Word: architecting
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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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...
Undismayed, Architect Kahn filled his partners' places with his younger brothers Louis, Moritz and Felix, kept an eye out for a still younger brother Julius, who was just finishing college. His faith in the Kahn family was not misplaced. Louis is still Albert's chief executive and right-hand man. Felix worked with the famous "six companies" group that built Boulder Dam. Moritz, now dead, supervised most of the work on Russia's Five-Year Plan. The young Julius, later an executive with Republic Steel, invented a new and more precisely calculable method of reinforcing concrete which...
Weekly Pay: $45. Albert Kahn's personality still reflects that curious mixture of shrewd materialism and esthetic refinement that has made him the prototype of the machine-age architect. Methodical in his working hours, he gets to the office early every morning, drives himself incessantly until evening. Each week he solemnly accepts the weekly paycheck of $45 which he has been getting for the past 40 years, carefully turning over $40 of it to his wife and keeping $5 for "lunches and extras...