A Review of Albert Kahn: Under Construction

A Review of Albert Kahn: Under Construction

Albert Kahn: Under Construction

A Review of the Albert Kahn Building Projects, 1903 – 1943,
University of Michigan Museum of Art
February 27 to July 3

The north wall on level three at the University of Michigan Museum of Art has become Bentley Historical Library turf in the ongoing collaboration between these two kindred institutions. Albert Kahn: Under Construction, a gathering of documentary photographs generated by Detroit architect Albert Kahn’s building projects around the world is the latest installment in an ongoing series of joint exhibitions. Curated by Claire Zimmerman, Professor of Architecture, Albert Kahn: Under Construction surveys the years 1903 to 1943, during which Kahn actively managed an architectural firm that by the early twenties had grown to be the largest in the country. The exhibit dutifully documents stages in the actual construction of selected buildings, but revealed through the accumulation of these 130+ images is a a portrait assembled photo by photo of a man of exceedingly large vision who actively constructed a creative, nimble and versatile organization that helped shape significantly our modern American identity.

Here are some highlights: The photographs have been arranged in nine of eleven panels. Five categories identify the purposes of the selected buildings: Photograph (shows the range of projects), Manufacture (looks at factories and warehouses), Buy and Sell (focuses on city office buildings), Explore and Enlighten (deals with educational and religious structures) and Fight (highlights factories designed for the mass production of large-scale war machines like tanks and heavy bombers).

The projects cover a wide range of building kinds, but the 16 selected for display are significant and soundly represent what was typical of the more than 1,900 buildings produced by the Kahn office within these years.

1903 Packard Motor Company, Detroit
1912 Bates Manufacturing Company, Maine
1915 Natural Sciences Building, Ann Arbor, Michigan
1916 Ford Factory, Omaha, Nebraska
1917 The Vinton Building, Detroit
1917 Krolik and Company, Detroit
1921 Durant Building (General Motors Headquarters), Detroit
1924 Ford Motor Company Power House, Iron Mountain, Michigan
1929 Stalingrad Tractor Plant, Stalingrad, Russia
1930 Autostroy Forge Corporation, Moscow, Russia
1930 Shaarey Zedek Synagogue, Detroit
1938 Chrysler Half-Ton Truck Plant, Warren, Michigan
1939 General Motors Building, New York World’s Fair, New York City
1941 Glenn Martin Assembly Plant, Omaha, Nebraska
1941 Chrysler Tank Arsenal, Warren, Michigan
1943 Willow Run Bomber Plant, Ypsilanti, Michigan

The five categories of building types allow for a chronological arrangement, while the accompanying texts identify key issues and clarify sometimes hard-to-see details. However, on the panels themselves narrative sequencing often proceeds counter intuitively, from right to left rather than from to left to right. Under Explore and Enlighten, panels seven and eight (counting from the left side of the display), for example, the stark image of a steel frame forming the sides and roof of the Shaarey Zedek synagogue (center photograph on the bottom row on panel seven), demonstrates how skeleton and cut stone cladding go together to make a traditional structure. But the story of Shaarey Zedek actually begins on panel eight, so that the evolution of this building tracks from right to left. This trope of reading backward is repeated on other panels. The intention is to counter expectations and by doing so draw closer attention to the content of each photograph.

Another fine surprise is the cluster of photographs on the lower half of panel eight showing massive metal roof trusses being fabricated at Lehigh, Pennsylvania, and by the McClintic Marshall Production Company in New York City. Until the Russians had facilities of their own, design and construction of trusses for their factory buildings took place in the US. These pictures capture close up not just the scale but also the craftsmanship and the elegance of these purely functional elements in factory construction.

In the middle of panel five (under Buy and Sell) a photo of the Durant Building/ General Motors Building presents all four of the magnificently towering blocks of this immense and nearly completed project. To track the evolution of the Durant Building going up, however, begin at the bottom of panel six and work backward. To add to our understanding of the complexity attendant on urban building projects, the modest Vinton Building has been juxtaposed to the Durant Building. Pairing these two projects that were built so close together in time helps with understanding the rapid expansion of Kahn’s architectural office as Detroit escaped the constraints of war rationing and the labor shortage.

The last two panels (Fight) reflect changes both in design and in use of materials as dictated by new requirements for mass production. Even more vast interior spaces for building large, heavy machines for war were needed, and the scale was set for these colossal buildings well before Roosevelt’s declaration of war. The buildings rose rapidly out of empty fields, their proportions shockingly beautiful. Photos showing the fabrication of metal skeletons and then the application of concrete strips convey sleek, aerodynamic qualities in the designs, which become even sleeker when enhanced by ribbons of glass. The special knowledge and skill involved in selecting the photographs for all the projects presented in this exhibit show through everywhere, but these last spectacular choices confirm the fact that Kahn’s firm, right up to his death in 1942, was constantly advancing in its capability of building practically, efficiently and beautifully whatever the need.

More needs to be done both to illuminate the practices of the photographers who took the pictures and to comprehend the methods and interests of the various contractors brought in to do the work of construction. On panel ten, for example, photos of the Glenn Martin Assembly Plant show in one instance black men digging a foundation while next to it is a shot of what appears to be a low-cost workers’ housing development. How were black workers housed? How were they treated? How were vast sites taken in hand so that the work was sequenced, the materials brought in on time, and the daily schedules adjusted to occupy the workforce of men? Such questions cannot be addressed by a concise and intense show like Albert Kahn: Under Construction, but this show, the first of many it is hoped, opens the way for the investigation of new questions. The photographs on display are accompanied by an account book, an issue of Architectural Forum featuring Kahn’s buildings as of August 1938, and a typical scrapbook for holding and organizing a project’s pictures. These items enrich the encounter with Kahn’s routine photographic documentation of his projects and it is a pleasure to have them available in the two vitrines on each side of the display. One last note: along with photos of two projects conducted for the Soviet government, there is a map with data and diagrams showing the Soviet Union’s 5-Year Plan, 1928 – 1933, for modernizing Russia. It is a treat to be able to study this map in its large-scale format.

By Jeffrey Welch, April 6, 2016

Tale of a House: Architect Priscilla Baxter Neel

IN the fall of 2015 Dr. Mary Ann Hunting of New York City wrote a query to Washtenaw County Historical Society for information on a female architect who had designed the home at 2235 Belmont here in Ann Arbor. The architect’s name was Priscilla Baxter Neel. Dr. Hunting was writing a book on women architects. A graduate of Vanderbilt and CUNY, she had previously done a book about Edward Durrell Stone.

Mailbox, carport, boarded windows behind yews

The WCHS administrator forwarded the query to Susan Wineberg, who had just completed the second edition of Historic Ann Arbor: An Architectural Guide. Susan Wineberg forwarded the query to Fran Wright. Mary Ann Hunting knew the house was “falling apart” and was slated for demolition by the owner. Dr. Hunting wanted an early photograph of the house.

Susan and I started with the City Assessor’s website. We found the house and the current owner, CR Investments LLC, or Campus Realty, a student apartment rental firm, but there was no photograph of the house on the website. And the old photograph from the handwritten assessor’s pages was only black and gray showing no details. So we went to see the house at 2235 Belmont for ourselves.

Assessor’s floor plan, with modifications

The house, built in 1951, is brick with a the modern flat roof. There are skylights in the roof over the kitchen area. The living room/dining room/kitchen is one large area. One living room wall is brick with a raised fireplace and brick hearth. Large floor to ceiling windows and also glass doors to the exterior lighted the space. One glass door leads to a greenhouse. Four bedrooms and two bathrooms are in the wing that is closest to the street. One bathroom has a square deep tub in it. The house is on a concrete slab, no basement, and the furnace room is at the back end of the house. There is a carport connected to the house on the west side.

The family name Neel was still on the mailbox and the Ann Arbor City Directories confirmed that the owners were Dr. James V. Neel, geneticist at the University of Michigan, his wife Priscilla, and their children Frances, James Van Gundia, and Alexander Baxter. Priscilla did not have a separate listing as a professional architect in the directories.

The architect of this house, Priscilla Baxter Neel, had a twin. Her family lived in Wollaston, Massachusetts. Priscilla and her twin sister, Frances, both studied at Radcliffe College (the separate college Harvard University had for women) and graduated in 1940. They also received Bachelor of Architecture degrees from the Cambridge Graduate School of Smith College (another women’s college). In 1942 they were both awarded scholarships to study with Walter Gropius at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.

Front door, opening to the west

James V. Neel was born in Ohio and educated at Wooster College and then the University of Rochester, where he received a Ph.D. and an M.D.. Neel taught at Dartmouth until 1941, was in Washington in 1942 and then in the US Medical Corps. Immediately after the war (1947) he was chosen by the National Research Council to be the acting director of the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission in Japan. The Neels came to Ann Arbor and the University of Michigan in 1948, where James was Professor of Internal Medicine and a geneticist in the Institute of Human Biology which he helped found. He was director of the University Hospital from 1966 through 1970. He was a member of many professional Genetics and Internal Medicine societies, Phi Beta Kappa, the scientific research society Sigma XI, and the medical honor society Alpha Omega Alpha. His hobby was orchid cultivation, thus the greenhouse attached to 2235 Belmont. He died at 84 in the year 2000.

Priscilla was a good friend of Mary Palmer of the Frank Lloyd Wright designed Palmer House, and with her started a yoga program in Ann Arbor. The two women and other friends were in a yoga class at the Y. Their instructor encouraged them to read some of the yoga literature, including B. K. S. Iyengar’s Light on Yoga, leading to the two of them becoming the Y’s yoga teachers. Priscilla and Mary and other women practiced yoga in Mary Palmer’s Japanese tea house in her garden. This led to Mary Palmer going to India to meet B. K. S. Iyengar and to his coming to Ann Arbor to teach yoga here.

Priscilla never practiced architecture professionally as far as we could find out. When she died in 2012 her children sold the house to Stegeman’s Campus Realty firm the next year. We believe she designed only her own house at 2235 Belmont. Her twin sister Frances designed one house in Connecticut and some time after her marriage moved here to Ann Arbor and designed and built her own house in Barton Hills where she still lives.

Front door, from living area, fireplace, hidden, at base of brick wall left edge

The Campus Realty firm bought the house in 2013 and by the looks of it never had a tenant move in. The mailbox still says Neel. All the windows have been taken away and replaced with plywood boards. The greenhouse attached to the living room has lost all the glass, leaving only the three foot high brick foundation, a little fan, and two thermostats on the house’s exterior wall. The shrubbery around the house is quite overgrown.

All the kitchen appliances were gone. The interior finished walls of the kitchen (and perhaps laundry room) were gone too. The milk box was intact and opened both inside and outside. The living room had a ceiling-high pile of cupboards and such in front of the raised hearth fireplace. All the copper pipe that could be reached had been removed with the holes in the walls as evidence. One of the bathrooms had the entire wall of ceramic tile taken off and left leaning against a wall in the bedroom in two large sections. We could see from the inside that the windows were removed, frames and all, not just the glass panes. All the debris from the interior demolition is still in the house.

Windows and doorway to patio, across from kitchen/dining area

We wish for a more positive end to this house but CR Investments has had a demolition permit since January 2015. It is not advertised for sale. CR Investments originally bought the property, which was in poor condition, to demolish and to build another small house for a family member. But that moment passed and now they are just holding the property. It is only a matter of time before architect Priscilla Baxter Neel’s only house and long-time home is replaced by another dwelling.

Milk box by the utility door

Inside the kitchen

By Frances Wright, March 11, 2016

Wells Ira Bennett, Educator and Architect

Wells I. Bennett led the College of Architecture and the University of Michigan as Dean from 1938 to 1957. Arriving at the university in 1912 as Instructor, Bennett rose to leadership through his early interest in low-cost housing and city planning. As a practicing architect in Ann Arbor, Bennett was active after 1921, developing a considerable residential practice mainly with faculty clients.

Taking a sabbatical leave in 1932-33 to study schools of architecture and post-WWI housing projects in Europe, Bennett published two articles on housing projects in the US and France in 1935. In addition he offered a course analyzing practices in low-cost housing projects with various forms of government intervention in England, Germany, Austria, Holland and France.

At this time in the Depression the US government authorized over three billion dollars for low-cost housing and slum clearance but with the proviso that each specific project be presented as part of a larger plan. At the time there were few trained town and city planners, opening a field for city planning that MIT stepped up to meet in 1934. At this same time Bennett, working with then Dean Emil Lorch, developed courses in this area, including housing, that gave Michigan’s program a unique place in the Middle and Far West. A formal degree in City Planning entered the architecture school’s curriculum in 1946.

A key initiative by Bennett starting in 1940 was a Forum gathering of architecture school administrators and architects at the university for the purpose of sharing insights and defining common interests. The first gathering brought together a who’s who of practictioners, including Eliel Saarinen and Eero Saarinen at Cranbrook, and Joseph Hudnut, Dean of the Harvard School of Design and a 1912 alum of the UM architecture school. The collegial dynamic inspired by these yearly meetings proved invaluable to the university in 1948 when venerable Professor Jean Hebrard retired and high enrolment created a need for recommendations for new staff and teaching leadership in architecture. These recommendations, for example, led to bringing in William Muschenheim in 1950.

Bennett served on the Ann Arbor City Planning Commission since 1935 and on the State Board of Registration for Architects, Engineers and Surveyors since 1939. He was a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects and was President of the Detroit Chapter from 1946 to 1947. During his tenure as Dean he brought a series of fine teachers to his program, including Mary Chase Stratton (1937), Gerome Kamrowski (1946), Herbert Johe (1947), Edward Olenki (1948) and William Muschenheim (1950).

By Jeffrey Welch, March 11, 2016