(2 of 3)
Factory of Factories. Secret of Albert Kahn's ability to build factories faster than any other man alive is not primarily an architectural one. It lies in a combination of engineering knowledge and shrewd business organization. Himself a product of the great manufacturing system that grew up in Detroit with the expansion of the modern automobile industry, he has applied the principles of mass production to the art of architecture. His Detroit offices, now running on a feverish schedule, are a veritable factory of factory design.
When a new job of designing enters the Kahn office, Albert Kahn's whole team goes into action. The Executive Division not only scurries after contractors for steel, concrete, excavation and labor, but checks the details of estimates and assures smooth-running coordination. Meanwhile the engineers and architects of the Technical Division have worked out their structural blueprints and are ready with specifications for everything from steel trusses to washroom tile.
Kahn factory designs have been known to get under way before the client has made up his mind on the location of the building.
F.O.B. Detroit. "Don't let anyone tell you that luck doesn't count," says Albert Kahn. "I was born under a lucky star. I got all the breaks." His biggest break was that he happened to be a struggling young architect in Detroit at the time when the automobile was about to make Detroit the biggest mass-production center in the Western Hemisphere.
Born in the small town of Rhaunen, near Germany's Ruhr Basin, Kahn arrived in the U.S. as a gangling boy of twelve. Son of an impoverished smalltown Rabbi who peddled fruit for a living on Detroit's streets, young Albert seemed destined to be an infant prodigy musician. But the vicissitudes of fruit peddling made it necessary for young Albert to enter the offices of a Detroit architect as office boy. He was fired from the job because he smelled too strongly of his father's horse, whom he dutifully curried every day.
One day Julius Melchers (father of U.S. Artist Gari Melchers) picked up the downcast Kahn and took him into his drawing school. Learning fast, Albert Kahn was soon ready for another architectural job, with Detroit Architect George D. Mason, where he spent 14 years making himself an expert in his craft. A trip to Europe at 21 (on a $500 scholarship he got from the magazine American Architect) gave him what he considers his real education in architecture. Back in Detroit, at 26, he joined two other architects in opening an office. Within two years one of his partners had died, the other had gone to teach architecture at Cornell University.
Undismayed, Architect Kahn filled his partners' places with his younger brothers Louis, Moritz and Felix, kept an eye out for a still younger brother Julius, who was just finishing college. His faith in the Kahn family was not misplaced. Louis is still Albert's chief executive and right-hand man. Felix worked with the famous "six companies" group that built Boulder Dam. Moritz, now dead, supervised most of the work on Russia's Five-Year Plan. The young Julius, later an executive with Republic Steel, invented a new and more precisely calculable method of reinforcing concrete which eventually made Albert Kahn the outstanding U.S. authority on concrete construction.