Kahn, Albert

Kahn, Albert (kän), 1869–1942, American architect, designer of factories, b. Germany. He organized a large office in Detroit that applied the techniques of mass production to architecture, and he designed a great number of factories, war plants, and naval bases. Kahn was a pioneer in the use of reinforced concrete and steel. From 1928 to 1932 he was in charge of the industrial building program in the USSR.

Bibliography

See G. Nelson, Industrial Architecture of Albert Kahn, Inc. (1939).

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Kahn, Albert

(born March 21, 1869, Rhaunen, Westphalia—died Dec. 8, 1942, Detroit, Mich., U.S.) German-born U.S. industrial architect. In 1904 he received a commission for the Packard Motor Car Co. auto factory; his design, with its reinforced concrete frame, represented an innovative departure from traditional masonry factory construction. Kahn was the principal architect for most of the large American automobile companies for 30 years. His firm designed more than a thousand projects for Ford, among them the fabrication and assembly plant in River Rouge, Mich., which was one of the largest industrial complexes in the world. By 1937 his firm was producing 19% of all architect-designed industrial buildings in the U.S., and he received commissions for factories, foundries, and warehouses from all continents. Kahn's firm designed 521 factories in the U.S.S.R. and trained more than a thousand Soviet engineers during the 1930s.