GENERAL ELECTRIC AIRCRAFT ENGINES, EVANDALE
This installment is motivated by a loss. The General Electric Aircraft Engines plant in Evendale, OH, is demolishing one of its important, early factory buildings, designed by architect Albert Kahn of Detroit.
Modernism and factories had an intimate relationship. German architects Peter Behrens and Walter Gropius built some of the earliest Modernist factories in the world, including Behrens' AEG turbine works (1910) and Gropius' Fagus Factory (1912). Modernism itself glorified machine production, standardization, economy, and efficient, rational design. Modernist factories were buildings designed and constructed like machines, housing machines, often for making machines. A criticism of Modernism has been that all Modernist buildings look like factories, no matter what their function. Many Modernist architects, however, might have considered that a compliment.
Albert Kahn (1869-1942) was born in Germany and came to Detroit in 1880, where he opened his own architectural firm in 1895. His clients included Henry Ford, Republic Steel, General Motors and Chrysler. For Ford he designed the first assembly-line plant (Highland Park, 1909-13); he developed a new type of construction where steel and reinforced concrete replaced wood in factory walls, roofs and supports, and his creative "sawtooth" roofs contained skylights which admitted quantities of natural light to the factory floor.
Kahn designed the Evendale factory for Wright Aeronautical Corporation as part of the WWII defense effort. When completed in 1941, it was the largest defense-related aircraft factory in the world. The machine shop and assembly building alone covered more than thirty-seven acres of unobstructed floor space. In front of the factory sat a long, low, flat-roofed office block of yellow brick, with continuous, horizontal strip windows and a handsome stone-veneered entrance pavilion displaying two-story vertical windows and stainless steel details. It is this factory and office block, visible from I-75, which are being demolished by GE, which has owned the plant since 1949 and manufactures jet engines there.
Rapid changes in industrial technology soon makes factory buildings obsolete. The factory is thus a building type difficult to preserve. It is unfortunate that of the multiple buildings in its Evendale plant, GE chose to demolish the most architecturally significant. With creative planning, one suspects that portions of this important building might have been saved and incorporated into the new construction planned for the site. The demolition of Albert Kahn's handsome factory and office block is a loss to Modernism in America and makes Cincinnati architecturally less rich than it was just a few days ago.
Can we learn anything from this hasty and ill-advised demolition? Let's hope so. Other fine Modernist factories still survive in the Cincinnati area, such as the former Xomox valve factory and corporate headquarters at 4444 Cooper Road in Blue Ash. This beautiful building, designed by Cincinnati's premier Modernist architects Carl Strauss and Ray Roush, was perhaps the most progressive factory in the region when built in 1969. Its black steel framing, dark-tinted glass, and delicate sun screens are now looking dangerously run-down. One fears that it could soon disappear or undergo an unsympathetic rehab which might compromise its elegant character.
Challenging as they may be to save, we should not let our best Modernist factories tumble off the end of the assembly line.
Posted 3/30/2010
