75

Nigel Coates 3 The Mother of all Bombs

Freya Wigzell 8 The people here think I’m out of my mind

Kristina Jaspers 20 The Adam’s Family Store

Claire Zimmerman 28 Albert Kahn in the Second Industrial Revolution

Laila Seewang 45 Ernst Litfaß and the Trickle-Down Efect

Roberta Marcaccio 59 The Hero of Doubt

Rebecca Siefert 71 Lauretta Vinciarelli, Illuminated

Shantel Blakely 86 Solid Vision, or Mr Gropius Builds his Dream House

Thomas Daniell 98 In Conversation with Shin Takamatsu

Francesco Zuddas 119 The Idea of the Università

Joanna Merwood-Salisbury 132 This is not a Skyscraper

Victor Plahte Tschudi 150 Piranesi, Failed Photographer

Francisco González de Canales 152 Eladio and the Whale

Ross Anderson 163 The Appian Way

Salomon Frausto 183 Sketches of a Utopian Pessimist

Theo Crosby 189 The Painter as Designer

Marco Biraghi 190 Poelzig and the Golem

Zoë Slutzky 202 Dino Buzzati’s Ideal House

206 Contributors

75
aa Files The contents of aa Files are derived from the activities
Architectural Association of the Architectural Association School of Architecture.
36 Bedford Square Founded in 1847, the aa is the uk’s only independent
London wc1b 3es school of architecture, ofering undergraduate,
t +44 (0)20 7887 4000 postgraduate and research degrees in architecture and
f +44 (0)20 7414 0782 related ields. In addition, the Architectural Association
aaschool.ac.uk is an international membership organisation, open to
anyone with an interest in architecture.
Publisher
The Architectural Association For Further Information Visit
aaschool.ac.uk
Editorial Board or contact the Admissions Oice
Mark Cousins aa School of Architecture
George L Legendre 36 Bedford Square
Joanna Merwood-Salisbury London wc1b 3es
Irénée Scalbert
Martino Stierli The Architectural Association (Inc)
is a Registered (Educational) Charity No 311083
Editor and a Company limited by guarantee
Thomas Weaver Registered in England No 171402
Registered oice as above
aa Publications Editor
Pamela Johnston aa Members can access a black-and-white and/or larger-print
version of speciic printed items through the aa website
Technical Editor (aaschool.ac.uk) or by contacting the aa Membership Oice
Sarah Handelman (membership@aaschool.ac.uk/+44 (0)20 7887 4076)
For the audio infoline, please call +44 (0)20 7887 4111
Editorial Assistant
Clare Barrett
A Note on the Display Initials
Design In the late 1950s an American manufacturer called the Burroughs
John Morgan studio Corporation worked with the Federal Reserve Bank to develop
the E13B type font – a tiny set of numbers printed in magnetic
No 75, 2017 Contents ink at the bottom of a cheque, readable by automatic sorters.
© Architectural Association ‘Where once the cheque was used merely to transfer funds from
and the Authors one account to another, it will soon become the chief vehicle
for transmitting all the vital information required throughout
issn 0261-6823 an entire banking or accounting system’, stated the Burroughs
isbn 978-1-907896-94-1 Corporation in its 1959 address to shareholders.
Discussing the font in the December 1960 issue of the
Printed in England Architectural Association Journal (aaJ) devoted to his work,
by Pureprint Group the painter and type designer Edward Wright dryly noted that
‘the Romans would have found some of our typefaces which
aa Files is published twice a year are derived from their own alphabet quite incomprehensible’.
Subscription for two issues And yet while E13B was in production, Wright himself had been
(including postage & packing) participating in the communication of something similarly
uk £32 (students £27) unfathomable – a font for Alison and Peter Smithson’s House
Overseas £33 (students £28) of the Future, shown in the 1956 Daily Mail Ideal Home
Single issues: £15 exhibition. This house, however, was no home, nor even an
(plus postage & packing) architectural project, but a simulation, projecting 20 years
Back issues are available forward into a life where housework was automated and
technology completely integrated. In the harshly lit reality of
aaschool.ac.uk/aailes the Olympia Exhibition Centre, this future was also entirely
hand-made, built of plywood and plaster. Wright contributed
to these same artisanal qualities in his own hand-drawn
typeface projected onto the facade. The letters are slabby yet
seductive, hi-tech yet kitsch.
The display letters in this issue, drawn as ever by Adrien
Vasquez from the John Morgan studio (and appearing in
a short homily to Wright by architect Theo Crosby and in the
essay by Salomon Frausto) are a remaking of Wright’s
design. Like his letterface, Wright himself displayed certain
incongruities. A South American born in Liverpool, he was
packed of to public school before studying architecture at
the Bartlett and typography under George Adams. Like his
friend Crosby, Wright’s life straddled hemispheres and was
‘full of contradictions’, wrote Brian Housden in his aaJ
proile. ‘It seems to be that the world appears to him full of
opposites and these can only be contained in something
as tortuous as a labyrinth’ – or as enigmatic as the future.
 Albert Kahn
in the
Second Industrial
Revolution
Claire Zimmerman
In the irst decades of the twentieth century the
built landscape of the United States underwent
a profound transformation. Fossil fuels
powered gasoline engines that required new
road networks, consuming distance and
throwing out lines of development from city
centres. Electrical current liberated architecture
from constricted loor plates, opening the
way to the total environmental control of built
space. Building across the board changed
rapidly ater 1890; industrial architecture
strikingly so, as North American architects
synergised architectural knowledge and new
production processes for the outputs of this
‘Second Industrial Revolution’ – car, truck,
tractor, tank, airplane.1 Perhaps no one was
more emblematic of this industrialisation of
architecture than Albert Kahn (1869–1942),
founder of a Detroit irm that grew rapidly in
these years, numbering 600 by the early 1940s.
Energy distribution was important to Kahn
buildings, where state-of-the-art mechanical
systems laced through straightforward, but
ingeniously structured designs. The radical
conjoining of eclectic architectural casings to
modern technology is crystallised in the Temple
Beth El on Woodward Avenue in Detroit (1922),
a stone’s throw from Kahn’s cluster of gigantic
buildings in the city’s New Centre. Exploring
the building, the striking disjunction between
classical detailing (full Ionic facade, grand
amphitheatre sanctuary) and vast darkened
chambers above the sanctuary’s suspended
dome is striking. Plenums the size of long
galleries ventilate the communal space through
ornamented domical grates set into shallow
side arches. The building sucks fresh air from
two roof-mounted louvered air-intake cham-
bers, sending it four loors down a broad shat
to feed the plenum chamber, a vast but shallow
wedge of space sandwiched between the
basement (banquet hall, gym and vast kitchen)
and the sloping sanctuary loor. A fan unit
housed in the plenum chamber (which has the
same plan as the sanctuary above) washes and
heats the air before pumping it into the
sanctuary through 372 four-inch adjustable
mushroom ventilators set into the concrete
slab underneath the seats. A wall of concealed
radiators and the adjoining lobby bufer
congregants from gelid Detroit winters; the two
hot sides of the sanctuary – the loor and the
back wall – warm the vast space. Supplementing
this supply, the recirculating chamber in the
attic ilters air through its hall-sized airshats.
Switching points between front-of-house – the
spaciously elegant sanctuary – and equally
impressive back-of-house mechanical systems,
the domical vents also let a cable operated by
an automated winch-and-drum assembly lower
a giant chandelier into the worship space.
This is not an industrial building, yet
Temple Beth El, with its American Renaissance
30
shell, demonstrates Kahn’s modern way of
building just as efectively as his famous
industrial complexes like River Rouge. The
robust construction fabric accounts for the
building’s survival over decades of neglect, and
remains a source of pride for Pastor Aramis
Hinds, who bought it lock, stock and barrel
ater the city’s bankruptcy in 2013. Beth El is
the second synagogue built by Albert Kahn
Associates (aka) for the congregation; Kahn
also designed the temple’s 1902 home down-
town – arcs of wooden seating were moved from
the old to the new sanctuary and then supple-
mented. Beth El moved further out again in the
1970s, to a building by Minoru Yamasaki, part
of a steady outward migration of institutions
– itting in both a irm and a city known for
serial and mass production.
In a related vein, buildings were not one-
ofs for aka – they were outputs, periodically
updated in new projects. The irm built
everything from houses to high-rises as the
beneits of electrical power, plentiful oil and
gas ramiied throughout all sectors of the
building industry. Beth El featured the most
up-to-date mechanical systems available in
the 1920s; only its wrapper – the image of the
building – was drawn from seemingly timeless
models, static and retrograde. And it is
these kinds of commissions – rather than the
factories that take up much of the scant
historical analysis of this important irm – that
reveal the secret of aka. New building models
with ‘organically designed’ technological
infrastructure could be clad in existing type-
images appropriate to diferent uses, creating
individual buildings that looked backwards
and forwards at once. Stable recognisable form
hid unstable dynamic machines.
Buildings built with the logic of cars within
a retrograde architectural schema contradicted
the avant-garde enterprise, only newly stabilised
by institutions like the Bauhaus. And for that
reason – for its inability to function properly
within the image-driven schema unfolding as
modernism – the work of aka could not be
part of the twentieth-century canon. The irm’s
contributions to the burgeoning military–
industrial complex ater 1945 may have proved
a further hindrance to the reception of the work.
By contrast, aka buildings constructed before
the Great Depression appear frequently
in architectural publications. These include
memorable non-industrial projects like the
Fisher and General Motors buildings, as well
as a string of newspaper headquarters, clubs,
oice buildings and warehouses. And moving
back further still, to the beginning of the
twentieth century, the irm launched with
Previous: Albert Kahn and his irm on the roof
of the Marquette Building, Detroit, 1924
Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan /
© Albert Kahn Associates
a set of remarkable buildings that went far
beyond industrial architecture elsewhere.
Based in Detroit from the beginning of his
career, Kahn established an oice that designed
the architecture of mechanisation in part by
carefully designing its own internal procedures.
If we walk back through the irst half of the
twentieth century, clearing away historical
overburden layer by layer, we see a pragmatic
response to new conditions of capitalism as
they played out in the built environment in this
work. Here, perhaps, are sites of agency that
a large architectural bureaucracy could exploit
more efectively than the avant-garde.
1950–1930
The extent of Kahn’s practices is still not fully
known. Records have been lost or discarded,
and in part because historians and critics
remained largely silent ater 1947. However,
in addition to receiving signiicant income from
factory design, it is clear that Kahn owned or
partnered in a necklace of companies, oten
joint enterprises with his siblings. Among
them: Kahn Realty; Truscon, a building
products company founded with his brother
Julius as the Trussed Concrete Steel Company;
Multi-Color, a reprographics irm co-owned
with his sister Mollie Kahn Fuchs; McDonald
& Kahn, a construction and real-estate develop-
ment irm co-founded and run by his brother
Felix in San Francisco. Another brother, Moritz,
invented and patented building components,
published the indings of the irm’s applied
research and also represented Truscon
in London and aka in the ussR; Louis, the
youngest brother, managed the oice in Detroit
until his death in 1945. The remaining brother,
Gus, may have provided advanced mechanical
systems for Kahn buildings with his own
irm or from his post at the American Blower
Company, suppliers of Temple Beth El’s
advanced HVac. Kahn paid for his brothers to
attend the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor,
where Julius, Moritz and Louis pursued degrees
in engineering as Kahn established himself;
all three later joined the practice. Like other
large irms, aka also commissioned a remark-
able number of photographic images of
buildings from local professionals, both before
and ater completion. The irm was popular
in the years immediately ater Kahn’s death in
1942, but increasingly marginalised over
the next two decades.2 Compare Kahn, with his
nearly 2,000 completed job numbers, and
Le Corbusier’s 78 constructed buildings; then
compare their footprint in architectural history.
The other Kahn – Louis, an iconic igure in us
architecture (and no relation) – was known
for a small group of masterpieces built ater
the war, such as the Kimball Art Museum.
Yet these hardly provide prototypes for new
building, much less models for future work.
aa files 75
The ambivalence of a professional ield to
one of its possible futures – a future of mass
production architecture – is striking.
If Albert Kahn receded from historical view
in the second half of the century, he was
omnipresent during the war. In the late 1930s,
the oice renewed a longstanding relationship
with the us military, completing an array
of factories (including the vast Glenn Martin
Aircrat Assembly Plant extension in Middle
River, Maryland, in 1937).3 The building
spanned 300t without internal support, an
achievement at the time. When historian Grant
Hildebrand referred to its interior as a space
‘that swallows up human gestures’, he signalled
the unprecedented technical achievement that
Kahn lobbed out into the future, in anticipation
of the time when airplanes would reach the
wingspan accommodated by this building.4
Interestingly, Glenn Martin 1937 is anomalous
in Kahn’s work – a construction experiment
that deployed bridge engineering in a covered
column-free interior, which was not the norm
for factories, even those that produced air-
planes. Somewhat like an architect’s manifesto,
the plant could be absorbed into the technologi-
cal sublime on the edges of architecture culture,
in ways that many other factory buildings
resisted. It is thus no surprise to ind this image
singled out by an architect like Mies, in his
celebrated collage for his Concert Hall project
of 1942, one of the best-known representations
of wartime building in the United States.5
In 1943 Nikolaus Pevsner broadly distin-
guished architecture from the built environ-
ment when he wrote ‘A bicycle shed is
a building; Lincoln Cathedral is a piece of
architecture’.6 The war made this distinction
essential. As massive investments in military
building eclipsed other forms of construction,
architects distanced their work for the
military from their own ‘properly’ architectural
activities. Updating Pevsner in 1947, Henry-
Russell Hitchcock coined ‘the architecture of
bureaucracy’ to distinguish good design from
good building. As others have noted, Kahn
was Hitchcock’s primary exemplar of the
bureaucratic architect (as opposed to the genius
architect, here Wright rather than Mies).7
In The Architectural Review, Hitchcock’s
comparison of Wright’s Guggenheim Museum
in New York to Kahn’s Chicago Dodge plant,
an aircrat engine factory built in the midst of
the war (1942–44), showed buildings that
were incommensurable in every way – in size,
function, form, siting, urban impact and
intended goals. This was precisely Hitchcock’s
point. Yet other issues were also at stake, as
the reader soon learns: ‘we must guard against
the enticement of ideas and features which
promise to give to bureaucratic building
something of the special expressive power that
can be legitimately provided only by architects
aa files 75
of genius working as individuals*’, Hitchcock
writes. Expanding on the asterisk, he notes:
‘The public monuments of Nazidom might
serve as a warning. Moreover, England and
America have their own horrible examples of
twentieth-century bureaucratic monuments.’
In addressing a problem that fascist (and
Stalinist) architects had created when they used
soundness of construction as the measure of
architectural value or quality, Hitchcock detly
separated advanced construction technology
from advanced architectural conception.
Establishing a hierarchy between the two, he
identiied something more than mere building,
but less than architecture, recalibrating
divisions between art (the architecture of
genius) and use (bureaucratic building) – and
at the same time accommodating dynamic
change in contemporary building practices.
This critical move admitted a large body of
economically productive material – the
architecture of bureaucracy – into the fold of
professional architectural markets. But it also
helped keep that material out of the enclosure
marked ‘discourse’ – the arena for new architec-
tural ideas. Ironically, the igure that Hitchcock
used to demonstrate the qualities that also
appear in the architecture of ‘Nazidom’ was
a German-Jewish American architect whose
irm developed strategies diametrically opposed
to those of fascist architects, and who dedicated
himself to their defeat.
To safeguard architectural expertise from
those who might insist that constructive quality
mattered as much as conceptual quality was
also to separate aesthetic debates from political
ones. Hitchcock criticised German architecture
for being an instrument of party politics ater
1933, attempting to decouple politics from
aesthetics in buildings.8 He split aesthetic
efects of from everything else architectural.
This splitting, or re-inscription of an existing
split with the use of new tools, separated
economic capital and cultural capital. Building
participated in both markets, but architecture
belonged to only one. This was the market in
images, whether three-dimensional or two –
as regulated by the doctrinal spaces of modern
architecture – magazines, journals, exhibitions,
lectures, schools.9 As noted above, Kahn’s
architecture was not image-based, at least not
in the terms accepted by modernism; and the
wartime work was manifestly political, in that
it was executed for the state. Ater the war,
when debates about ‘New Monumentality’
further emphasised the image-based quality
of architecture and its symbolic role in culture,
this work was set of at a disadvantage on the
world stage.10 As markets developed and tasks
became more specialised, image was uncoupled
from technique (or form from function).
No matter the building type, industrial clients
in Detroit and the Midwest were looking for
technological currency, rather than aesthetic
radicalism. A factory’s performance was
determined by quantitative output. Its
appearance, not necessarily related to that
output, might be controlled by a host of
qualitative factors, most importantly by
a capacity to change over time as business
expanded or contracted.
By contrast, the architectural avant-garde
of the interwar and immediate postwar years
expected a building to concretise symbolic
representation in form. An image necessarily
ixed in time and space conveyed statements
local to a particular moment, oten aesthetic.
Possible future changes to building function
interfered with the clarity of such an aesthetic
statement; such changes could seldom be
accommodated within the original formal
scheme. This mechanism mimics that of the
ine arts, where works of art are valued precisely
for their ixity as completed works. As industri-
alists pressed for technical achievements that
involved a relatively constant acceleration in
technology, architects clung to cultural ones
valorised in galleries, publications and schools.
Despite this gap between cultural practices,
the operations of economic capitalism were not
so diferent from those of cultural capitalism.
Ater the Second World War cultural expertise
was codiied as modernism.11 Given aka’s
technical modernity and retrograde images,
it is no surprise to ind the irm let out of the
picture. Mechanisation and rationalisation,
the hallmarks of Amerikanismus embraced
by Europeans in the 1920s and 1930s, were
nonetheless shunned in the United States a
mere 20 years later.12 Going ‘back of the wall-
surface to look at the plumbing’, as R Buckmin-
ster Fuller instructed, might not reveal the
‘truth’ of the matter – the distinction between
building and architecture – but it could show
what was let behind when the plumbers
departed. Thus we might move further back in
time, now, to better understand the nature of
Kahn’s contribution to the built environment
of twentieth-century global modernity.
1930–1910
aka’s Detroit buildings are hard to distinguish
from one another. Many have a generic quality
that we associate with late-nineteenth- and early
twentieth-century architecture, exempliied by
the Detroit Athletic Club (1915) or the Maccabees
Building (1927). Well made and well designed by
the standards of their day, they are nonetheless
background buildings. We note them primarily
because they are so numerous and consistent
– hundreds of buildings in Detroit alone.13
Neil Levine tells us that Kahn’s contemporary
Frank Lloyd Wright realised over 400 buildings
and designed twice that number.14 Kahn’s
oice contains over 1,900 job iles for projects
executed in his lifetime. Multiple building
31
 Packard Motor Car Company Building
under construction, Long Island City, New York, 1916
Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan /
© Albert Kahn Associates
Laying the block loor, Ford Motor Company Building,
Edgewater, New Jersey, 1930
Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan /
© Albert Kahn Associates
 Albert Kahn Inc,
Dodge Chicago Plant, Chicago, 1943
Photograph Heinrich Blessing
© Chicago History Museum
 Albert Kahn Inc,
American Steel Foundries Plant, Chicago, 1943
Photograph Heinrich Blessing
© Chicago History Museum
phases were designated by a letter appended to
the job number; sometimes the project moved
through the alphabet a second time. The
quantity of executed work is thus currently only
approximately known, particularly for the early
years of the practice, when Kahn built a
reputation on private houses and remodelling.
While the work was organised largely from
the city of Detroit, aka was active throughout
the world. In May 1929 Kahn signed a contract
for the Stalingrad Tractor Factory, and a binding
contract for an expanded range of Soviet
factories followed in December, two months
ater Black Friday. While the Stalingrad building
was designed in Detroit, and its components
manufactured in foundries in New York and
Pennsylvania, later buildings were produced
with a Moscow oice staf of 45 employees from
Detroit and innumerable Soviet engineers and
draughtsmen trained in the ‘Kahn methods’,
as Sonia Melnikova-Raich has detailed. The
Stalingrad factory was built for $4,000,000;
Kahn’s subsequent contract with aMtORG – the
irst trade representation of the Soviet Union
in the us – was worth a reported $30,000,000
in 1929 dollars.15 When contract negotiations
broke down in 1932, well over 500 industrial
campuses had been built or were in progress,
administered out of a Moscow branch oice
that had also trained the Soviet engineers and
draughtsmen.16
During this time, declared anti-Semite
Henry Ford was Kahn’s major client, bringing
the irm a steady income stream from com-
plexes such as River Rouge and Highland Park,
as well as from assembly plants and manufac-
turing facilities throughout Michigan and
the rest of the United States, not to mention
Montevideo and Mexico City. Kahn might
conceivably have dissociated himself – at
considerable inancial cost – from his largest
corporate client ater the publication of
‘The International Jew: The World’s Foremost
Problem’ in the Ford-owned Dearborn Independ-
ent in 1920, but he took a diferent path. He
continued to work for Ford and other industrial-
ists, countering Ford’s German investments
(ongoing until 1941) with his work on wartime
armaments plants in the us.17 Throughout
the 1910s and 1920s, Kahn was tied to the Ford
operation by a stream of dollars. His work
for GM, Dodge, Hudson, Chalmers, the Fisher
Brothers, Packard, Kelsey and Chrysler was
similarly robust, fuelling the irm’s growth.
aka planned and executed a remarkably
heterogeneous array of buildings between 1910
and 1930, from residential additions and private
house commissions to mega-campuses.
Synagogues, work for prosperous clients such as
Kahn’s father-in-law Ernest Krolik or his patron
William Clements, numerous contributions to
the University of Michigan campus, and
apparently innumerable buildings in Detroit
36
attest to the breadth of work of the practice, but
also suggest common motifs between factory
and country club, oice building, house.18
It was the image of Kahn factories that inlu-
enced international architecture, but the array
of buildings still standing in Detroit (along
with many that are no longer standing) allow
a fuller understanding of one form of mass-
production architecture. In 1927 Albert Kahn
explicated his position on architectural
representation, or building style:
To imitate the old under existing conditions
must result in failure, to attack the problems from
the new basis can, in the proper hands, produce
results of highest merit, though difering from what
was done in ancient or medieval days. Business
and modern conditions are not a deterrent – they
are, as a matter of fact, the best kind of incentive
for progress in art and building as they are for the
betterment of life.19
Kahn’s statement may explain the seemingly
perfunctory character of his irm’s work, which
was markedly less sumptuous than buildings
by leaders of the American Renaissance such as
Carrère and Hastings, McKim, Mead & White,
Warren and Wetmore, or local competition
Smith, Hinchman & Grylls. Spareness of detail
or simpliications throughout the fabric of large
buildings resulted from economy and a design
process that was highly systematised, repetitive
and eicient.20 Thinner wall sections, for
example, used more steel but less masonry,
requiring less cratsmanship on or of site.21
Without stylistic wrapping, however, many
Kahn buildings preigure European modern
buildings that were meant to ‘attack the
problems from the new basis’ of the early
twentieth century, including Ludwig Hilber-
seimer’s Hochhausstadt (1924) or Mies’s 1934
competition scheme for the German Reichs-
bank. Stripped of stylistic markers, the exteriors
of Kahn buildings resemble hardline function-
alism or Russian constructivism; with stylistic
markers applied, they reference diferent
objects, nominally, and can as easily be
associated with Hilberseimer as with McKim,
Mead & White.22 Because aka buildings had
little to do with form or image, they might be
styled as modern, classical, Gothic or Roman-
esque.23 Style, as image, was signiicant on
a building site, but was not decisive in relation
to ‘attacking the problem from the new basis’:
it was purely perfunctory. Whereas ‘mere
building’ is relatively image-resistant,
‘architecture’ is heavily dependent on its ability
to summon images – at least in Pevsner’s
and Hitchcock’s schema. As modern as he
was, Kahn’s work deied this core principle
of modernism.
Architecture has long been identiied with
spatial design, particularly in the twentieth
century. When planning space for any given
programme, Kahn claimed utility as the chief
requirement, dictating ‘that design be always
projected from inside out and not the opposite.
Good business demands that neither the
external nor internal design be ever permitted
to interfere with the practical usefulness of the
building.’24 Yet the interior spaces of Kahn’s
buildings are oten criticised for appearing too
big, insuiciently spatially articulated, or not
properly programmed. In relation to a smaller
reading room at McKim, Mead & White’s
former law library in Kent Hall at Columbia
University, the Clements Library reading room
(a design into which Kahn poured a lot of efort)
reveals an under-articulated interior, as if the
architect’s attention was withdrawn before
the design was inished. Perhaps this was the
case, given the rapid pace at which the projects
progressed. The ‘production line’ that was
characteristic of the Kahn oice certainly
required time limits on all stages of the building
process.25 This quality of space, so consistent
among Kahn designs, indexes ‘practical
usefulness’. Kahn architects designed spaces to
be lexibly inhabited within the limits of a given
programme. They ofered square or cubic
footage for occupation rather than spaces zoned
for controlled use – not a surprising procedure
for architects whose major clients required
precisely this kind of open-ended accommoda-
tion.26 aka buildings do not adhere to the
well-established spatial conventions associated
with modern architecture, including those of
American Renaissance architecture of the late
nineteenth century. Like the exterior styling,
the internal spaces appear perfunctory.
Perhaps for this reason, the irm’s buildings
oten fail to grab our full attention. Many
architects ind them boring, although they seem
to be genuinely admired by non-specialists,
despite their generic typological quality. They
are best apprehended in relation to the classes
taught within their walls, the products manu-
factured in them, and the people working in
the corporations, factories and institutions
that they house. Their apparent incompleteness
has been interpreted negatively, as a lack or
a deiciency – an interpretation that owes much
to traditional criteria of architectural judge-
ment dating back to the Renaissance. But this
very incompleteness of Kahn’s buildings might
instead be seen as their most positive aspect.
Walter Benjamin’s famous ‘Work of Art’ essay,
with its remarks about architecture perceived in
a state of distraction, could have been written
for the coeval Detroiter, then entering one of the
most active phases of his career. Like other
Weimar culture theorists, Benjamin understood
that Amerikanismus brought new possibilities
into being across the cultural spectrum. aka
buildings, read through this lens, suggest
the value of not designing too speciically,
leaving room, conceptually, for the agency of
actors other than the architect.27 Buildings
aa files 75
are incomplete without the presence of their
occupants, and lexibility of use provides an
antidote to obsolescence in rapidly changing
building markets.
Rather than the image of fast-fashion, we
might compare this work to the automotive
industry. Today, if you want to apply the brakes
in a car, then you put your foot on the brake
pedal, whether a Ferrari or a Model t, where this
indirectly brought a force to bear on a rapidly
rotating tyre. Today’s brake pedal communi-
cates with a complex computer system that
brings anti-lock brakes into contact with brake
shoes that stop the car through a series of
digital relays. These kinds of complex processes
enabled through seemingly straightforward
interfaces remain a feature of automotive as of
building design.28 The use of a recognisable
historical form, even if obsolete, means
that we continue to recognise brake pedals
and accelerators as uniquely indexed to
their function – never mind the iction.29 aka
modelled the interface between the built
environment and its occupants using a similar
register of recognisable markers (strictly
functional, and more ‘culturally functional’)
such as Beaux-Arts classicism, covering steel
frame buildings with the thinnest and most
economical of stone veils. This interface
between architect and public difers notably
from the way in which architects traditionally
– and still today – certify buildings as
architecture, invoking specialised training
and authority.30
Despite the evident challenges that aka
ofered to developing modernist protocols,
the irm’s factory buildings were readily
absorbed into elite architectural discourse.
Photographs of the glass plant at Henry Ford’s
River Rouge Ford complex, or of the ‘Crystal
Palace’ of Highland Park, provided twentieth-
century auteurs such as Gropius or Mies with
critically important models. The glass plant is
particularly arresting as an unprecedented
glass-sheathed factory building intended for
the manufacture of itself – that is, glass for
Ford vehicles. German historian Adolf Behne
included Kahn’s Seamless Steel Tubes (1919),
which similarly demonstrates both function
and output, in his Modern Functional Building
of 1926.31 Situated just west of Detroit in
Dearborn, the facility manufactured extruded
metal tubing for engines, in three long linear
sheds with continuous interiors – the extruded
steel buildings extruded steel tubes. Works like
this provide dramatic examples of buildings
modelling their own function by simply
enclosing it – an organic construct that Behne
in particular appreciated.
Peeling back from the 1950s to this earlier
phase reveals how profoundly the irm’s goals
difered from those of European architects.
Photographic images and drawings of Kahn
aa files 75
work may have inluenced European modern-
ism directly, but aka itself had a diferent
agenda. Constant experimentation in search
of greater eiciencies resulted in a single
ongoing process in which research and
development activities were incorporated into
the structure and organisation of the irm.
Spurred by the pace of work in Detroit, aka
continually improved output and eiciency to
serve both the client’s and irm’s own ends.32
Any single building was subject to revision in
the next of its kind; no work stood as the ‘inal
word’ on anything.33
1910–1890
Well established in Detroit architectural circles
by 1910, Kahn had gained important footholds
with his projects for the Packard Company
(beginning 1903) and the Ford Motor Company
at Highland Park (1908). Between these dates,
his irm’s work for the Peirce Arrow plant in
Bufalo (1906) may mark the beginning of the
moving assembly line, arranging automotive
labour a full seven years earlier than Ford
at Highland Park in 1913. If the assembly line
organises labour in space, Kahn concretised
this concept for automobile manufacture.
Beginning with the machines and the humans
who operate them, the building provides
a carapace or outer shell for those internal
operations. Kahn’s brother Moritz codiied this
idea in The Design and Construction of Industrial
Buildings (1917), but Kahn expressed similar
ideas in speeches authored or co-authored by
his brother.
Detroit’s intense growth from 1890 on
underpins the irm’s history.34 Rampant
lawlessness and anti-urbanism proliferated in
the capitalist expansion of Motor City well
before the First World War, as industrialists
routinely annexed city, state and federal funding
for their own proit-making ventures – architec-
ture and new building included. Against this
pattern of unpredictable change and wide-
spread exploitation, labour unions struggled
to gain traction. Kahn, no social revolutionary,
responded by tackling problems of building.
The Packard plant, constructed in phases over
a period of around 30 years from 1903, marks the
beginning of Kahn’s industrial career.35 The irst
nine buildings followed standard mill construc-
tion, but in the tenth in 1905 Kahn introduced
the reinforced concrete frame for which he
would become well known. The entire Packard
complex grew from this basic construction type.
Like other American architects at this time, aka
embraced the need for incremental building in
growing markets;36 buildings expanded as
necessary, with and without prior planning.
Previous: Workers on the roof of the Packard Motor
Car Company Building, Detroit, 1906
Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan /
© Albert Kahn Associates
The main administration building, initially
two loors, added two more as the irm grew.
The Packard site is in truth a 40-acre linear strip
of consistent concrete framing, both a set
of separate buildings, and a single gridded ield
speckled irst with square piers and then later
with round mushroom columns.
At Packard #10, Kahn used Truscon rein-
forced concrete to enlarge the manufacturing
loor and increase loor-to-ceiling heights
for the irst time. The same system proliferated
in building for Ford, Dodge, General Motors,
Hudson, Murray Body Corporation and
countless others. Kahn-built factories are nearly
indistinguishable in early interior photographs,
taken before production machinery was
installed. In addition to a typical plan, they
represent a highly recognisable yet generic
fabric of urban building. In the context
of Detroit, the sameness and extent of these
buildings created a de facto civic identity
invoked by architect’s iat, where none was
provided by politicians.37
Kahn had become an architect through
apprenticeship and private study. Ater his
family emigrated from Germany to the us in
1881, he never returned to formal schooling, but
went out to work aged 11. His talent at drawing
led to a position at Mason & Rice in Detroit,
and to a six-month travelling fellowship to study
architecture in Italy, France and Germany in
1891. It was on this trip that he acquired a taste
for Renaissance architecture; his travel compan-
ion was Henry Bacon, who worked for McKim
Mead & White and would later design the
Lincoln Memorial in Washington (1915–22).
The interests of the young Kahn are best
revealed in his account of the trip, published
in 1891, and in the numerous sketches
he produced during these months. With little
variation in style or composition, Kahn
documented buildings and cityscapes
in a thorough and eicient hand, with only
occasional glimpses of creative insight.38
Image Industry
Despite aka’s functionalist-organic building,
and the image-resistant character of the irm’s
work, modernist critics and architects contin-
ued to cite the factories in and as photographic
images. These images of Kahn’s work were
centrally important to developing progressive
thought, even if other aspects of the irm’s
work were not. Mies’s use of the Glenn Martin
photograph followed a line of similar citations,
whether on building sites or on enlarged
photographs.39 Gropius’s initial publication
of photographs of industrial architecture in
the 1913 Werkbund-Jahrbuch is perhaps the best
known of these, oten cited as an origin point
for Neues Bauen doctrines that developed
between the wars.40 But in European modernist
buildings that recall the image of a Kahn
37
 Albert Kahn Inc, Glenn Martin Bomber plant,
Omaha, Nebraska, 1942
Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan /
© Albert Kahn Associates
 Albert Kahn Inc, interior views,
Packard Motor Car Company Building, Detroit, 1919
Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan /
© Albert Kahn Associates
factory, the relationship between constructional
logic and building envelope was oten the
inverse of one that applied in Detroit. Kahn clad
radically changing architecture in conventional
dress; Europeans inspired by Kahn used the
image of radical architecture to dress up
non-radical building.41 For these architects, core
organisational principles related to function
were oten secondary to function treated as a
representational sign.42 In Kahn manufacturing
buildings, by contrast, a ruthlessly productive
organisation dictated all other aspects of the
space. Cladding style followed utilitarian
decisions and conventions prevailing in North
American architecture at the time. Style was
operationally irrelevant, as the factories show.
On the one hand, then, photographic
architecture drawn from the industrial heart-
land of the United States paradoxically recast
this work as image – preserving the power
of unstyled factories but not stripping the
conventionally styled buildings of their
wrappers to reveal ground-breaking achieve-
ments hidden by pilasters or classical
columns.43 Charles Sheeler’s elegant photo-
graphs of the River Rouge complex are only
the most well-known of these kinds of images
– in this case, commissioned by Ford for the
purpose of sanitising his increasingly negative
image.44 The Sheeler Rouge photographs,
as Daniel Jacobs has shown, aestheticise the
factory and transform it, well before Mies, into
the technological sublime – as do many other
photographs of Kahn’s industrial architecture.
These images entered the Dna of modernism,
providing the commercial vernacular that is
the necessary counterpoint to avant-garde
practice.45 On the other hand, the gains of war
capitalism and victory in the Second World War
(resulting at least in part from the American
industrial efort) recast the same industrial
work once more. Brute war munitions factories
were the Doppelgänger of Ford’s triumphant
message of eicient manufacture. History
foreclosed on Kahn’s work, whether as ephem-
eral image or record of the military-industrial
complex. Sheeler, by contrast, entered the
canon of art history.
The Construction of the Present
Unlike many of Kahn’s Detroit manufacturing
and assembly buildings, Seamless Steel Tubes
still stands today, its three steel-framed sheds
now completely wrapped in a skin of corrugated
enamelled metal. The building’s distinctive
butterly roof proile is thus simultaneously
cancelled out and rendered intriguingly
cartoonlike, a form detached from the generic
industrial zone around it. A single 900t-long
shed joins two shorter ones, all three unglazed
today. Ranks of massive I-columns deine these
sheds, immense feet that rise to support the
gantry crane rail. Above the rail, rising lightly
42
to the roof beyond, slender steel columns
connect lacy steel trusses and complex butterly
roolights, now entirely covered. The dim
interior was once lit along its entire length and
from all four sides. A smattering of unbroken
glass panes along a spandrel wall between
the old building and later additions recalls its
former character. Elsewhere, the interior is
mullioned but not paned. Only the glass was
removed when a coat of insulated cladding
was added to the outside.
Unfenestrated buildings clad with enam-
elled metal are now commonplace in the us,
whether retroitted or newly built. But strangely
similar to Temple Beth El, this vast building’s
new shell obscures the clarity of its structural
diagram and the ingeniousness of its original
design, if for very diferent reasons. The
building’s appearance today hides it from
history just as efectively as the Ionic porch on
Woodward Avenue camoulages the synagogue’s
modernity. One might map aka’s disappear-
ance from history onto the contemporary
invisibility of the irm’s legacy. The River Rouge
Glass Plant and Seamless Steel Tubes in its
original glazed incarnation persist only in
photographic images – images of pure function
unalloyed by change over time. They are not
alone – the mutability of industrial architecture
means that rapidly evolving design solutions
developed for daylight factories are usually
recaptured with diiculty. Our historical
apparatus resists this work.
The evolving roofscapes of the daylight
factories eloquently relect the irm’s experi-
mental practice. The modiied butterly roof
used at Seamless Steel Tubes replaced earlier
sawtooth designs, channelling natural light
from two sides throughout the length of the
building to reduce interior cast shadows, and
funnelling hot air and fumes away through
smaller intake monitors. This type was used at
the Rouge site, in the Soviet buildings and in
the Lady Esther cosmetics plant, to name only
a few. By the late 1930s, the butterly roof evolved
into pop-up lantern monitors like those that
corrugate the Glenn Martin plant’s giant roof,
washing the interior with even light. Seamless
Steel Tubes was formally complex, with its
beautifully modulated fedora hat proile and
initially well-lit interior. But once war was
declared, the daylit factory’s days were num-
bered, and innovative experimentation
migrated from roof proiles to rapid construc-
tion techniques.
At the other end of the spectrum of aka
activities, the components of Kahn’s work
– buildings (and the expertise with which to
construct them), images, the wholesaling of
building products, contracting, mechanical
systems and real-estate development – repre-
sent a distributed force, a sophisticated
adaptation to the requirements of territorial
expansion under industry.46 Diversifying in
diferent productive streams of architectural
activity, Kahn articulated the existing subdivi-
sions of architectural practice without regard
to their interface with discourse or theory.
This is architecture under capitalism – disam-
biguating diferent aspects of a single industry,
and articulating them separately.
Kahn participated in a phase of American
capitalism in which the market for products was
particularly robust. Upshits in the irm’s size
and output occurred at least twice, triggered in
part by territorial or political expansions of the
United States government – once before the
First World War, when the assembly line became
an architectural phenomenon, another around
the time the us entered the Second World War.
Economic historian Giovanni Arrighi notes that
as capitalism develops over time, the market
for goods is eventually distinguished from the
market for capital itself, and the latter begins
to determine the former. The production
of surplus proit through speculation follows,
made possible by abstract instruments of
inancial exchange – chiely stocks and bonds,
but also more complex instruments like futures
and mortgage-backed securities. Kahn’s
industrial activity produced things that could be
sold for money, not inancial instruments
themselves. His most active years (up through
1942) coincided with an increasingly articulated
market system that had a material basis
fundamentally diferent from the immaterial
basis of the later ‘inancialisation’ of capital in
the second half of the twentieth century. The
shit, then, from a market economy to a inance
economy had signiicant consequences for the
built environment.47 The work of Kahn provides
an opportunity to see the diference between
them. aka buildings produced mass goods;
they were themselves mass-produced, and they
were critical instruments in the development
of industry’s basic operations, not cultural
products spat out as by-products of industrial
capitalism. They muddy distinctions between
base and superstructure (in that they are both),
and reveal the agency of architecture in social
and economic construction.48
In terms of Detroit’s development, Kahn
created a systematic if highly calibrated
instrument, perhaps a default response to
the need to collectivise urban experience.
His infrastructural approach put architecture
in the service of urban organisation, in part
by constructing the same thing for diferent
clients, efectively creating sameness and
regularity to connect the competitive principali-
ties of Ford, Chrysler and GM (as well as others)
through a common manner of building. This
made them parts of a single civic entity, not solo
operators sharing infrastructure generally paid
for by taxpayers, and continually accelerating
competitive drive. Whether aka did this from
aa files 75
an excess of civic piety or because repetition
cut the irm’s costs (along with the cultural
value of the architectural output) is impossible
to determine, but also irrelevant. As the irm
systematically constructed sites of industrial
capitalism in the irst decades of the twentieth
century, its members found inventive
capacities for architecture in new spatial
practices associated with industry and the
consumption of its products.
Regardless of Kahn’s admiration for the
American Renaissance, aka practised within
the broader rubric of Progressive Era reform
movements. The daylight factory was billed
as a beneit to both industrialist and labourer,
and ailiation across class lines underpinned
much of the irm’s work and the ideology
of its principal partners. Today, as architects
investigate the degree to which design can be
married to public welfare and better education
about building, both inside and outside
capitalism, the Kahn operations merit further
study. Whether they constitute models or
counter models, the irm’s activities foreground
the issue of architecture and the built environ-
ment as accommodations for many, quite
apart from questions of land ownership and
social equity. The body of work produced by
the irm between 1902 and 1945 raises the
question: could architecture under capitalism
ever be anything but commercial practice,
and can modes of resistance be wrapped in the
least radical of images? Do architects need
to ‘own’ politics in order to be political? Does
the architect’s intention relate to the eicacy
of their work?
Ever more active specialisation within
architectural irms around increasingly
technical requirements means that responsibil-
ity for the built environment has grown more
distributed and abstract over the course of
the last century. Yet architecture (or building,
as speciic material processes and output)
remains easier to relate to a market economy
than to one that deals primarily in abstract
inancial exchange. If the speciicity of
architectural construction relates closely to
the production of other sorts of goods, then
the economy of ‘cultural capital’ within
architecture still represents a ‘cycle of accumu-
lation’ similar to that which Arrighi identiies
for inancial instruments, representing an
ephemeral and abstract system of architectural
exchange. Prizes, publications, exhibitions,
academic events, media appearances, even
academic appointments ofered by institutions
(exchanges) to particular actors (private
corporations) begin to approximate investment
instruments analogous to those found on
the stock market or in the stockpiles of
inancial managers.49 By this schema, the
architecture academy today operates parallel
to real-estate developers, yet on a diferent
economic plane, playing the role of architec-
ture’s Wall Street – managing investment and
risk for the creation of architectural futures.
In the age of speculative capital, we have
reached the end of the image in building, and
moved on to something else.

1. Acknowledgements: My thanks to
Jan Frohburg for sharing his extensive
research on the Concert Hall Project;
also to Reinhold Martin, Esra Akcan,
Monica Ponce de Leon, and Lutz
Robbers for opportunities to present
parts of this work; to Robert Fishman
for his Stakhanovite comparison;
and to Thomas Weaver for his expertise
and breadth of curiosity.
2. Chris Meister has recently explored
Kahn’s early industrial career, revealing
how factories ofered an early break
to a young architect struggling to
establish a commercially viable oice
in a competitive market. Meister cites
Kahn’s obituary, with an estate of
over two million dollars at his death in
1942. See Chris Meister, ‘Albert Kahn’s
Partners in Industrial Architecture’,
Journal of the Society of Architectural
Historians, vol 72, no 1 (March 2013),
pp 78–95.
3. George Nelson, Industrial Architecture
of Albert Kahn, Inc (New York,
nY: Architectural Book Publishing
Company, 1939).
4. Hildebrandt is citing William
Macdonald on the Parthenon here.
See Federico Bucci, Albert Kahn,
Architect of Ford (New York, nY:
Princeton Architectural Press, 1993),
pp 103–14; also see Grant Hildebrand,
Designing for Industry: The Architecture
of Albert Kahn (Cambridge, Ma: Mit
Press, 1974), p 193.
5. Designed as a project with students
at the Illinois Institute of Technology
when Mies was director of the
architecture programme there from
1938, the collage features cut coloured
paper collaged on an enlarged
photostat, measures 29.5 x 62 inches.
6. Nikolaus Pevsner, An Outline of
European Architecture (Harmonds-
worth: Penguin, 1982 [1943]), p 15.
7. ‘By bureaucratic architecture I mean
all building that is the product of
large-scale architectural organisations,
from which personal expression
is absent. Indeed the type of
bureaucratic architecture par
excellence is … the production of such
an architectural irm as Albert Kahn
Inc, in Detroit, where the anonymity
is the more obvious now that
Albert Kahn, the founder, is dead.
The strength of a irm such as Kahn,
or for that matter of a state
architectural bureau, depends not
on the architectural genius of one
man (there is suicient evidence that
Kahn was a mediocre architect
considered as an individual), but in
the organizational genius which can
establish a fool-proof system of rapid
and complete plan production’.
See Henry Russell Hitchcock, ‘The
Architecture of Bureaucracy and the
Architecture of Genius’, Architectural
Review (January 1947), pp 3–6. For
an earlier version of the bureaucratic
architect, see Francis Fitzpatrick,
‘The City Beautiful’, The Western
Architect, vol 17, no 1 (January 1911),
p 13. My thanks to Johnathan
Puf for pointing out this reference.
8. Paul Jaskot, The Architecture of
Oppression: The SS, Forced Labour and
the Nazi Monumental Building Economy
(London: Routledge, 2000).
9. See Claire Zimmerman, ‘Heedless
Oblivion: Curating Architecture ater
the Second World War’, in Geof Eley
and Julia Adeney Thomas, eds,
Visualising Fascism (Duke University
Press, under review).
10. As Paul Jaskot has shown, Hitler’s
monumental stone building stock
was dependent on the labour
exploited from prisoners incarcerated
in concentration camps such as
Flossenbürg, sited remotely, yet near
the mountainous granite deposits of
southeast Germany not far from the
Czech border, or Mauthausen, due west
of Vienna. Kahn’s architecture, by
contrast, was tightly constrained by the
need to perform economically as well
as operationally in a highly competitive
building market.
11. Other responses followed. Postmodern
architects, by contrast, acknowledged
that image and technique no longer
belonged together, if in fact they ever
had, when they adopted a highly
self-conscious disjuncture between
the two in buildings by Robert Venturi,
Robert A M Stern, and others.
12. ‘Genius versus bureaucracy’ resembles
Clement Greenberg’s 1939 opposition
of avant-garde and kitsch, disciplined
for the architecture markets.
My thanks to Nelson Mota for this
observation. See Clement Greenberg,
‘Avant-garde and Kitsch’, Partisan
Review, no 5 (1939), pp 34–49.
13. See http://ilovedetroitmichigan.com/
detroit-architecture/albert-kahn-400-
buildings-in-metro-detroit.
14. Neil Levine, conversation with author,
March 2015.
15. Scrapbook iles, Box 13, Albert Kahn
Papers, Bentley Historical Library,
University of Michigan (bHl).
16. Sonia Melnikova-Raich, ‘The Soviet
Problem with Two “Unknowns”:
How an American Architect and a
Soviet Negotiator Jump-Started the
Industrialization of Russia, Part i:
Albert Kahn’, Ia: The Journal of the
Society for Industrial Archaeology, vol 36,
no 2 (2010/2013), pp 57–80.
17. ‘The International Jew’ was the irst
a series of four articles that appeared
in The Dearborn Independent, a
newspaper owned by Henry Ford,
then published as a separate pamphlet.
18. Kahn’s oice library, preserved at
Lawrence Technological University
and the University of Michigan,
shows that the oice kept up to date
on contemporary architectural
developments in the United States
and Europe, including those of Neues
Bauen and other modern architects.
19. Albert Kahn Papers, bHl.
20. The contents of the Kahn Library at
Lawrence Technological University
suggest that this was an elective choice,
not a default lack.
21. They also increase the tendency of
stone cladding to crack, a matter with
which the Kahn irm dealt carefully.
See photographs of cracking of the GM
Building cladding, Box 2, bHl. These
are joined by careful documentation of
construction experimentation on many
other projects.
22. In fact, the GM Building may also
have inspired Mies’s Reichsbank
competition project – it had an impact
on Hans Poelzig’s iG Farben complex
in Frankfurt am Main.
23. Michael Smith notes that the designer
of the GM Building was Wirt Rowland,
who preferred non-classical styles for
the exterior of buildings he designed.
Kahn insisted on classical detailing.
See Michael G Smith, Designing Detroit:
Wirt Rowland and the Rise of Modern
American Architecture (Detroit, Mi:
Wayne State University Press, 2017).
24. Albert Kahn Papers, bHl.
25. George C Baldwin, ‘The Oices of
Albert Kahn, Detroit, Michigan’,
Architectural Forum 29 (November 1918),
pp 125–30; George Nelson, The
Industrial Architecture of Albert Kahn,
Inc (New York, nY: Architectural Book
Publishing Co, 1939).
26. Cost cards found at the Kahn irm
in 2015 reveal that all building costs
were reckoned in cubic footage
as well as square footage. See Kahn’s
original cost notebook, bHl.
27. ‘Through the example of Kahn, you seem
to make a case for open-ended design
and lexibility, a current interrupted
by the modernist-functionalist tide…
over-designed, functionally over-
determined modernist layouts lack
such lexibility and have proven to
become obsolescent much more quickly
than their more perfunctory ancestors.’
Ricardo Agarez, note to author, April 2014.

aa files 75 43
28. See Michael Mahoney, ‘Reading
a Machine’, www.princeton.edu/
~hos/h398/readmach/modeltfr.html,
in which Mahoney clariies the
coincidence of technical complexity
with user-friendliness. He locates
a key instance of this coincidence
in the design and production of
the Model t, beginning at Ford’s
Piquette Avenue plant in 1908,
but largely moved to Highland Park
by 1910.
29. John Harwood, The Interface: IBM and
the Transformation of Corporate Design
1945–1976 (Minneapolis, Mn: University
of Minnesota Press, 2011) thoughtfully
pursues the subject of design interface.
30. Postwar Eastern Europe may ofer
a diferent model, equally as invested
in mass production as that of aka,
and ofering a far better comparison
than ‘Nazidom’.
31. Adolf Behne, Der moderne Zweckbau
(Munich: Drei Masken Verlag, 1926).
32. Jayne Choi, ‘Cybernetic Industrious-
ness: The Production of Albert Kahn
Associates, 1918–1942’, unpublished
paper.
33. Even Kahn’s Clements Library at uM,
one of his favourite projects, is one
in a long line of citations, from Vignola
to Stanford White.
34. Olivier Zunz, The Changing Face of
Inequality: Urbanization, Industrial
Development and Immigrants in
Detroit, 1880–1920 (Chicago, il:
University of Chicago Press, 1982).
35. Chris Meister, ‘Albert Kahn’s Partners
in Industrial Architecture’, op cit, p 80.
36. His Detroit Trust Company building
on West Fort Street, for example, was
both complete in its initial one-bay
iteration (1915) and equally complete
in a 1926 expansion.
37. For the ‘typical plan’ in Kahn’s work,
see Francesco Marullo, ‘Architecture
and Revolution: The Typical Plan
as Index of the Generic’, in Pier Vittorio
Aureli (ed), The City as Project (Berlin:
Ruby Press, 2013), pp 216–60.
38. Albert Kahn, ‘Our Travelling Scholar’,
The American Architect and Building
News XXXIII: 812 (18 July 1891), pp 39–41;
for a selection of Kahn’s travel
sketches, see https://exchange.umma.
umich.edu/resources/24727.
Concrete load testing, Krolik Building, Detroit, 1917
Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan /
© Albert Kahn Associates
39. Industrialists did not make the same
mistake: Giovanni Agnelli studied
Highland Park closely, as did the
architects of the Van Nelle factory
in Rotterdam. For recent studies of
these buildings, see pathokahn.com.
40. Walter Gropius, ‘Die Entwicklung
moderner Industriebaukunst’, whole
issue Die Kunst in Industrie und
Handel/ Jahrbuch des DWB 1913
(Jena: E Diederichs, 1913). Translated
as ‘The Development of Modern
Industrial Architecture’, 1913 in
Benton and Sharp, Form and Function
(London: Crosby Lockwood Staples,
1975), pp 53–55.
41. For some examples, see pathokahn.
com.
42. Reyner Banham, Theory and Design
in the First Machine Age (Cambridge,
Ma: Mit Press, 1960), pp 325–26.
Banham cites Buckminster Fuller.
43. For a deinition of photographic
architecture, see Claire Zimmerman,
Photographic Architecture in the
Twentieth Century (Minneapolis, Mn:
University of Minnesota Press, 2014);
for documentation of the architecture
of the Second World War, see
Jean-Louis Cohen, Architecture in
Uniform (Paris: Editions Hazan, 2011).
44. See Daniel Jacobs, ‘The Fief of Ford’,
San Rocco 12: The Client (2016), pp 19–33.
45. Thomas Crow, ‘Modernism and Mass
Culture in the Visual Arts’, Modern
Art in the Common Culture (New Haven,
ct: Yale University Press, 1996).
46. Claire Zimmerman, ‘Albert Kahn’s
Territories’, in Franch i Gilabert, Eva et
al (eds), Oice US Agenda (Zurich: Lars
Müller Publishers, 2014), pp 117–27.
47. See Giovanni Arrighi, The Long
Twentieth Century: Money, Power
and the Origins of our Time (London:
Verso, 2010), pp Xi–XiV.
48. For Raymond Williams, the term
‘base’ represents a social process,
and superstructure should rightly be
read as ‘superstructures’. See Raymond
Williams, ‘Base and Superstructure
in Marxist Cultural Theory’, New
Let Review, November/December 1973.
49. In this schema, the hedge fund
managers are those who hazard the
most, while risking the least – like the
architects who never build anything.
Ross Anderson is a senior lecturer in architecture at the
University of Sydney. He worked as an architect in the oices
of Daniel Libeskind and Zvi Hecker, both in Berlin, before
moving to Cambridge to complete a PhD dissertation,
‘From the Bauhütte to the Bauhaus’, under the supervision
of Peter Carl. His research, mostly on modern German
architecture and philosophy, has been published in various
edited books and journals, including The Bauhaus Annual,
the Journal of Architecture and Art Bulletin.
Marco Biraghi is a professor at the Politecnico di Milano,
where he teaches the history of contemporary
architecture. He is the author of Hans Poelzig: Architectura,
Ars Magna (1992), as well as more recent titles Storia
dell’architettura contemporanea 1750–2008 (2008), Project
of Crisis: Manfredo Tafuri and Contemporary Architecture
(2013) and Storia dell’architettura italiana 1985–2015
(with Silvia Micheli, 2013). In 2004 he co-founded GiZMO,
a research group dealing with the history and criticism
of contemporary architectural culture.
Shantel Blakely is an architectural historian and currently
a recipient of the Richard Rogers Fellowship, researching
the English poet–educator–anarchist Herbert Read.
She has taught courses in architectural history, theory
and urban design at Columbia, Barnard and Parsons, and
her writings and translations have appeared in Log, PLOT,
Avery Review and Open Letters. She was formerly public
programmes manager at Harvard GsD, and in 2002
she worked as a tour guide for Historic New England at
the Gropius house, Lincoln, Massachusetts.
Nigel Coates is an architect, designer and teacher. He
graduated from the aa in 1974 and ran a unit at the school
for a decade from 1978, out of which emerged the natØ
(Narrative Architecture Today) group. In 1985 he formed
Branson Coates Architecture with Doug Branson, with
whom he completed a number of projects, including
a series of cafes in Japan, an extension to the Gefrye
Museum in London and the National Centre for Popular
Music in Sheield. From 1995 to 2011 he was professor
and head of department at the Royal College of Art. Since
2006 he has worked through his own studio, producing
multiple furniture and lighting designs and contributing
installations to various galleries, museums and biennales.
He is the author of Guide to Ecstacity (2003) and Narrative
Architecture (2012).
Theo Crosby (1925–1994) was an architect, editor, writer
and curator. Born in South Africa, he moved to London in
1947, where he worked for Frey, Drew & Partners. In the
1950s, parallel to running his own practice, he was the
technical editor of Architectural Design, the creative driving
force behind the 1956 ‘This is Tomorrow’ exhibition
at the Whitechapel Gallery and editor and designer of the
magazine Uppercase. In the 1960s he organised and designed
the British pavilion at the 1964 Milan Triennale, and headed
the design oice of Taylor Woodrow on a proposal for the
new Euston Station. In the 1970s he co-founded the
design irm Pentagram, and in the last decades of his life
he acted as an architectural advisor to the Prince of Wales,
was appointed professor of architecture and design at the
Rca, and was fundamental to the building of the Globe
Theatre. His many publications include Architecture: City
Sense (1965) and The Necessary Monument (1970).
Contributors
Thomas Daniell is head of the department of architecture
at the University of St Joseph, Macau. Widely published,
his books include FOBa: Buildings (2005), Ater the Crash:
Architecture in Post-Bubble Japan (2008), Houses and Gardens
of Kyoto (2010) and Kiyoshi Sey Takeyama + Amorphe (2011).
His book An Anatomy of Inluence is forthcoming from
aa Publications in 2018.
Salomon Frausto is the director of studies at the tu Delt’s
Berlage Centre for Advanced Studies in Architecture and
Urban Design, and previously the coordinator of the public
and scholarly programmes of Columbia University’s Buell
Centre. He graduated with degrees in architecture from
the University of Michigan and Columbia University and his
books include Architourism: Authentic, Exotic, Escapist,
Spectacular (2005) and the forthcoming Twelve Institutional
and Public Buildings Revisited, 1928–1968. His work on Theo
Crosby forms part of a long-term book and research project.
Francisco González de Canales teaches Intermediate Unit 8 at
the aa with his partner Nuria Álvarez Lombardero, with
whom he also runs a Seville-based oice, Canales &
Lombardero. He has lectured widely and is the author of
various books, including Experiments with Life Itself (2013)
and (with Nicholas Ray) Rafael Moneo: Building, Teaching,
Writing (2015).
Kristina Jaspers works as a curator at the Deutsche
Kinemathek, and has co-curated, among other things,
the exhibition ‘Bigger Than Life: Ken Adam’s Film Design’,
in which the projects presented in her essay were shown
together for the irst time. The exhibition is provisionally
scheduled to travel to the Oslo Architecture Museum
in Autumn 2018. She has also contributed to numerous
publications related to ilm and architecture, including
Zwischen Film und Kunst: Storyboards von Hitchcock
bis Spielberg (2011) and Things to Come: Science, Fiction,
Film (2016).
Roberta Marcaccio teaches history and theory of architecture
at the aa and leads a design think tank at the London School
of Architecture. Alongside her teaching activities she also
works for the London-based studio DsDHa, overseeing the
practice’s research and communication. Her writings have
featured in Real Estates (2014), Erasmus Efect (2014) and
Milano Architettura (2015) and she is currently working with
aa Publications on an English anthology of the writings of
Ernesto Nathan Rogers, which will be published in 2018.
Joanna Merwood-Salisbury is professor of architecture
at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand.
She has published widely on nineteenth-century American
architecture, including Chicago 1890: The Skyscraper and
the City (2009), and her book, Design for the Crowd:
Patriotism and Protest in Union Square, is forthcoming from
the University of Chicago Press.
Laila Seewang is an architect, historian and currently
a research fellow, completing her PhD in urban history
at the etH Zurich. She has been published in The New
York Times, the Journal of the Association for Information
Science and Technology and Scenario Journal, and her essays
have appeared in the edited anthologies The SaNaa Studios
2006–2008 (2009) and in Open City (2015).
Rebecca Siefert is a PhD candidate in art history at the
Graduate Centre of the City University of New York,
and an adjunct instructor of art and architectural history
at New York University.
Zoë Slutzky is a writer and translator in New York. She is
a PhD candidate in comparative literature at the Graduate
Centre of the City University of New York, and teaches
literature at Hunter College.
Shin Takamatsu established his architectural irm in Kyoto
in 1980 and almost immediately attracted a worldwide
reputation through a succession of mechanistic, idiosyn-
cratic buildings, including the kimono workshop Origin
and the dental clinics Ark and Pharaoh. Drawings of these
projects, in what would soon be identiied as his signature
graphite style, were exhibited at the aa in 1986 with an
accompanying published folio, The Killing Moon. Since then,
Takamatsu has completed numerous cultural, commercial
and residential projects in Japan, Taiwan and China, and
is professor emeritus at his alma mater, Kyoto University.
Victor Plahte Tschudi is a professor in architectural history
and theory at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design
and the leader of Occas (the Oslo Centre for Critical
Architectural Studies). He is the author of Baroque Antiquity:
Archaeological Imagination in Early Modern Europe (2017) and
is currently writing a book on Piranesi and the modern age.
Freya Wigzell is completing a doctorate at the Bartlett,
ucl on architecture’s enduring relationship with shells.
Claire Zimmerman is an associate professor at the
University of Michigan where she directs the doctoral
studies programme at Taubman College. She is the author
of Photographic Architecture in the Twentieth Century (2014)
and co-editor of Neo-avant-garde and Postmodern: Postwar
Architecture in Britain and Beyond (2010). Recent and
forthcoming essays include ‘Reading the (Photographic)
Evidence’, (Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians,
2017), ‘Queequeg’s Coin’ (bfo journal, 2017) and ‘Heedless
Oblivion: Curating Architecture ater the Second World
War’ (in Visualising Fascism, 2018). Current projects include
Invisible Architecture, a historical analysis of the impact
of us industrialisation on architecture through the Kahns
of Detroit.
Francesco Zuddas is senior lecturer in architecture at Anglia
Ruskin University. He studied at the University of Cagliari
and the aa, where he also taught architecture and urbanism.
He is currently writing a book on the project of universities
in Italy in the 1970s, based on his PhD research.