One-Man Boom

RFC last week lent Wright Aeronautical Corp. $92,000,000 to build a whole new airplane engine factory near Cincinnati (see p. 77). Day before, Henry Morgenthau Jr. had authorized (for tax purposes) a five-year amortization of such plants if the land is taken on lease. Thus was cracked, perhaps broken, one of Defense expansion's chief bottlenecks--the reluctance of manufacturers to go on a long-term hook for new war-term capacity.

The announcement made good reading at the Detroit offices of Albert Kahn Associated Architects and Engineers, Inc. For Wright is a Kahn client, and Kahn will design a good part of the $92,000,000 plant. Wright, furthermore, is only one

Kahn client that has been waiting for a Treasury green light before building new factories. On Kahn drafting boards last week were $7,000,000 worth of normal orders. The Wright and other pending jobs would give him some $12,000,000 more. With a backlog of $19,000,000, Kahn would be close to his all-time high. He expects to double that by November. As he had been in the twenties (his office does 10% of all U. S. private industrial construction), Albert Kahn was once again becoming a "one-man building boom."

Albert Kahn is a small, merry, 71-year-old architectural genius who spent his youth in a penny-pinching struggle to support an immigrant family of ten (including an impractical Rabbi father). He was 34 when the late Henry B. Joy, president of young Packard Motor Car Co., walked in and asked him to design a factory.

Kahn had never done one, but "would try." Brother Julius Kahn (later president of Truscon Steel, vice president of Republic) had invented an improved type of steel-reinforced concrete. The Packard fac tory became the first reinforced concrete and steel sash factory in the U. S. It also had window area of revolutionary proportions and a layout planned for efficient production. With this pioneering start, Kahn became the industry's No. 1 architect-engineer, has ever since designed most of Ford's, Chrysler's, General Motors' plants.

"When I began," says Albert Kahn, "the real architects would design only museums, cathedrals, capitols. The office boy was considered good enough to do factory buildings. I'm still that office boy." He still makes other architects uncomfort able by calling architecture "90% business and 10% art." Unlike his equally functional-minded contemporary, Frank Lloyd Wright, who gets a free hand from his clients, Kahn preaches to his staff that the client's analysis of the problem is the first step to its solution. Clients who have appreciated this approach include (besides virtually the entire automotive industry) the Governments of the U. S. and the U. S. S. R. For the latter, as consultant on the First Five Year Plan, Kahn designed factories at Stalingrad, Chelyabinsk, Kuznetsk, Nizhni-Tagil. Brother Moritz handled the job. For the U. S. he has just done the plans for $25,000,000 worth of new naval air bases at Midway Island, Honolulu, Alaska, Puerto Rico, Jacksonville.

Besides Brother Louis (business brains), 300 employes help turn out the Kahn blueprints. But old A. K. still passes on every one. Fifty different buildings may move, conveyor-belt-wise, over his desk in a day; he remembers their smallest details. Recently, A. K. celebrated the quickening pace of his business by giving shares in it to 25 old employes. If Defense booms his backlog as he expects, his fees should top $2,000,000 this year. Once a year Factory-Builder Kahn makes a concession to his artistic (10%) nature. He takes on a residence, and the firm, geared to turn out industrial designs on a mass-production basis, loses money on the job. Usually in Georgian or Tudor tradition, it ill compares with the utilitarian beauty of its factory brothers. But it is "Albert's baby," and nobody minds.

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