Albert Kahn Associates

Albert Kahn Associates is an architectural design firm in Detroit, Michigan. It introduced a new technology in industrial building involving a unique reinforced concrete method referred to as the Kahn System of construction using proprietary patented reinforcement steel manufactured by Trussed Concrete Steel Company. The building of automobile factories and other types of factories were revolutionized from wooden timber framing construction. Besides being an advanced technology in strength that led to wider open interior spaces, it featured a high degree of fire resistance and larger window space for light. The firm started by Albert Kahn built factories for Chrysler for over a decade, Ford Automobile for 30 years and Packard Automobile for 35 years. Other important clients of the firm were Republic Steel and General Motors. The firm was awarded a $40 million dollar contract to build a tractor factory in Russia in 1928. The firm's output was over a million dollars worth of work per week by 1929. By 1939, the firm designed 19 percent of all industrial buildings in the United States and had designed some $800 million of buildings worldwide.

Albert Kahn established the Detroit firm in 1895 and was its first and only employee then. In 1896, Kahn took on two partners: George Nettleton and Alexander Trowbridge. All three were architects at the time with the architectural firm Mason & Rice in Detroit. The firm they opened in January 1896 was initially called "Nettleton, Kahn, and Trowbridge". At the time there was an abundance of design jobs available. Mason & Rice even referred some of their work to Kahn's new firm when they had more than they could handle.

The firm's first large design job in Detroit was to design Children's Hospital of Michigan. Its next major project came in 1898 from James E. Scripps to design an elaborate library with an art gallery. The Scripps Library and Museum was located adjacent to Scripps' mansion home on Trumbull Avenue at Grand River Avenue. The dynamics of the firm changed when Trowbridge took a position at Cornell University in 1897 and Nettleton died in 1900. The firm then hired designers with good reputations and an ability to work as a team with other designers. Ernest Wilby, a young Englishman from Canada, was their key designer working for the firm at the time. This new team then collaborated with the Mason & Rice architectural firm to design the Palms Apartments, a building with English architecture on Jefferson Avenue at Rivard Street in Detroit. It was one of the first buildings to use reinforced concrete as a major construction material.

...
Wikipedia