Abstract

Architecture faces an evolution of cultural-historical kind that often takes a circular spiral form with periodic returns and continuous reviews of past experiences. It can always be reused, reinterpreted and become again part of the main flow of disci­plinal development. Architectural obsolescence is always unfinished and its historic valuation variable.To relate this reflection with functionalism, that is a central concept for modernity, we will discuss a unique case of twentieth-century architecture history, the factories of the Ford Motor Company in Detroit, designed by Albert Kahn, for two reasons: due they present a progressive transition from an architectural object to an offspring increasingly technically pure, and because it performed in a series of buildings with the same program, designed by the same architect and in a quick time sequence. This example demonstrates the connection between the evolution of the concept of function and the object’s own obsolescence. From functionalism, we try to explore the boundaries between the project method applicable to an architectural object and the one used for a pure technical object as defined by Gilbert Simondon.