But in some ways, the initial Highland Park buildings still harkened back to traditional factory design. The long, narrow main building, with stairs, elevators, and toilets in four external towers, had the proportions and layout of a Lowell mill, even if much larger. The adjacent one-story machine shop, with its sawtooth roof, resembled an English weaving shed. Even after the assembly line had been installed in the factory, some material, including car bodies, was moved by horse-drawn cart.31
Kahn’s 1914 addition to Highland Park, the “New Shop,” represented a more radical break from the past. Almost immediately after Highland Park opened, Ford began adding more Kahn-designed buildings to the tightly clustered complex, including an administration building and a large power plant. It soon needed new assembly space as well. The company decision to begin making parts that it previously had bought from outside suppliers, along with the growing volume of production and a growing workforce, left the main factory crowded almost as soon as it was completed. Furthermore, the assembly line and the rapid pace of production made material handling an ever-greater priority, as large quantities of raw materials, parts, and subassemblies needed to be delivered to particular points along various assembly lines at a pace that avoided pileups of inventory or shortages that stopped production.
Kahn’s solution in the New Shop was to build two parallel six-story factory buildings, connected by an 842-foot-long, glass-roofed shed. Along the bottom ran railroad tracks, so that trainloads of supplies could be brought directly into the plant. Along the top ran two overhead cranes that could lift loads of up to five tons to some two hundred platforms jutting out from all levels of the adjacent buildings. From the platforms it was only a short distance to any place within the new buildings, allowing workers to use hand trucks to quickly deliver supplies to the many workstations within. Strikingly modern, the craneway, with concrete and glass buildings making up its walls, the staggered pattern of the jutting platforms, and its glass roof, was a new kind of space, resembling more the great nineteenth-century shopping arcades, like the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II in Milan, stripped of ornamentation, than a traditional factory.
Inside the New Shop, the foundry and machine shop were positioned on the top floor rather than on the bottom level, the usual practice, possible because of the strength of the reinforced concrete construction. Production could then flow downward, as parts and subassemblies were lowered from floor to floor by gravity slides and conveyor belts, until reaching the final assembly line on the ground level. Air circulation was accomplished through ducts inside hollow concrete columns, an approach reminiscent of that used in English factories by Lombe, Arkwright, and Strutt over a century earlier.32
The Highland Park factory almost immediately became the object of enormous worldwide attention for its design, its assembly line, its experiment in high-pay paternalism, and the Model Ts that came out of it. Ford sought the attention, using the building complex as an advertisement for his firm. (Manufacturers had been doing variations of this for decades, designing handsome factories adorned with large signs, putting engravings of their plants on their stationery, allowing postcards of them to be issued, and sometimes welcoming journalists.33) The freestanding administration building was handsomely designed and carefully landscaped. The nearby power plant had plate glass windows, allowing passersby to look in at the giant generators. Henry Ford insisted that the plant have five chimneys, so giant letters spelling out Ford could be positioned between them, though fewer chimneys would have sufficed. In 1912, the company began conducting public tours of the plant. By the summer of 1915, three to four hundred people a day were visiting. To further publicize the factory, Ford issued a booklet detailing its operations, with pictures from its own, in-house Photographic Department (which also produced weekly short films to distribute to Ford dealers and local theaters).34
Figure 4.2 An aerial view of Ford’s Highland Park factory in 1923.
Among the most important visitors to Highland Park was Giovanni Agnelli, the chairman of the Italian automaker FIAT, who came away determined to adapt Ford methods to the European auto industry, which still largely made cars through handcrafting. To accommodate the Ford system, he commissioned a new factory in the Lingotto district of Turin, which opened in 1923. The plant—one of the great landmarks of modernist architecture—was Highland Park turned on its head. Like the New Shop, it had two long, linked, parallel buildings for assembly operations, each five stories high and over a quarter mile long. In the huge courtyard between the buildings, two spiral ramps connected all of the floors to the roof. In an opposite procedure from Highland Park, raw materials were delivered on the ground floor and production proceeded upward until finished cars were driven onto a test track on the roof, with banked curves that allowed high speeds. Then the cars were driven down a ramp for delivery. (In a ricochet, when Kahn designed an eight-story service center for Packard on the West Side of Manhattan, he included two interior ramps that allowed access to a rooftop test track.)35
Highland Park positioned Kahn as the leading architect for the automobile industry. He was soon designing factories for the Hudson Motor Company, the Dodge brothers, Fisher Body, Buick, and Studebaker, as the industry rapidly adopted both the assembly line and reinforced concrete construction. Ultimately his firm designed a wide range of industrial buildings, not only in North America but in South America, Europe, Asia, and Africa as well. Kahn also designed office buildings for the auto industry and other industrial firms, including the massive General Motors Building in midtown Detroit (the largest office building in the world when it opened in 1922), and the adjacent, opulent headquarters for Fisher Body. And he designed homes for auto executives, including lakefront mansions in Gross Pointe for Henry Joy and Henry Ford’s son, Edsel. He even designed the Henry Ford Hospital. The extraordinary productivity of his firm, which by the late 1920s had four hundred employees, and the rapidity with which it could complete designs, rested on a high degree of division of labor, with various departments performing specialized functions, an application to professional, white-collar work of some of the principles Ford perfected for manufacturing. To track work, Kahn’s firm used forms similar to those used by Ford at Highland Park.36
River Rouge
Even as Kahn’s practice grew, Henry Ford remained his most important client. Together they designed what became the next flagship of industrial giantism, Ford’s River Rouge plant. Almost as soon as the New Shop was completed, Ford began planning a much larger complex in nearby Dearborn, buying massive tracts of land. Some was used for Ford endeavors besides the car company, including a separate firm that produced Fordson tractors. But most of it was devoted to making the Model T. Ford decided to advance to the extreme his effort at vertical integration, seeking to make not only parts but also basic materials like steel, glass, and rubber for his cars, eliminating the possibility of suppliers raising prices or not fulfilling orders when inventories were tight. The Dearborn property, along the Rouge River, allowed the direct delivery of bulk goods, including iron ore, coal, and sand, from Great Lakes ships and had plenty of water for industrial processes. Also, the sparsely populated Dearborn suburb gave Ford greater control over his environment than Detroit, with its heterogeneous population and episodic labor activism.37
Ford began constructing a blast furnace at River Rouge in 1917. It was followed by a series of other processing plants, including coke ovens, open-hearth furnaces, a rolling mill, a glass factory, a rubber and tire plant, a leather plant, a paper mill, a box factory, and a textile mill. Ford put great effort into integrating the various plants and reusing byproducts. Impurities from the blast furnaces, for example, were sent to an on-site factory to be made into cement. Ford also began buying coal and iron mines and vast tracts of forest land in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, where he built sawmills, kilns, and factories to make wooden parts for the Model T. Sawdust and scrap lumber were used to make the charcoal briquettes, sold under the Kingsford brand, which to this day fuel bar
becues and family happiness across America. His grandest effort at backward integration was a vast rubber plantation in the Amazon Basin that proved a costly failure.38
Complete Model Ts were never produced at River Rouge, which initially served as a feeder plant for Highland Park. Engines, tires, windows, and other components were taken from the Rouge to Highland Park for final assembly. But with the high volume of Model T production, even the feeder operations were vast. The River Rouge foundry, where engine blocks were cast from molten iron conveyed from adjacent blast furnaces, was the largest in the world, employing ten thousand men.39
When final assembly operations did begin at the Rouge, it was, ironically, to make boats, not cars. During World War I, Henry Ford contracted with the Navy to build 112 submarine chasers using assembly-line methods. The Navy paid for a new plant to produce them, the “B Building,” designed by Kahn. Freestanding, it was the largest factory ever built, 300 feet wide and 1,700 feet—a third-of-a-mile—long, a huge shed with walls composed almost entirely of windows. As tall as a three-story building but open inside to accommodate boat production, it was designed to allow the later addition of intermediate floors. When the last of the Eagle Boats left the building in September 1919 (none were completed in time to be used in combat), floors were added and the building was used to assemble Model T bodies, which previously had been purchased from outside contractors.
The B Building represented the beginning of a shift in factory design principles for Ford and Kahn, moving away from the ingenuous architectural machine that they had just developed at the New Shop. Kahn helped lead not one but two revolutions in industrial architecture. Rather than multistory buildings, at the Rouge Kahn and Ford erected very large single-story factories to avoid the cost of hoisting materials and to allow bigger uninterrupted spaces, since columns to support upper floors were no longer needed. The expansive, open areas gave engineers flexibility in machine placement, aided by the company decision to stop using overhead shafts and belts to power machinery, instead deploying individual electric motors. Single-story plants also avoided the need to punch holes between floors when assembly lines were repositioned. In 1923, Ford switched its standard design for branch plants from multistory to single-story as well.
With the move to single-story factories, Kahn abandoned reinforced concrete, no longer needing its vibration dampening qualities. Instead he used steel frames, which allowed structures to be put up more quickly and expanded more easily. Kahn’s new buildings had, if anything, even more glass on the walls than his earlier structures, and he generally used roof monitors—raised structures with glass facing in varied directions—rather than sawtooth roofs, which provided more diffuse natural light.
The loft-style, concrete buildings Kahn helped popularize continued to be built for manufacturing and storage. Resistant to water damage and strongly constructed, they can be found in large numbers in older American industrial districts, sometimes still used for manufacturing, sometimes abandoned, sometimes converted to warehouses or offices, and occasionally turned into trendy apartments. But Kahn himself almost never returned to the style.
Instead, Kahn embraced sleek surfaces of glass and metal in buildings both functional and beautiful. Over the course of two decades, he created a bounty of industrial buildings of great modernist design—clean, light, spare, seemingly endless. Many of Kahn’s Rouge buildings were expressions of almost pure form—tall cylindrical chimneys, long glass walls, shapely monitor roofs—unsullied by ornamentation. The Engineering Laboratory, completed in 1925, where Henry Ford had his office, had a particularly striking interior, with a long central space flanked by smaller galleries, with two levels of monitor windows on both sides flooding it with light. Some of Kahn’s later designs, like his Chrysler Half-Ton Truck Plant, are widely recognized as among the greatest industrial buildings ever erected, modernist masterpieces.
Yet neither Kahn nor Ford thought of themselves as modernists. In a 1931 speech, Kahn gave a nuanced but largely negative appraisal of modernist architecture. Kahn criticized the extreme functionalism and lack of ornamentation of architects like Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier (arguably traits that characterized his own factory designs). “What we call modernism today is largely affectation, a seeking for the radical, the extreme.” In his nonindustrial projects, Kahn drew on a variety of historical styles, designing often handsome but rarely pathbreaking buildings. Henry Ford was even more explicitly antimodernist at the very moment he was creating a new industrial modernity. Concurrent with the creation of the Rouge, he continued to add to his collection of old machines, furniture, and buildings, which he eventually installed in Greenfield Village, near the Rouge plant, a recreation of an earlier, small-town America. Even as his cars and factories promoted urbanization and cosmopolitanism, Ford remained deeply nostalgic about the parochial, rural world he grew up in and chose to leave.
Buildings continued to be added at the Rouge all through the 1920s and 1930s. The Press Shop, completed in the late 1930s, became the largest single factory building in the world, with a floor area of 1,450,000 square feet. Ford spaced the Rouge buildings far apart to allow for later expansion, having plenty of room on the 1,096-acre site. An elaborate system of rail lines, roads, 142 miles of conveyors, monorails, and an elevated “High Line” with an automatic transport system moved raw materials, parts, and subassemblies within and between buildings. Employee parking lots ringed the vast, isolated complex, but many workers arrived at special streetcar and bus terminals. Fences, railroad tracks, and guarded gates restricted access to the plant, which came to resemble a fortress, in contrast to Highland Park, which was situated in a busy urban neighborhood, with public sidewalks alongside the factory buildings.40
Ironically, while the Rouge was being built out to produce everything needed to make a Model T, the car itself was becoming obsolete. By the mid-1920s, other car companies, including General Motors and Chrysler, had introduced more technically advanced and varied models than Ford, which still only sold the Model T (though it offered luxury cars under the Lincoln nameplate). By 1927, as sales diminished, it became evident that something had to be done. Abruptly, Ford stopped making the Model T, even before finalizing the design of its replacement, the Model A. For six months, Ford factories sat idle, while the company replaced 15,000 machine tools and rebuilt 25,000 more. New molds, jigs, dies, fixtures, gauges, and assembly sequences had to be created. Meanwhile, the layoff of 60,000 Detroit-area Ford workers created a social crisis, as relief agencies, free clinics, and child-placement agencies struggled to meet the huge demand for their services.
The underbelly of the Ford system had been exposed. Extreme standardization had allowed other companies to win over consumers on the basis of style and change, what General Motors president Alfred P. Sloan, Jr., called “the ‘laws’ of Paris dressmakers . . . in the automobile industry.” Single-purpose, specialized machinery, which made it inexpensive to produce particular parts, made it expensive to switch over to new products (a problem that went all the way back to the high-speed but inflexible machinery used in the early Lowell mills). The changeover from the Model T to the Model A cost the Ford Motor Company $250 million ($3.5 billion in 2017 currency) and first place in sales to General Motors. Vertical integration had its downside, too, evident when the economy and auto sales tanked just a few years after the introduction of the Model A; Ford had a harder time cutting costs than the other major automakers, which bought most of their parts from outside suppliers. Over the course of the decade starting in 1927, Ford had a cumulative net loss, while General Motors made nearly $2 billion in after-tax profits.
The introduction of the Model A completed the transfer of the center of the Ford empire from Highland Park to River Rouge. The final assembly line for the new car was set up in the B Building, which was so large that it also could house at various times an assembly line for Fordson tractors, a trade school, fire department, and hospital. The geographical move was accompanied by a purge of pioneer
Ford engineers and executives, most of those remaining from the team that had created the Model T, the assembly line, and the Ford system. With Harry Bennett and Charles Sorenson, a long-time, very tough Ford production manager, effectively running the Rouge, an autocratic, chaotic, and brutal culture came to characterize the plant. Workers decried harsh discipline for petty offenses, arbitrary, ever-changing rules, and tyrannical foremen. One Rouge worker complained that “The bosses are thick as treacle and they’re always on your neck, because the man above is on their neck and Sorenson’s on the neck of the whole lot—he’s the man that pours the boiling oil down that old Henry makes. . . . A man checks ’is brains and ’is freedom at the door when he goes to work at Ford’s.”
The Rouge—“that self-sufficing industrial cosmos, a masterpiece of ingenuity and efficiency,” Edmund Wilson called it—embodied an extreme strategy of industrial concentration. Ford set up dozens of branch plants in the United States to assemble kits of parts shipped from Highland Park and later Dearborn, but manufacturing remained highly centralized at the major complexes. During the 1920s and 1930s, the company built a series of “village industry” factories in rural southeastern Michigan. Powered by small hydroelectric dams, the plants produced small parts for use at Highland Park and the Rouge—starter switches, drill bits, ignition coils, and the like. Henry Ford conceived of the plants as providing work for farmers during the slack winter season. Again, as at Greenfield Village, he seemed to be embracing an idealized vision of a decentralized Jeffersonian society, even as his life’s work undermined it. But with a combined workforce at their height of only some four thousand workers, the village factories were not much more than an ideological gesture in the shadow of the giant Ford plants.
Other automakers also built very large plants. The complexity of manufacturing an automobile, with its hundreds of different parts; the cost of transporting bulky components like frames, axles, motors, and bodies; and the heavy investment needed to build and equip an automobile plant made concentration of production a widely shared strategy. The Dodge Main plant in Hamtramck (an independent enclave within Detroit) began as a parts supplier for Ford, but the Dodge Brothers later expanded it to produce their own car. Albert Kahn designed the first buildings; Smith, Hinchman, & Grylls, another Detroit architectural firm, many additional buildings, most of them multistory structures made of reinforced concrete. Under the Dodges and later Chrysler, which bought the company after its founders’ deaths, the factory became a fully integrated manufacturing and assembly plant, larger in floor space than Highland Park, its nearest equivalent. It had some 30,000 workers in the late 1930s and even more during World War II, remaining in operation until 1980. General Motors became famous for its divisional structure and decentralization, but in Flint, Michigan, it, too, had a huge production complex, several really. In the late 1920s, the gigantic Buick plant (yet another Kahn design) had 22,000 workers; a cluster of Chevrolet factories employed 18,000 workers; Fisher Body, by then a GM subsidiary, had 7,500 workers; and still more workers could be found in the factories of AC Spark Plug, another GM subsidiary.
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