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Abstract
This essay traverses linked scales of development by DuPont, centering on its Iranian joint venture, Polyacryl Iran Corporation. This brief episode of petrochemical development took place where the global supply chain linked oil to polyester, amid the corporate and architectural patronage of the late Pahlavi era, and in the literal ground of the desert outside of Isfahan. Over the course of construction and plant startup (1975–79), DuPont’s synthetics mythology acted on the desert site and local labor, understood to be similarly amenable to transformation. The relatively minor part played by architects Moira Moser (Khalili) and Nader Khalili in this process are also curiously cast in terms of plasticity, something they attributed to the landscape and its capacity for change.
Notes
1 Qiana Nylon, E.I. du Pont de Nemours & Company, c. 1968, FILM_1995300_FC247_01, FC247, DuPont Company Films and Commercials (Accession 1995.300), Audiovisual Collections and Digital Initiatives Department, Hagley Museum and Library, https://digital.hagley.org/FILM_1995300_FC247_01.
2 The “decade of development” was consecrated by John F. Kennedy in his address before the 18th General Assembly of the United Nations, September 20, 1963, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, https://www.jfklibrary.org/archives/other-resources/john-f-kennedy-speeches/united-nations-19630920. This rhetoric around development and its essential production of “underdeveloped” and “developing states” coincided with the geopolitical organization of the Third World under the terms of the Cold War. For critical appraisals of this history and the bipolar framework that development theory and history so often relies, see Walter Rodney and Vijay Prashad.
3 “Engineering Department Site Survey—Iran Plant No. 210,” July 13, 1973, 8. Box 29, Polyacryl Iran Corporation files (Accession 2370), Hagley Museum and Library.
4 EIDP Inc. Wallace H Carothers (current assignee), Fiber and method of producing it, US Patent 2,071,251A, February 16, 1937.
5 As the transcript for an internal recruiting tape makes clear: “As in all DuPont overseas operations, this plant will be operated by employees from the host country. But DuPonters will be required too—to help train the 1,500 or so Iranian workers who will be employed to operate the facility, and to help manage the operation until the Iranians have developed the skills and technical expertise required to run a modern manmade fibers plant,” January 10, 1975, 2. Box 29, Polyacryl Iran Corporation files (Accession 2370), Hagley Museum and Library.
6 They were mentioned only twice in board meeting minutes, to report that the process of selection was conducted and Seihoun Khalili was chosen. No administrative records or design documents were retained in the PIC archives.
7 Irving Schapiro to the Shah, 1978, Subject file folders from W. M. McCabe, Jr. 1976-81, Box 3, Polyacryl Iran Corporation files (Accession 2370), Hagley Museum and Library.
8 I deploy the term “Middle East” as a geographic anchor and a reference to a regional market that was recognized as such by the time of DuPont’s endeavors there in the 1970s, a conception that also assumed a more or less undifferentiated desert condition. As a historian, I acknowledge that that the term is itself a slippery construction of the West, which has been used often extrinsically to refer multiply and incompletely to the Arab world or the Islamic world, and in relation to the strategic use of territories by powers outside the region. Southwest Asia/North Africa (SWANA) is the accepted and more inclusive regional term used in contemporary scholarship, though the Arabian/Persian Gulf is a more accurate geographic frame for the episode I trace in this text, which has been productively recast by scholars including the anthropologist Neha Vora, who has presented the Gulf in relation to historic Indian Ocean networks rather than through incursions from the West. See Ahmed Kanna, Amélie Le Renard, and Neha Vora, Beyond Exception: New Interpretations of the Arabian Peninsula (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2020); Karen Culcasi, “Constructing and Naturalizing the Middle East,” Geographical Review 100:4 (2010): 583–97.
9 PIC planners make reference to this in the 1974 feasibility report. They also proposed a fiber-for-oil arrangement with the government, exchanging 300 metric tons of crude oil for 24.2 million pounds of fiber to be delivered quarterly after the receipt of oil. Memo ahead of E.R. Krane visit to Iran, May 8, 1974, Iran Venture and Agreement, 5. Box 19, Polyacryl Iran Corporation files (Accession 2370), Hagley Museum and Library.
10 John F. McAllister, The First Nylon Plant: A National Historic Chemical Landmark (Washington, DC: American Chemical Society, 1995), 2.
11 Regina Lee Blaszczyk, “Synthetics for the Shah: DuPont and the Challenges to Multinationals in 1970s Iran,” Enterprise & Society 9:4 (December 2008): 674. Alongside primary source material from the Hagley Museum & Library, Blaszczyk’s writing on DuPont’s synthetic textiles is an important resource for this paper. She is, so far, the only scholar to have written about DuPont’s joint venture with Behshahr Industrial Group, Iran Polyacryl Corporation. She does so from the perspective of a business historian, evaluating the fate of the project in the wake of the 1979 revolution.
12 See Meg Jacobs, Pocketbook Politics; Economic Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007). Regina Lee Blaszczyk has also focused her study of DuPont textiles in the context of postwar American consumer society. Regina Lee Blaszczyk, “Styling Synthetics: DuPont’s Marketing of Fabrics and Fashions in Postwar America,” The Business History Review 80:3 (Autumn 2006): 485–528; “Designing Synthetics, Promoting Brands: Dorothy Liebes, DuPont Fibres and Post-War American Interiors,” Journal of Design History 21:1 (Spring 2008): 75–99.
13 John F . McAllister, “A National Historic Chemical Landmark: The First Nylon Plant” (Washington, DC: American Chemical Society, 1995), 2.
14 Wilhelm Thiele, The DuPont Story (E.I. du Pont de Nemours & Company, Apex Film Corporation, 1950), DuPont Company Films and Commercials (Accession 1995.300), Audiovisual Collections and Digital Initiatives Department, Hagley Museum and Library, https://digital.hagley.org/FILM-1995300-FC190-192.
15 “DuPont Life Protection,” accessed May 27, 2021, https://www.dupont.com/life-protection.html.
16 Audra J. Wolfe, “Nylon: A Revolution in Textiles,” Science History Institute, Distillations (blog), October 2, 2008, https://www.sciencehistory.org/distillations/nylon-a-revolution-in-textiles.
17 “Enter Qiana,” Time 92:1 (July 5, 1968): 60.
18 As DuPont grew, so did its marketing armature. It started publishing DuPont Magazine in the 1920s and maintained an employer-run magazine called Better Living within the PR department from 1946 to 1972. In 1964, twenty-five years after it had first debuted nylon, DuPont had the largest marketing department of any American textile company. Its publications gave expression to the corporate slogan with articles that celebrated the manifold ways that DuPont products contributed to improving American standards of living, as well as the world abroad. Blaszczyk, “Styling Synthetics.”
19 Cavalcade of America Commercials Reel No. 3 (E.I. du Pont de Nemours & Company, 1954), DuPont Company Films and Commercials (Accession 1995.300), Audiovisual Collections and Digital Initiatives Department, Hagley Museum and Library, https://digital.hagley.org/FILM_1995300_FC253_01.
20 C.W. Borden personnel files, Box 9, Polyacryl Iran Corporation files (Accession 2370), Hagley Museum and Library.
21 Blaszczyk, “Synthetics for the Shah,” 699.
22 “Iran—the name means little to most Americans. Before the 1973 Middle East oil embargo, it meant even less,” company administrators admit in an internal recruiting tape, January 10, 1975. 2. Box 29, Polyacryl Iran Corporation files (Accession 2370), Hagley Museum and Library.
23 Eric Page, “Saudis to Oppose Sharp Oil Price Rise; Du Pont Planning Iran Fiber Venture,” “Cost of Joint Effort Held at Half Billion,” New York Times, September 6, 1975.
24 Blaszczyk, “Synthetics for the Shah,” 688–89.
25 Teijin of Japan and two German chemical companies, Bayer and Hoescht, were also invited to bid on the project: Blaszczyk, “Synthetics for the Shah,” 689.
26 Blaszczyk, “Synthetics for the Shah,” 683.
27 Assistance from the Iranian government was an explicit provision of the final agreement, Blaszczyk notes. This included “laws prohibiting rival enterprises in synthetic fibers; protectionist tariffs designed to uphold prices of polyester and acrylic; guarantees of sufficient water and electricity; and a five-year holiday on corporate taxes and duties for imported equipment and chemicals.” In essence, DuPont expected the government to ensure the profitability of its investment. Blaszczyk, “Synthetics for the Shah,” 691–93.
28 Blaszczyk, “Synthetics for the Shah,” 717.
29 For an interpretation of the plant architecture taken up by Anthony Lumsden of Daniel Mann Johnson & Mendenhall, see Sylvia Lavin, “Reclaiming Plant Architecture,” e-flux Architecture (August 2019), https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/positions/280202/reclaiming-plant-architecture/.
30 DuPont News 6, no. 11 (Nov. 1977), in Polyacryl Iran Corporation Papers, and in Blaszczyk, "Synthetics for the Shah," 692.
31 Blaszczyk, “Synthetics for the Shah,” 692.
32 Jim Flynn, interview by Joseph G. Plasky, April 4, 2017, sound recording, Oral history interviews with former employees of DuPont Company’s Textile Fibers Department (Accession 2010.215), Audiovisual Collections and Digital Initiatives Department, Hagley Museum and Library, https://digital.hagley.org/2010215_20170404_Flynn.
33 Jim Flynn, interview.
34 “Remembering the U.S. Navy’s Iranian Evacuation of 1979,” The Sextant (blog), February 22, 2019, https://usnhistory.navylive.dodlive.mil/2019/02/22/remembering-the-u-s-navys-iranian-evacuation-of-1979/.
35 Harry F. McPartland, interview by Joseph G. Plasky, February 12, 2009, sound recording, Oral history interviews with former employees of DuPont Company’s Textile Fibers Department (Accession 2010.215), Audiovisual Collections and Digital Initiatives Department, Hagley Museum and Library, https://digital.hagley.org/2010215_20090212_McPartland.
36 Describing the resolution of a fight that broke out between skilled laborers and day laborers—over the fact that the former were fed in the cafeteria on site, and the latter were not—Flynn said “just feed them, we’ll pay extra, or whatever.” Situations like these were typical construction site crises that could be overcome with expedient judgment calls. He tells the interviewer, “But Joe, something like that happened just about every two or three days. It’s just what you had to do to get a plant like that built." Jim Flynn, interview.
37 Jim Flynn, interview.
38 Page, “Cost of Joint Effort,” 31.
39 Page, “Cost of Joint Effort,” 31.
40 Page, “Cost of Joint Effort,” 27.
41 A memo notes the “excessive cost due to Iranian architect requirement,” May 1, 1979. Box 9, Polyacryl Iran Corporation files (Accession 2370), Hagley Museum and Library.
42 “Somebody said, well, we gotta have some trees. So the Shah, when he comes in there, it doesn’t look bare. So the day was planned, and I was involved in all kinds of stuff getting ready for the Shah to come in. And they decided they wanted to plant like forty trees along the walkway as you come in. So I come into work one morning, and there’s a guy out there, and they were putting trees in. But Joe, they just cut them off at the stalk and just put them in the ground. There wasn’t no ball or nothing on those trees! [Laughing] They must have been there about a week, for the Shah, and they must have just taken them out and burned them.” Security precautions figured into these plans. Flynn describes preparing three separate helicopter landing sites for the Shah’s arrival that had to be leveled with bulldozers. But this was all happening in the lead-up to the revolution, and the visit ended up being canceled in the end, given the tenuous political situation. Jim Flynn, interview.
43 Minutes of the 4th Board Meeting, Polyacryl Iran Corp, November 20th, 1974, 7. Box 1, Polyacryl Iran Corporation files (Accession 2370), Hagley Museum and Library.
44 Page, “Cost of Joint Effort,” 31.
45 Farshid Emami, “Urbanism of Grandiosity: Planning a New Urban Centre for Tehran (1973–76),” International Journal of Islamic Architecture 3:1 (2014): 90.
46 Nader Khalili and Moira Moser-Khalili, “Space, Time and Villages,” هنر و معماری/Hunar va Mimari/Art and Architecture10–11 (December 1971): 142.
47 Khalili and Moser-Khalili, 140.
48 Khalili and Moser-Khalili, 141.
49 Nader Khalili, Ceramic Houses: How to Build Your Own (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1986), 23.
50 Khalili, Cramic Houses, 25.
51 Khalili, Ceramic Houses, 44.
52 Khalili, Ceramic Houses, 105.
53 Khalili, Ceramic Houses, 69.
54 Hossein Maroufi, “Regeneration of Industrial Heritage of Textile in Isfahan, Iran,” International Workshop on Industrial Heritage, Milan, October 1, 2018.
55 C.W. Borden litigation file, General safety in Iran—anti-Western issues, 1978. Box 21, Polyacryl Iran Corporation files (Accession 2370), Hagley Museum and Library.
56 John Kifner, “Ghosts of U.S. Still Haunting A City in Iran,” New York Times, March 13, 1979.
57 James Barron, “American Architects in Iran Saw Gigantic Projects Fade Away,” New York Times, September 9, 1979, https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1979/09/09/issue.html.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Gabrielle Printz
Gabrielle Printz is a PhD candidate in Architecture History and Theory at Yale University. She studies correspondences between architecture, capital, labor, and state-making, with a focus on inter/national developments and expatriate work on the Arabian Peninsula. Outside of academia, she works through f-architecture, a research practice and alias shared with Virginia Black and Rosana Elkhatib.