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Mexican Restaurant & Tequila Bar

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248.865.2900

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Try One of Our Tasty,
New Featured Menu
Choices that
Complement our
Lunch and Dinner
Menus

The Menu Includes a
Soup of the Month
and a
Tequila of the Month

COURTESY OF HISTORICDETROIT.ORG

A New Menu
Each Month

MARCH SPECIAL

15% Off

Your Total Food Bill

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TOP: The first three floors of the New Center Building (now called the Albert Kahn
Building), at Second and Lothrop in Detroit, were occupied by Saks Fifth Avenue
(which opened in 1940), as pictured in this postcard. ABOVE: The Kahn-designed
Natural Sciences Building, U-M, Ann Arbor, c. 1915

toured Europe for a year on a scholar-
ship in order to look at the continent’s
grandest structures. When he returned,
Mason promoted him to chief designer.
Four years later, in 1895, the archi-
tect founded Albert Kahn Associates,
bringing along his brothers, Louis,
Moritz and Felix. A few years later,
his engineer brother, Julius, came on
board, developing a concrete reinforc-
ing system that was later patented as
the Kahn Bar System.
From there, the brothers grew a
firm that built the bedrock of Detroit’s
most renowned manufacturing facili-
ties — including Henry Ford’s first car-
making plant.
In 1909, Ford hired Kahn’s firm to
design the Highland Park Ford Plant.
The reinforced concrete system allowed
for the construction of large spans that
increased the open floor space, and the
grid design allowed for flexible expan-
sion. Between 1917 and 1928, the Ford
Rouge plant was constructed according
to a Kahn design, its different buildings
connected by rail lines.
Kahn’s techniques predated modern
computer modeling: He developed a
“flexible and systematic way of putting
buildings together,” Zimmerman says.
The modern factory was born.
And with it, an interesting partner-
ship: Ford, a notorious Jew-hater,
decided that Kahn was a Jew he could
support.
Temple Beth El Rabbi Leo Franklin,
a friend and neighbor of Ford, stopped
speaking to Ford in response to the
virulent anti-Semitic writings in Ford’s
Dearborn Independent newspaper, but
Kahn, a Beth El board member, “was
very careful,” Zimmerman says. “He
wasn’t going to mess around with this
super-powerful man. During the war,
his office went to 600 staff. He had to

keep the money coming in.”
Zimmerman hasn’t combed through
Kahn’s personal correspondence, which
is held at the Smithsonian’s Archives
of American Art, so she doesn’t know
how or if he acknowledged Ford’s sen-
timents.
Of Kahn’s personal creed, she knows
only that he refused to skimp on mate-
rials or engage in fakery in his build-
ings. In his eulogy for Kahn, Rabbi
Franklin told of how Kahn insisted on
using stone to build the new Temple
Beth El on Woodward at Gladstone
(1922) rather than covering brick with
a concrete veneer. It would be like
“building a house of God as a sham,”
Kahn allegedly said.
“There must be no sham, no show,
it must be real, it must be what it pur-
ports to be,” he said.
In 1942, Kahn, who had four chil-
dren and a wife to whom he was devot-
ed, died of pneumonia.
While Kahn was relegated to the
margins as an architect — due largely
to his indifference to modernist tropes
and his involvement in building weap-
ons factories — there’s renewed inter-
est in him.
“There’s a huge interest in Albert
Kahn because he’s just a remarkable
architect,” Zimmerman says. “For odd
and complex reasons, he’s never been
given his proper place in the history
of architecture in America and people
have realized what an astonishing gap
in our knowledge this is.”

*

details

Albert Kahn: Under Construction will be
on view Feb. 27-July 3 at the University
of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor.
(734) 764-0395; umma.umich.edu.

huerto

HOURS

Closed on Mondays

DINING & BAR
Tu-W 11am - 10pm
Th-Sat 11am - Midnight
Sun 12pm - 9pm

3 DAYS ONLY!!!

Thursday March. 3 thru Saturday. Mar. 5

J*ME accessories and CORDANI Shoes
invites you to
Spring 2016 CORDANI POP-UP
SALES EVENT!

**NEW Location:
251 E. Merrill Street, Suite 233
Inside the Merrillwood Building- 2nd fl oor

**Located on the 2nd
fl oor look for the J*ME
sandwich board sign

(former House of Renew space)

Birmingham

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For more info. and hours: Call Jayme Kirschner (formerly of Imelda*s Closet)
248-342-5342

2036170
2081240

February 25 • 2016

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