The white-haired old man who had just been awarded a medal for distinguished war service had never been closer to the firing line than the desk of blueprints in his office in Detroit. But the applauding members of the American Institute of Architects in Detroit's Hotel Statler this week knew that Albert Kahn's contribution toward the defeat of the Axis powers had been greater than that of many a general. In nearly every United Nations industrial stronghold, from Detroit to Novosibirsk, his art is conspicuous. Albert Kahn, 73, father of modern factory design, is the world's No. 1 industrial architect.
Before U.S. war production could get its second wind after Pearl Harbor, it needed factories, and it needed them fast. So industry turned to Albert Kahn. He had long been accustomed to break all records in factory construction. He had designed many a mammoth U.S. plant in a few days, had set it up and delivered the keys in a few months. Packard's architect for 39 years, Ford's for 34, Chrysler's for 17, General Motors' for 150-odd major plants, Kahn had done some two billion dollars' worth of industrial building in the last four decades. He was used to big jobs, done fast.
In the busy offices of Albert Kahn Associated Architects & Engineers, Inc., on several floors of Detroit's New Center Building (which he himself designed) he and 500-odd assistants (soon to be 650) were handling last December more factory construction than any other industrial architects in the world. During 1941, his office rolled up the unprecedented figure of 20,000,000 sq. ft. of industrial construction for the national defense effort. He had set a record in building the Wright Aeronautical Corp. factory in Cincinnati. Within a year Kahn was to build a still bigger one: Henry Ford's vast, $75,000,000 Willow Run bomber plant. Willow Run's record will be broken if a still bigger Kahn job—so far in plans only—goes through: the $120,000,000 Chrysler airplane engine plant in the Chicago area.
He Did It Before. The problem of rapid industrial building on a national scale was nothing new to Builder Kahn. In 1928 the Soviet Government, after combing the U.S. for a man who could furnish the building brains for Russia's industrialization, offered the job to Kahn. Twenty-five Kahn engineers and architects went to Moscow. They had to start from scratch. Russia not only lacked factories, but the pencils and drafting boards to design them. There was only one blueprint machine in Moscow. Six months were taken up in compiling a Russian-English technical dictionary so that the U.S. engineers could make the Russians understand what they were talking about. Raw recruits from Russia's farms and city streets had to be converted into expert draftsmen and construction workers.
Soon Kahn's engineers were given full charge of the entire heavy industrial building program of the first Five-Year Plan. In two years they had built 521 factories from Kiev to Yakutsk, and trained some 4,000 Soviet engineers and apprentices to carry on their work.