Obscured Disruptions of Industrial Poultry Sheds

Abstract The large-scale poultry industry as it is known in the twenty-first century emerged from a complex interplay of small-scale farming practices, new technologies, and architectural innovations. This paper offers an architectural history of the industrial poultry shed, a building type that underpins global poultry production yet remains largely unexamined as architecture. Sheds are not vernacular outbuildings, but industrial structures engineered to control interior conditions such as climate and light, and their adoption depended on capital that placed them beyond the reach ofsmallholders. Special attention is given to participants of the 1930 World's Poultry Congress who contested the emerging high-density and interior poultry housing. While the ‘Chicken of Tomorrow’ competition of 1948–51 in the United States is often described as the turning point for upscaling industrial poultry, this competition was only possible because of infrastructure that emerged earlier. Drawing on the Congress proceedings and the national submissions prepared for it, the paper shows how enclosure was demonstrated, justified, and questioned. Some disruptive voices—particularly women—challenged the proposed high-density housing and the shift to interior settings. As sheds became the standard unit of production, access to the poultry economy narrowed and the small-scale husbandry knowledge held less authority. In the twenty-first century, despite their concerns, large-scale industrial poultry sheds are overwhelmingly normalised. This study recentres critiques of poultry confinement and reveals how gender, architecture, and science intersected in shaping the path toward today’s industrial poultry sheds. In doing so, it complicates dominant narratives of inevitable technological progress.