The Packard Plant was commissioned in 1903 by Henry B. Joy, newly appointed president of the Packard Motor Car Company. Upon his appointment, Joy had decided to move Packard's production from Warren, OH to Detroit, MI where the automobile industry was beginning to centralize. Through connections that each had at the University of Michigan, Joy commissioned Albert Kahn to design the sprawling Packard Motor Car Company Plant on a 40 acre tract on East Grand Boulevard. The first nine buildings of the complex were built using contemporary brick and steel models of factory design and construction. By 1905, the year the company formally moved production from Warren to Detroit, Building #10 of the Packard Plant was built using the Kahn System of Reinforced Concrete. Kahn focused the layout of Building #10 on the concepts of interior flexibility and generous fenestration made possible by the reinforced concrete structural system used. Structure and planning arrangement allowed for 32'-0\" x 64'-0" bays lined with large amounts of glazing. Kahn's functional treatment of the relationship of the interior to the exterior influenced incipient Modernisms in Europe. In 1909, the need for space in the growing company necessitated the addition of two floors to Building #10, highlighting both the structures strength and planning flexibility. It also created a vertical arrangement of production that necessitated heavy concrete ramps to move production from floor to floor. In 1911, the Packard Forge Shop was completed, which implemented a formally ambitious continuous horizontal run of glass and louvers that bypassed structure as a curtain wall. The production model for automobiles at this time was based on craftsmanship and individual assembly. Because of its attention to quality and excellence in early motor design, Packard distinguished itself as a premier brand. By 1925, Packard was the world's premier luxury car brand. To boost sales during the Depression Era, Packard introduced the mid-priced Clipper, but it was Hollywood and the business elites preference for custom Packards that helped the company stay afloat. From 1940 to 1945, the Packard Plant buzzed with wartime production activity, including the redesign of a Rolls Royce engine that was deemed the mighty Packard Merlin. The Merlin engine was a two-stage supercharged V-12 that was the heart of the P-51 Mustang fighter plane. By the late 1940s, Packard was in trouble due to fierce competition from Detroit's Big Three. The availability of luxurious cars at cheap prices, a lack of capital, and its failure to restyle car lines led to Packard's ultimate failure. In 1956, Studebaker bought Packard and closed the plant's production.

The complex is currently abandoned. The Packard Plant is a favorite site for tourists of urban decay, second only to Michigan Central Terminal. The plant is unguarded and host to a number of illegal or unsafe activities, which has fueled the city's decade-long attempts at demolition. Illegal dumpers have hauled hazardous waste to the site, creating an environmental liability and increasing the complexity of any potential preservation or development projects.

Despite decades of neglect, abuse, and fires, the plant is in relatively good structural shape. Since the Kahn System of Reinforced Concrete was a pioneering structural concrete system, it was overdesigned to perform and is therefore nearly ten times the necessary strength by today's codes. Aside from its structure, the plant is in near ruinous condition. Water mains in sublevels of the basement have been gushing water for upwards of five years without city intervention, which is eroding the building's foundations. Scrappers can be seen hauling debris from the site daily, often removing and dismantling building elements to sell to scrap yards in the neighborhoods, which is a lucrative operation in Detroit's hard economy. Scrappers have even punched holes into portions of the building's walls in order to provide access for their trucks.

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Building #10 of the Packard Plant was built using the Kahn System of Reinforced Concrete, which allowed for 32f'-0\" x 64'-0" bays lined with large amounts of glazing. This system of construction was first patented by Albert's brother Julius Kahn in 1901, which was managed under the Trussed Concrete Steel Company in Detroit. The Kahn System was first used by Albert and Julius Kahn (with Ernest Wilby) in the Engineering Building on the University of Michigan's Ann Arbor campus in 1903, which led to their commission for the Packard complex.

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Packard's Building #10 was the first in a series of innovative factories designed by Kahn that helped to facilitate Henry Ford's method of assembly line production. In 1906, Kahn designed the Pierce Great Arrow Automobile Plant in Buffalo, which organized entire work functions into seven separate buildings, formulating a precedent of horizontal production flow management. By 1909, Kahn had established himself as the go-to industrial architect in Detroit especially, but also in other areas of industrial growth. Kahn built the Highland plant for Ford Motor Company in this year, which organized the production flow into a vertical arrangement similar to the Packard. However, construction remained traditional brick and steel. It is in this facility in 1913 that Ford introduced his assembly line method of manufacturing. By 1917, in order to better accommodate the new method of production assembly, Ford commissioned Kahn to design the sprawling River Rouge complex based on the structural precedent of Packard's complex and the horizontal organizational precedent of Pierce Arrow's Buffalo plant.

[ADD 3-4 SENTENCES ON LABOR WORK FORCE IN THE ORIGINAL PLANT]The history of the complex itself is a narrative of the plight of Detroit's social arrangement from an industrial to a post-industrial society. After Studebaker sold the plant in 1957, the Packard name was dissolved and production of Studebakers was transplanted to outer lying suburbs ringing the metro limits. Developers turned the complex into an industrial mall where buildings were rented to various manufacturers. In the 1960s and 1970s, the plant was subdivided, partitioned, repurposed, and modified as manufacturing tenants come and go throughout the complex. By the late 1970s most manufacturing companies left, leaving the complex unguarded. As the complex deteriorated, artists hosted art shows and people organized illegal all-night rave parties that helped incubate Detroit's early years as the birthplace of Techno. Many DJs who played the Packard raves went on to work the Deep Techno clubs of East Berlin and throughout Eastern Europe where Techno was institutionalized.

[ADD 2-3 SENTENCES ON THE ORIGINAL RECEPTION OF THE PLANT, AND KAHN'S IDEA OF FUNCTION AND AESTHETICS.]Currently, the Packard Plant has eroded into what is today an industrial ruin that is treated as an urban artifact representing the rise and subsequent decline of Detroit, as seen through its automobile industry.

As of 2010, the Packard plant has dwindled to one small chemical processing tenant, which has plans to merge with another company and move within the year. Future plans for the complex are currently ambiguous. There is speculation of a green automobile manufacturer revitalizing the plant to its former industrial glory. There are also proposals to convert the plant to an automobile museum. The complex has been estimated to cost between $5 and $10 million to demolish, which has stalled the city's attempts to tear it down. Currently, there are plans to use the complex in the filming of the upcoming Transformers 3 movie, in which the film crew plans to lace portions of the less significant portions of the complex with explosives, which would ultimately save the city money in demolition.

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