From Oil to Information: Caudill, Rowlett, Scott and Architectures of the Energy Crisis

Abstract

This paper traces the history of architecture-engineering firm Caudill Rowlett Scott (CRS), roughly 1948–1983, in the context of the postwar oil economy and the 1973 energy crisis. The paper examines CRS’s transformation from a design firm into an energy conglomerate over the course of three decades, as it both concretized the fossil economy between Houston and Saudi Arabia and modeled its own corporate structure after its oil clientele. Analyzing numerous CRS projects designed and built for the oil industry, from corporate office towers to industrial training colleges, the paper looks at a moment in which energy systems and the architectural profession were coproduced through the discourses, practices, and institutions of oil at its most vulnerable historical inflection points. CRS thereby epitomized an energy transition from oil as a substance to oil as information, where a growing postindustrial society would leverage the immaterial dimensions of energy as a foundation for building.