Architecture

and scientific
management:

Albert Kahn
(1869-1942)
 Taylor’s scientific management

1. Replace rule-of-thumb work

methods with a scientific study
of the tasks
2. Scientific selection of the
employee
3. Clear delineation of authority
and equal division of work
4. Responsability
5. Scientific task specialization
and design
6. Management-worker
cooperation
“Other innovations of Mr. Ford’s are his plants along waterways, making
possible water shipments, and his placing of numerous smaller plants in rural
districts in attractive settings, giving employment to farmers during the winter
months, which has proven of great economic help to the respective communities
and his business as well. It was also Mr. Ford who proved the advantages of
decentralization now so generally adopted”
 “I will employ one million workers at Muscle Shoals
and I will build a city 75 miles long at Muscle Shoals”
(H. Ford)
«steel, brick and glass»
«simple mass, large glass areas and undecorated walls»
 THE SOVIET ADVENTURE

«Albert Kahn, architect of Detroit, has been engaged by the Soviet Government to
plan and supervise the construction of a large group of manufacturing plants at
Stalingrad, at the mouth of the Volga River in Southern Russia, it was made known
yesterday. The buildings will be of American architecture and will cost about
$4,000,000. The first one, to be erected for the manufacture of tractors, will employ
about 2,000 men and have a capacity of 40,000 tractors annually. This plant will be
followed by automobile factories, cotton mills and other industrial buildings»
« one-story structure of incombustible materials, with enormous uninterrupted
floor spaces under one roof, with a minimum number of columns »
«The architect qualified to handle the problems of today must be a
combination of many parts, and, as I recently read, must, like the
conductor of a well organized orchestra, assume leadership in directing
groups of men to produce concerted and harmonious results.
Even thirty years ago, there were comparatively few firms employing
more than fty assistants. Today, we have numerous rms with hundreds of
employees. Their practice must necessarily be managed with proper
system and on a business basis. [...] There is no place here for the
temperamental artist, the clear-headed business man must have charge.
Don’t misunderstand me — this clear-headed businessman-architect must
not be devoid of artistic training or ability, for this must ever be the
corner stone of the profession»

A. Kahn, Putting Architecture on a Business Basis , 1930

NON-INDUSTRIAL BUILDING
Albert Kahn Architect, Ernest Wilby Associate, Engineering Building University of Michicagan, Ann Arbor 1903
University Hospital, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1919-21
Detroit Athletic Club, 1913-14
General Motors Building,
Detroit 1919-20
General Motors Building, Detroit 1919-20
Fisher Building, Detroit 1928-29
Fisher Building, Detroit 1928-29
 Critical fortune
Industrial Architecture and the Modern Movement
“Mountainous silos, incredibly space-
conscious, but creating space. A random
confusion amidst the chaos of loading
and unloading corn ships, of railways and
bridges, crane monsters with live
gestures, hordes of silo cells in concrete,
stone and glazed brick. Then suddenly a
silo with administrative buildings, closed
horizontal fronts against the stupendous
verticals of fifty to a hundred cylinders,
and all this in the sharp evening
light…Everything else so far now seemed
to have been shaped interim to my silo
dreams.”
 « I’m going out of the Ford workshops in Detroit.
As an architect, I am in a kind of stupor »

(Le Corbusier, Quand les cathédrales étaient blanches, 1937)

 Bibliography

F. Bucci, The Kahn Method, Franco Angeli, Milan 2017.