Detroit, home of Henry Ford and the motor car, and of Motown and punk, was once the US’s fourth biggest city. It lay at the centre of what was once the cradle of mass production, of what became known, in Huxley’s Brave New World as “Fordism”.
It’s there, at the intersection of Manchester and Woodward in Highland Park that Henry Ford perfected mass production. The Model T Automobile Plant, built in 1909, housed the world’s first moving assembly line. At its peak, the plant built 1000 “Tin Lizzies” each day. Today it stands semi-derelict, probably the most important factory in automotive history.
An American journalist, Lincoln Steffens, coined the famous phrase “I’ve seen the future, and it works”, after his visit to the Soviet Union in 1921. Steffens was an early campaigner against the corporate corruption that dominated America’s industrial cities, and he took Detroit as a prime example. However, in his enthusiasm for an alternative, he failed to spot that the Soviet system had adopted some of the dehumanising aspects of Fordism.
Car assembly typically took place from top to bottom, with raw material on the top floor, and a car rolling out on the ground floor, ready to be fired up. Car chassis travelled down in huge electrically-powered lifts. Machines were arranged according to their function in the manufacturing process rather than by type; overhead conveyors, gravity chutes, and belts were used to transport materials from one work station to another.
Body-building, upholstering and panel-beating were carried out on the second floor. There were also machine shops which made pistons, water pumps and brake drums. The linking range may have been used as stores and quality control areas. The car’s “body in white” travelled down to the first floor where it was attached to the chassis and fitted out. Final assembly was carried out on the ground floor, then finished cars were loaded onto rail wagons on the factory’s own sidings. 
Today, Detroit’s great temples to the motor car – the iconic factories of Ford, General Motors, Cadillac, Fisher Body, Packard and many others – lie in ruins. The architect who conceived them was Albert Kahn: most famously, he designed the plant at Highland Park in Detroit where the Ford Model “T” was produced but over the course of his career, he pioneered reinforced concrete frames and built many hundreds of other factories.
Arguably, Albert Kahn was The Architect of the 20th Century: his buildings made a greater impact on the world than Le Corbusier’s or Frank Lloyd Wright’s. These photos show one of Kahn’s buildings, which survives despite the ravages of time and the defeat of Fordist thinking.
