Reading through Albert Kahn’s Library: French Art Deco and the Architect of Detroit

Abstract

What does it mean to read through a library? Can viewing objects through their collector, rather than their user or even their maker, offer a worthwhile lens through which to understand a design culture? This article addresses those questions by unpacking the remarkable collection of 1920s French decorative arts folios from the shelves of the office library of architect Albert Kahn (1869–1942). Overwhelmingly remembered for his practice in industrial architecture, I ask why we might find these folios of French articles de luxe in the collection of a factory architect from Detroit. While it may be tempting to see Kahn’s project of bureaucratic or factory architecture in stark contrast to the contemporaneous burst of moderne luxury home goods across the Atlantic, this study prompts a reconsideration of how the form and purpose of these prints might have been implicated in, and resonated with, a culture of design and production in the Motor City.