel is a distillation of the most powerful and evocative images from this project.
The Steel: Photographs of the Bethlehem Steel Plant, 1989-1996 Joseph E. B. Elliott Book published by Columbia College Chicago Press, Chicago, 2013
PALAZZOS OF POWER
Four monuments of industrial might loom on the banks of the Delaware and Schuylkill Rivers in Philadelphia. Two are crumbling ruins, two still hum with contained energy, networked to power and information grids. Their turbine halls are colossal, their detailing magnificent. Within them there is much to explore: turbines, transformers, breakers, boilers. In the early twentieth century the newness of electricity – its intangibility, danger, and contested status as a commodity – made it an especially challenging subject for architectural representation. In Philadelphia architects and engineers set out to build a system that bespoke “solidity and immensity” to re-assure skeptical consumers. The hearts of the new system were so-called central stations. Harboring huge turbines, their riverside locations facilitated the delivery of coal by barge and rail; and fresh water for cooling and steam production. Coal was hoisted high by cranes to elegant conveyor bridges. Steam emanating from the boilers spun turbines and generators in central stations’ turbine halls, the high-ceilinged show spaces to which visitors were brought. Why were they built this way? Why have they survived? What will the future hold?
Commencing in 2000, Elliott worked with architectural historian Aaron Wunsch to research and document the early power infrastructure of the Philadelphia Electric Company, attending to both technological innovations and architectural environment. The project is at once the study of a building type, a window upon urban system-building, and a review of the cultural context that brought such great works into being.
Palazzos of Power: Central Stations of the Philadelphia Electric Company: 1900-1930 Aaron Wunsch and Joseph E. B. Elliott Book published by Princeton Architectural Press, New York, 2016
PHILAELPHIA: FINDING THE HIDDEN CITY
In 2009 Elliott began working with HiddenCityPhiladelphia, a collective local effort to reveal, explore, and document forgotten and underutilized spaces across the city, ranging from a 100-year-old defunct opera house to a former social club and Vaudeville theater. The authors explored the accreted layers of urban history, as they have built up over 300+ years in Philadelphia. It is their firm belief that the most interesting and enticing places in the urban landscape are not the classic landmarks, but rather the prosaic survivors, flexible buildings that adapt and change as the city demands. They looked beyond the city's historic core at schools, religious and social structures, museums, libraries, factories, and the infrastructure of the city. Many continue to serve their original use. Others may not survive, or be completely transformed due to drastic changes in the economy and demography. The book portrays Philadelphia in its fascinating depth, complexity, and contradiction, as it is continually evolving.
Philadelphia: Finding the Hidden City Joseph E. B. Elliott, Nathaniel Popkin, and Peter Woodall Book published by Temple University Press, Philadelphia, 2018
IN EXCHANGE FOR GOLD
Gold has been mined in the area surrounding the small Costa Rican town of Las Juntas for over 100 years. In the beginning, large-scale North American mining companies exploited the people who worked for them. Today the large-scale mining operations are gone, but the old tunnels are still worked by local artisanal miners or coligalleros as they are called in this town. Conditions in the mines are even more dangerous than in the past. Miners process the gold using mercury in their own backyards along the rivers, threatening their own health as well as the ecology and public health of this community and that on a global scale. This book documents the linkage between the human experience and ecology of Las Juntas through the words of a natural scientist and the images produced by a documentary photographer. Collaboration between a scientist and an artist is rare, but is essential for truly understanding the give-and-take among a cultural heritage, social condition, and the ecology of an area. This case study honors this community and its rich culture and history, and serves to increase awareness of the environmental and human implications of gold extraction. It also examines approaches to protecting the environment, and the needs of individuals and communities whose heritage and livelihood come from this activity.
In Exchange for Gold: The Legacy and Sustainability of Artisinal Gold Mining in Las Juntas de Abangares Costa Rica Richard A. Niesenbaum and Joseph E. B. Elliott Book published by Common Ground Research Networks, Champaign, IL, 2019
LANDSCAPES OF EXTRACTION
An ongoing project by Joseph E. B. Elliott and collaborators.
The extraction and processing of raw materials from the earth for construction is as old as building itself. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the exploitation of America's vast resources of stone, ore, clay, lime and cement and the power needed to process and ship them changed the American landscape overnight. The advent of globalization, cheap foreign labor, and rising land values have closed many American quarries, stone cutting sheds, brickyards, and cement and lime plants, leaving a rich domestic industrial legacy unknown, abandoned and discarded. These places, the intersection of geography, technology, and culture, are an important legacy of American life and their stories are still accessible and vital through the visual testimony of the land, the buildings, and the silenced machinery as well as the lives of those who last labored there. To date the project has included marble and granite in Vermont, slate in Pennsylvania, and brick in Indiana and Montana.
ARCHIVAL RECORDING PROJECTS
Over a career spanning thirty years Elliott has produced photographic documentation of dozens of historically significant structures and landscapes. Conducted in collaboration with historians, architects, engineers, and archaeologists of the Historic American Buildings Survey and cultural resource firms, the projects include photographs, drawings and scholarly narratives. The photographs are made according to the Secretary of the Interior’s Standards for Architectural and Engineering Documentation, using both traditional large format analog and high resolution digital processes. The resulting images are transmitted to the HABS/HAER/HALS Collection of the Library of Congress as well as local repositories.
Selected images from projects:
American World War I Cemeteries and Monuments in France, Belguim, England Client: HABS/HALS/American Battle Monuments Commission
Goethals Bridge, Elizabeth NJ. Client: Richard Grubb and Associates/Port Authoriy of New York and New Jersey
Moulton Homestead, Jackson, WY Client: Program in Historic Preservation, University of Pennsylvania/Grand Teton National Park