Albert Kahn Inc.

A study of Albert Kahn Incorporated—the architecture firm closely associated with the Ford Motor Company and other auto companies—that explores capitalism and political economy through the built environment of industry and culture.

In Albert Kahn Inc. Claire Zimmerman provides a history of second-wave industrialization associated with the growth and development of the United States auto industry and its global footprint. A forensic analysis of the “architects of Ford,” the book theorizes how building and capitalism intersected in the case of twentieth-century industrial buildings, but also in other kinds of architecture and in the built environment writ large. Generally a marginal subject in histories of architecture, industrialism here exposes the expansionist modern project in Western architecture and culture, which was based on natural resource extraction and labor exploitation. With more than 140 full-color illustrations, the book combines an analysis of industrial architecture with compelling photographic evidence drawn from assorted archives.

Zimmerman offers a political economy of architecture; reconceptualizes the design process within a high-volume firm in dialogue with fast-paced industrial capitalism; tracks the feedback loops that industrialization introduced into architecture; and maps the unequal effects of these industrial environments on the workers who labored within them. Ultimately, Zimmerman shows how the coalition of US private capital and state power built industrial installations as imperialist projects, and how its practices survive to the present day.Table of Contents
List of Abbreviations
Preface
Introduction: Assembling the Book
1 Albert Kahn and the Kahn Family Businesses
2. Industrial Architecture, Situated in the Twentieth Century
3. Designing and Planning Industrialized Buildings, “Organs of the Human Brain”
4 Constructing Industrialized Buildings, “Created by the Human Hand”
5 Occupying Industrialized Buildings, “the Power of Knowledge Objectified”
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
Appendix A. The Kahn Office
Appendix B. The Kahn Library: German language books in the Kahn collections
Appendix C. The Cost Cards
Appendix D. The Construction Photographs
Notes
Bibliography
Index"Some books in architectural history rival the monumentality of buildings themselves. Claire Zimmerman’s Albert Kahn Inc. is one such case. It evokes monumentality not only in its physical heft but in its landmark contribution to the field”

—Critical Inquiry“In a truly alternative history of modern architecture, Zimmerman repatriates industrial architecture from its long-time outcast status back to the heart of the discipline. Drawing on extensive new documentary research, her account of the social, political, economic, cultural ramifications of the work of Kahn’s office is superb.”
—Adrian Forty, Professor Emeritus of Architectural History, University College London; author of Concrete and Culture

“Zimmerman challenges us to think anew about the position of architecture and engineering in relation to manufacturing, materials, and the midcentury politics of the United States and the USSR.”
—Kathleen James-Chakraborty, Professor of Art History, University College Dublin; author of Architecture Since 1400

“This rich and compelling account of one of the last century’s most prolific and intriguing building operations belongs in every library, of any scale, concerned with the history of modern architecture.”
—Andrew Leach, Professor of Architectural History, University of Sydney

Anchored in the most thorough study to date of the era-defining industrial architecture of Albert Kahn Inc., enhanced by intriguing sidebars on Mies van der Rohe, drawing on Zimmerman’s astute grasp of work practices, design details, and organizational modes—especially those deployed so inventively in the daylight factories that served extractive, manufacturing, welfare, and consumerist capitalism during the first half of the twentieth century—this book redefines how modern architecture must now be understood.
—Terry Smith, author of Making the Modern: Industry, Art, and Design in
America (1993)
Claire Zimmerman is Professor of Architecture at the University of Toronto, where she directs the PhD program in Architecture, Landscape, and Design. She is the author of Photographic Architecture in the Twentieth Century (Minnesota, 2014) and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (Taschen, 2006) and coeditor of Architecture against Democracy: Histories of the Nationalist International (Minnesota, 2024) and Detroit-Moscow-Detroit: An Architecture for Industrialization (MIT Press, 2023), among others.