Albert Kahn's Five-Year Plant and the Birth of “Uncertain Space”

Abstract

Structural parallels between the disposable “five-year plants” developed by Albert Kahn Associates, in response to the multiple exigencies of wartime planning, and the newly uncertain character of the spaces described by the classical information theory of Claude Shannon during the same period is an entry point for critiquing the rhetoric of crisis at the center of preservation discourse in contemporary Detroit. The authors read the conflicting implications of these historic spaces as instantiating Henri Lefebvre’s theorization of an emergent “contradictory space,” while complicating his narrative of its evolution out of the abstract space brought into representation by European exponents of the International Style by foregrounding the hyperrationalism of Kahn’s industrial buildings. In uncovering this longer trajectory of what they term “uncertain space,” the authors trouble the neoliberal paradigm of emergency management framing current preservation projects in Kahn’s native city while highlighting the potential for resistant readings. Uncertain space emerges as the horizon of sustainability frameworks that developed out of an earlier discourse on obsolescence, of which Kahn’s collaborations with Ford of the 1910s and 1920s are enduring embodiments.