The Resuscitation of Albert Kahn

Dieter Marcello, whose brilliant film on the Detroit architect Albert Kahn (1869-1942) is an exemplary mix of image and idea, is entertaining these days the half-serious theory that the shy Jewish immigrant from Rhaunen near Mainz singlehandedly won the Second World War.

Consider these details: When the Depression stopped auto factory commissions in America, Kahn was approached by Russian five year planners to build tractor factories and steel mills and other industrial infrastructure in the Soviet Union. (Over 500 of his 2000 completed projects were done in Russia before World War II.) And from the American side, he built the Chrysler Tank Arsenal and the Willow Run Bomber Plant whose almost 9000 B-24 Liberators provided the lethal punch that level German war industries.

Think of it this way: Kahn caught the Germans in a lethal pincher movement. From the East, his Stalin tanks; from the West his Liberator bombers. Heh, I've got even a bigger stretch ready for your consideration. In Berlin this summer they're celebrating the foundation of the Prussian Empire. In Detroit, the founding of the city as Fort Pontchartrain in 1701. Two tercentennaries with a single connection. Albert Kahn ended the Prussian Empire because he was the Albert Speer of the Detroit war industry.

Both Mies and Gropius, penny poor immigrants, tried to get a handle on this wealth in a secret meeting with Kahn at the University of Michigan in 1940 (the Saarinens, Eliel and Eero were on hand from nearby Cranbrook). Kahn turned them down. Nobody knows for sure why, but my theory is that he didn't trust their artsy-fartsiness. He mocked their Bauhaus style as "razored" architecture, their "golden fish bowls" (think of Mies' Neue National Galerie in Berlin, useless as an exhibition space, a Denkmal to his own procustrean geometric obsessions), and their increasingly complex means (pilotis and cantilevers) to achieve their simple ends. Kahn used to chide his peers that architecture was ninety percent business and engineering, ten percent art. Mies and Gropius reversed that ratio.

Now in the outstanding, thin catalog for the Albert Kahn retrospective at the Art Museum of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor--through October, 2001 (the hernia producing catalogs for Mies' back to back adulations at MOMA/New York and the Whitney are as thin in new ideas as they are (literally) heavy and (stylistically) prolix), we finally learn why Kahn's reputation had all but evaporated a decade after his death. To the living belong the spoils.

In their landmark 1932 exhibition at MOMA, Phillip Johnson and Henry Russell Hitchcock coined the term, "International Style", to take the sting of nationalist antipathies out of their campaign to establish the Bauhaus as the authentically modern style. Two essays in this catalog are as solidly revisionist as anything I have ever read in architectural history.

Terry Smith of the University of Sydney proves conclusively that the cultural snobbery of Corbu and Mies held factory architecture as infra dig, and Grant Hildebrand proves with equal force that the "mature" Mies was cribbed from Kahn's factories. The tide is turning in Kahn's favor.

I've never undervalued Kahn, from age three. His splendid Beau Deco Fisher Building (it's a characteristic 1920's transitional style between Beaux Art and Art Deco) was commissioned the year I was born, 1927, and completed the next year.

But to me, lately moved from my birthplace in Battle Creek to Detroit (my father had fled to Las Vegas with his secretary), it was not the Golden Tower with the Golden Hour of WJR, the Good Will station. It was the GillyHooBird's Nest, whence my blue collar Uncle Dan Fitzpatrick--he dispatched delivery trucks downtown at Crowley Milner's--secretly attributed his daily candy bar gifts as the work of the GillyHooBird. Some minutes after six p.m., settled down in his easy chair to read The Detroit Times, Uncle Dan would whisper with great intensity, "Pat, did you hear his wings whoosh?"

Which was my signal to examine the G-Bird's favorite landing place, the window ledge outside the front door. I never had to stop believing in Santa Claus. I still believe in the GillyHooBird. And am confident that the bloated rep of the Bauhustlers is at last over. RIP, Albert Kahn, who Dieter and I believe is the greatest architect of the twentieth century. Now there's a proper way to celebrate Detroit's tercentennial.

Praise Kahn by visiting, relishing and preserving his huge repertoire of buildings in the Detroit area, beginning with the shameless abandonment of the most significant building in the history of the twentieth century, Albert Kahn's Highland Park, Michigan Model T plant (1913). Architectural reps ain't over til they're over. Here comes Kahn. Bless his shy, quirky nature, and his blessedly creative pencil.