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How Michigan Became the Epicenter of the Modernist Experiment
A perfect storm of manufacturing money, ample space and robust industry created one of Modernism’s most fertile and important outposts in and around Detroit.
I. The Plant
IN 1908, the year Henry Ford introduced the Model T, what he called his “car for the great multitude,” the architect Albert Kahn submitted designs for Ford’s factory in Highland Park, Mich., near downtown Detroit. In 1913, three years after the company moved into the building, this would become the first automobile facility in the world with a continuously moving assembly line, and over the next 14 years, the site of creation for millions of Model Ts. It was here that Ford implemented the eight-hour workday and the five-day week, with livable wages for unskilled workers, which did as much to modernize America and rejigger its class system as did the Model T itself.
Kahn came from humble means. He was a Jewish immigrant from the former Kingdom of Prussia whose family had settled in Detroit in 1881. He founded his eponymous firm in the city in 1895, at the age of 26. Early in his career, with the 1904 design for Building 10 of the city’s Packard automotive plant, Kahn revolutionized industrial architecture by replacing wood materials with reinforced concrete, a safer alternative that also allowed for more dramatic structures. The Packard plant was a small city unto itself that at its height employed 40,000 workers in a 3.5-million-square-foot complex with vast rows of windows. (Kahn, who designed the entire complex, was, according to a 1956 article in the Detroit Free Press, “an apostle of sunlight,” someone who “didn’t think much of windowless factories.”) Ford would hire Kahn on the basis of Building 10 and other similar factories he worked on, which pulled American design into the 20th century.
The same year Kahn submitted his designs for the Highland Park plant, he completed work on a manor home about 20 miles north of the city, in what would become the suburb of Bloomfield Hills but was at the time still farmland. The commission came from George Gough Booth, the publisher of The Detroit News. Booth and Ford could not have been more different. During the 1920s, Ford, who once said, “I don’t like to read books,” also owned a newspaper, The Dearborn Independent, which ran a year-and-a-half-long series of anti-Semitic articles that began with a piece titled “The International Jew: The World’s Problem”; a connoisseur of Asian art and literature, Booth was scholarly, and a proponent of the Arts and Crafts movement.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/06/t-magazine/michigan-modernist-architecture.html
I. The Plant
IN 1908, the year Henry Ford introduced the Model T, what he called his “car for the great multitude,” the architect Albert Kahn submitted designs for Ford’s factory in Highland Park, Mich., near downtown Detroit. In 1913, three years after the company moved into the building, this would become the first automobile facility in the world with a continuously moving assembly line, and over the next 14 years, the site of creation for millions of Model Ts. It was here that Ford implemented the eight-hour workday and the five-day week, with livable wages for unskilled workers, which did as much to modernize America and rejigger its class system as did the Model T itself.
Kahn came from humble means. He was a Jewish immigrant from the former Kingdom of Prussia whose family had settled in Detroit in 1881. He founded his eponymous firm in the city in 1895, at the age of 26. Early in his career, with the 1904 design for Building 10 of the city’s Packard automotive plant, Kahn revolutionized industrial architecture by replacing wood materials with reinforced concrete, a safer alternative that also allowed for more dramatic structures. The Packard plant was a small city unto itself that at its height employed 40,000 workers in a 3.5-million-square-foot complex with vast rows of windows. (Kahn, who designed the entire complex, was, according to a 1956 article in the Detroit Free Press, “an apostle of sunlight,” someone who “didn’t think much of windowless factories.”) Ford would hire Kahn on the basis of Building 10 and other similar factories he worked on, which pulled American design into the 20th century.
The same year Kahn submitted his designs for the Highland Park plant, he completed work on a manor home about 20 miles north of the city, in what would become the suburb of Bloomfield Hills but was at the time still farmland. The commission came from George Gough Booth, the publisher of The Detroit News. Booth and Ford could not have been more different. During the 1920s, Ford, who once said, “I don’t like to read books,” also owned a newspaper, The Dearborn Independent, which ran a year-and-a-half-long series of anti-Semitic articles that began with a piece titled “The International Jew: The World’s Problem”; a connoisseur of Asian art and literature, Booth was scholarly, and a proponent of the Arts and Crafts movement.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/06/t-magazine/michigan-modernist-architecture.html
