Word: architect
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...white-haired old man who had just been awarded a medal for distinguished war service had never been closer to the firing line than the desk of blueprints in his office in Detroit. But the applauding members of the American Institute of Architects in Detroit's Hotel Statler this week knew that Albert Kahn's contribution toward the defeat of the Axis powers had been greater than that of many a general. In nearly every United Nations industrial stronghold, from Detroit to Novosibirsk, his art is conspicuous. Albert Kahn, 73, father of modern factory design, is the world...
...needed them fast. So industry turned to Albert Kahn. He had long been accustomed to break all records in factory construction. He had designed many a mammoth U.S. plant in a few days, had set it up and delivered the keys in a few months. Packard's architect for 39 years, Ford's for 34, Chrysler's for 17, General Motors' for 150-odd major plants, Kahn had done some two billion dollars' worth of industrial building in the last four decades. He was used to big jobs, done fast...
F.O.B. Detroit. "Don't let anyone tell you that luck doesn't count," says Albert Kahn. "I was born under a lucky star. I got all the breaks." His biggest break was that he happened to be a struggling young architect in Detroit at the time when the automobile was about to make Detroit the biggest mass-production center in the Western Hemisphere...
...twelve. Son of an impoverished smalltown Rabbi who peddled fruit for a living on Detroit's streets, young Albert seemed destined to be an infant prodigy musician. But the vicissitudes of fruit peddling made it necessary for young Albert to enter the offices of a Detroit architect as office boy. He was fired from the job because he smelled too strongly of his father's horse, whom he dutifully curried every...
...Julius Melchers (father of U.S. Artist Gari Melchers) picked up the downcast Kahn and took him into his drawing school. Learning fast, Albert Kahn was soon ready for another architectural job, with Detroit Architect George D. Mason, where he spent 14 years making himself an expert in his craft. A trip to Europe at 21 (on a $500 scholarship he got from the magazine American Architect) gave him what he considers his real education in architecture. Back in Detroit, at 26, he joined two other architects in opening an office. Within two years one of his partners had died...