Albert Kahn’s Territories [Office US catalogue 2014] (original) (raw)
Related papers
Fabrications , 2019
Taking its cast of characters from the history and pre-history of post-World War II empire, and focusing on the United States, the narrative arc sketched here stretches from the Second Industrial Revolution to the Cold War. Surveying a longer research project currently underway, the essay explores the work of an architecture firm that was left out of modernist historiography, despite the firm’s profoundly modern approach to building. Albert Kahn Associates of Detroit was instrumental in constructing the industrial infrastructure of the United States; yet the working methods of the firm, along with its output, still await thorough examination. The essay surveys the firm’s work over the first four decades of the twentieth century, noting connections between large-scale, transnational industrialisation and growing military super powers. At the same time, the disappearance of Kahn Associates from architectural history during the second half of the century prompts a more complex explanation than that of simple neglect. Instead, a retreat from the political conditions of the built environment, by those engaged in cultural discourse in architecture is sketched here, along with its effects on the discipline and practice of architecture as a whole.
Soviet industrialization was a complex economic and political undertaking. Rather than examine the process as a whole, this paper focuses on two fairly unknown players in the history of Soviet-American relations––one American firm and one Soviet negotiator––and their contribution to the amazingly rapid Soviet “superindustrialization” of the early 1930s, emphasizing some human and business factors behind Stalin’s Five-Year Plan. Saul G. Bron, during his tenure in 1927–1930 as chairman of Amtorg Trading Corporation in New York, contracted with leading American companies to help build Soviet industrial infrastructure and commissioned the firm of the foremost American industrial architect from Detroit, Albert Kahn, as consulting architects to the Soviet Government. The work of both played a major role in laying the foundation of the Soviet automotive, tractor and tank industry and led to the development of Soviet defense capabilities, which in turn played an important role in the Allies’ defeat of Nazi Germany in World War II. Drawing predominantly on Russian and English-language primary sources, this paper is based on comprehensive research including previously-unknown documents from Russian and American archives, contemporaneous and current materials, and family archives.
Built in USA: Post-War Architecture-Midcentury Architecture as a Vehicle for American Foreign Policy
2019
This article considers the 1953 Museum of Modern Art exhibition Built in USA: Post-War Architecture in relation to American diplomacy during the Cold War. By examining the international circulation of Built in USA by both governmental and cultural sector institution, we situate American postwar architecture within the informational agendas of a broader ideological struggle. We consider the engagement of media – image circulation and administrative apparatuses – with geopolitical forces and show the way in which architecture, in its status as a form of media, recursively negotiated them.
America as a Representation of Modernity in the Russian Architectural Press, 1870-1917
Znanie. Ponimanie. Umenie., 2016
With the creation of professional organizations in support of Russian architects during the 1860s, new publications were launched to provide information about architects and architectural practices in other countries. The Moscow Architectural Society and the Petersburg Society of Architects took the lead, with the latter society publishing the journal “Zodchii”, which would serve as the publication of record for Russian architects from 1872 until 1917. This article devotes special attention to “Zodchii” as a locus of information about architec, ture in America, with articles and reports on American building methods and technologies, architectural education, city planning (such as the rebuilding of Chicago after the fire of 1871), major urban projects, the design of private houses, skyscrapers, transportation, pol, lution and virtually any other topic related to the built environment. Apart from occasional references to Henry Hobson Richardson, little attention was given to specific architects, whose careers must have seemed distant to Russian architects and engineers. The rapid development of America in the half century after the Civil War suggested many possibilities and parallels for Russia. These perceptions are a significant and little known aspect of relations between Russia and the United States.
Notes on the architecture of Louis I. Kahn
The idea of collecting several papers dedicated to specific aspects of the architecture of Louis Kahn occurred to me some years ago during the academic year 2011-12 in connection with the exercises on my Urban and Architectural Composition course dedicated to the Twentieth century master*. At that time I and other members of the teaching group had a few doubts about the subject. Limiting ourselves only to the one-family dwellings Kahn actually built, we asked the students to develop a small independent supporting building located nearby. However, the exercises convinced us to deepen the projects on the master together with the pupils since some of our reflections would be useful to future students. As mentioned above, the papers deal with specific aspects of Kahn’s architecture. Firstly, I looked at the materials and construction elements that both Kahn and the neo-brutalist movement used in the 1950s and that superseded the theoretical positions of the Modern Movement. Together with the Smithsons’ projects, the frank exposure of the material and the undiluted exhibition of the construction process in Kahn’s architecture still influence a lot of creations in architecture today, above all in Switzerland and England. The papers contributed by Adriano Rabacchin are dedicated to the one-family dwelling, a project theme that Kahn practiced continuously but about which relatively little is known in both the master’s introductory studies and examples he developed. So Rabacchin analyses the Ehle house. Alessandro Dalla Caneva’s contribution is a theoretical consideration of the subject of building composition in the Latvian master’s projects. On the one hand, the project experience concerns understanding the importance of representation in the form and on the other hand understanding the methods through which the idea can be recognised in the form of the construction. Jia Lu is a Chinese architect who trained at the University of Harbin. In his chapters in this book he looks at the way Kahn used light by examining extraordinary examples in the Fisher house and the Korman house. Lastly, given the complexity of thought and complexity of the projects by the man who for many is the most important architect of the last century, and while this book is a fragmented study, the report it presents concludes that he was the most appropriate architect for fulfilling projects with a multiplicity of characteristic features that cannot be reduced to a single unit. Enrico Pietrogrande