Architects to Russia

When the Roman Emperor Augustus made up his mind to transform a city of brick into a city of marble, he employed Greek architects whose predecessors had designed the temples that still stood, like cool dreams in marble, on the hills of Attica and Sicily. When Francis I of France wanted palaces designed, he summoned Leonardo da Vinci. George Washington, after the fever of a war, set out to build a capital in a wilderness. He employed a Frenchman,* Pierre Charles L'Enfant, to blue-pencil the streets and domes that lobbyists and starlings (see p. 50) would later infest. Just so, last week, the Supreme Economic Council of Soviet Russia, represented by Amtorg Trading Corp. in Manhattan, signed contracts to retain, the Detroit architectural firm of Albert Kahn, Inc., as consulting architects for two years of Russia's famed five-year industrialization program which calls for the expenditure, in 1930, of $1,900,000,000.

The Program. Except insofar as they indicate the architectural trend of a new age, little do the duties of Albert Kahn, Inc., resemble those of Pierre L'Enfant and the Augustan Greeks. Under Architect Kahn's supervision, plans will be prepared by some 1,500 Soviet architects and engineers for four motor car, truck and cycle factories; nine plants for tractors and farm implements; then for six asbestos, corundum, and graphite factories; two locomotive works; 15 machine tool, cash register, and typewriter factories; 24 cement factories; 126 sawmills; 106 woodworking plants; 27 glass factories; 35 spinning mills; 15 woolen mills; 13 clothing factories; 112 shoe factories; 15 paper mills; 56 food products plants. How many billion dollars would be spent on these establishments after 1930 was not announced, nor was the obviously huge compensation which will be returned to Albert Kahn, Inc.

Albert Kahn, Inc. will be represented in the Soviet by Moritz Kahn, brother of Albert, who lately negotiated the agreement. In Moscow, he was handling a somewhat similar though comparatively minute project, the construction of a $30,000,000 tractor plant at Stalingrad (TIME, May 20), which Albert Kahn, Inc., completed.

To the U. S. Albert Kahn (60), mustached, bespectacled, came 48 years ago, not from Russia, but from Germany. He built the Ford plants, the Packard plant, the Hudson plant. He received the silver medal of the Architectural League for Detroit's Fisher buildings. He belongs to six golf clubs, but has never played golf. With his wife, he sailed for Europe last week, to visit, not Russia, but "a nice warm place" to stay a few weeks. In Europe he will visit cathedrals, sketch, have a holiday, come home.

Significance. Like the city of Austin-grad (TIME, Sept. 16) now being built as a focal point for the Soviet Automobile industry by Cleveland's engineering Austin Co.; like the Kahn tractor factory at Stalingrad, the new Kahn enterprise exhibits Soviet enthusiasm for U. S. industrial and architectural methods. Soviet engineers in the next five years will visit the U. S. to study U. S. mechanical processes, to become devotees in the steely U. S. temples of Albert Kahn.

There is nothing novel in Russian importation of alien architects: a nation without indigenous architecture, most of its monuments in the past have been successively the work of Byzantines, Italians, Frenchmen imported wholesale by such ambitious rulers as Peter I and Catherine the Great. But presently, in Russia, Moritz Kahn with 25 U. S. assistants will organize a Soviet designing bureau of some 4,500 architects and engineers. This bureau will be directed by B. E. Barsky, President of the Soviet Building Commission.

*Likewise, the City Planning Commission of Philadelphia last week announced that famed French landscape Architect Jacques Greber had been retained to help beautify Philadelphia.

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