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Albert Kahn Inc.

Architecture, Labor, and Industry, 1905-1961

Author Claire Zimmerman On Tour
Hardcover
$60.00 US
| $79.00 CAN
The MIT Press
On sale Aug 12, 2025 | 488 Pages | 9780262049115
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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.
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.
Claire Zimmerman View titles by Claire Zimmerman
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

About

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.

Author

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.
Claire Zimmerman View titles by Claire Zimmerman

Table of Contents

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

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