Who Was Albert Kahn? Detroit's Architect of the Industrial Century

## Albert Kahn, the Architect Who Built Industrial Detroit Albert Kahn was the architect who built industrial Detroit. He designed the Packard Plant on East Grand Boulevard in 1901, the Ford Highland Park Plant on Woodward in 1909, the General Motors Building on West Grand Boulevard in 1922, and the Fisher Building one block away in 1929. By the time he died in his Mack Avenue house in 1942, his firm had designed roughly a fifth of all factory buildings in the United States. The American Institute of Architects, meeting in Detroit that year, called him "master of concrete and steel, master of space and time." Kahn was born in Rhaunen, Prussia, in 1869, and arrived in Detroit as a child. He apprenticed in the office of Detroit architect George D. Mason. The sculptor Julius Melchers, who taught Kahn drawing, recognized that the boy was color-blind and would do better in architecture than in painting. Kahn took the advice. He spent a year studying in Europe on a traveling scholarship from American Architect magazine, returned to Mason's office, and opened his own practice in Detroit in 1895. ## The Concrete Factory Kahn's breakthrough was the reinforced-concrete factory. The Packard Motor Car Company had built nine plants on East Grand Boulevard using heavy timber. For Building No. 10, completed in 1905, Kahn used a concrete frame strengthened with steel reinforcing bars, a system patented by his younger brother Julius Kahn, a structural engineer trained at the University of Michigan. The "Kahn trussed bar" carried weight more cheaply than timber and resisted fire. The exterior infilled the concrete frame with short masonry walls and large industrial sash. The design became the worldwide standard for factory building. Henry Ford hired Kahn next. The Ford Highland Park Plant at 15050 Woodward Avenue opened in 1909, an 860-foot concrete shed that contemporaries nicknamed the "Crystal Palace." Ford ran the world's first moving assembly line inside it in 1913. Kahn brought daylight through roof monitors so workers could see. He believed natural light saved energy and improved morale. The architecture of mass production began here. Kahn's industrial designs traveled. He built the Ford River Rouge complex in Dearborn, then took commissions in the Soviet Union, where his firm designed 521 factories under a contract with the Stalin government between 1929 and 1932. The Tractor Plant at Stalingrad was prefabricated in Detroit and shipped to Russia in pieces. During the Second World War his firm designed the Willow Run bomber plant, the Chrysler Tank Arsenal, and the Glenn Martin aircraft plant. The AIA citation in 1942 called him the architect of "the Arsenal of Democracy." ## The New Center Skyline Kahn also built downtown. The Detroit Athletic Club at 251 Madison Avenue, completed in 1915, draws on the Farnese Palace in Rome and other Renaissance buildings Kahn studied on a 1912 Italian tour. The club's founder, Packard president Henry B. Joy, wanted to "get the men of the automobile industry out of the saloons on Woodward Avenue." Kahn delivered a dignified private club that became the headquarters of the auto elite. Kahn himself declined membership because the DAC did not admit Jews. The General Motors Building, now called Cadillac Place, opened at 3044 West Grand Boulevard in 1922. It is fifteen stories of Neoclassical limestone wrapped in a triple-arched ground-floor arcade. The Fisher Building rose one block away at 3011 West Grand Boulevard in 1929, the largest and most decorated of Kahn's downtown commissions and the AIA Detroit Building of the Century. ## Legacy Kahn died in 1942. His firm survives and still occupies the Albert Kahn Building on West Grand Boulevard. The factories he designed in the 1910s and 1920s set the form of the American industrial plant for the rest of the century. The Fisher Building, Cadillac Place, and the Detroit Athletic Club anchor the New Center and downtown skyline. ## Booking For a portrait session at any of Kahn's Detroit landmarks, visit [detroitphotography.com/book](/book) or call (313) 351-8244.