Industrial Architect

Around Detroit, automobile plants are native architecture, just as automobile talk is native folklore. More closely identified with that architecture than anyone else alive is a burly, white-haired man of 69 who lives and does most of his breathing at a drafting board in Detroit's New Center Building. Albert Kahn has been Packard's architect for 35 years, Ford's for 30, Chrysler's since the firm was incorporated in 1925, General Motors' on 127 projects. And as the products of those companies girdle the globe, so do the works of Albert Kahn, Inc. Employing a normal staff of 400, his is the biggest private architectural machine in the world. Its greatest job: supervising the creation of an estimated $2,000,000,000 worth of factories in Russia during the first Five-Year Plan.

In the era of Stanford White, all this would have been no particular commendation of Albert Kahn as an architect. But young architects today have heard and understood Le Corbusier's definition of a house as a "machine for living," Frank Lloyd Wright's statement that in ideal architecture "form and function are one." Lately, to his great surprise, indefatigable Albert Kahn has discovered that the industrial buildings he has been designing all these years are "modern architecture." To show how essentially modern they are, in logic, economy, and use of steel and glass, THE ARCHITECTURAL FORUM this week devotes its August issue to Architect Kahn.

Neither an originator and intellectual like Wright, nor a theorist and teacher like Harvard's Walter Gropius, Albert Kahn wrought his architecture out of the demands of his clients. A poor boy like many of them, he had to create his own market. When he began factory work in 1903 he had to show industrialists that he could design cheaper and more efficient buildings than their own engineers. He still has to. Kahn clients see eye to eye with an architect who says, as Kahn says, "Architecture is 90% business, 10% art."

It is a paradox that by modern standards such Kahn buildings as the Dodge truck plant (see cut) are nearer to 90% art. It is another paradox that when Albert Kahn gets away from his factories, with plenty of money to spend on the job. he luxuriates in a synthetic style exemplified at its cheesiest in the $20,000,000 boom-time Fisher Building in Detroit. For fun, he allows himself to design one house a year--this year a Georgian one. Senior of six brothers, four of whom he put through college, two of whom work in the Kahn firm, Albert is both spark plug and patriarch. He belongs to six golf clubs, has never so much as addressed a ball. Like his brothers, he still prefers a nap on the drafting table to a night in bed.

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