Albert Kahn
Architect (c.1869-1942)
1942 Obituary [1]
THE death, in Detroit, on Tuesday, December 8th, of Mr. Albert Kahn, the well-known industrial architect and engineer, of America, will be widely mourned by those of our readers who are interested in factory design. He was the designer of America's principal automobile plants, and he designed and built factories for the Packard, Ford, Chrysler, and General Motors concerns. After the Pearl Harbour disaster he was one of the first men to be called in for consultation with regard to the construction of America's new armament works. Among those works may be counted the factory of the Wright Aeronautical Corporation at Cincinnati, the bomber works of Ford at Willow Run, and the Chrysler aircraft engine factory at Chicago. In his forty years of work in America he and his brother s, together with their organisation, had constructed something like 150 different plants with a value of something over £400,000,000. In 1928 he went to Russia to assist in the first Five-Year Plan, and in two years he had trained about 4000 Soviet engineers and had supervise d the design and erection of some 520 different factories. In his own firm more than 500 assistants were employed on the design of factories , and their building on a mass production basis. Albert Kahn was of German birth and was seventy-three years of age. He was trained as an architect and gained a scholarship which enabled him to travel in Europe. He returned to Detroit and set up his own business, in which he was joined by his brothers. The spread of industry brought new problems of factory and housing construction, which he successfully solved, and his firm became one of the leading authorities on reinforced concrete construction. In later years he specialised in factory construction, but he retained his personal interest in house construction.