16 June 1903: Henry Ford founds the famous car company that still bears his name in Dearborn, Michigan. Twenty-five years later, the American industrialist wants to give an urban shape to his vision: we tell the story of Fordlandia through a photographic essay by Dan Dubowitz from Domus Archive.
This article was originally published on Domus 965, January 2013.
The first part of this work by Dan Dubowitz brings back to light an instersting episode of the 20th-century American history.
In the 1920s, Henry Ford set out to build an ambitious series of new towns in North America, but when he was blocked by Congresshe looked abroad to fulfil his ambitions. In 1928 he started to build a new town and rubber plantation deep in the Amazon rainforest.
Ford’s “work of civilisation” sought to industrialise the jungle and tame it to his will. The local workforce was to be moulded to the Fordism of his US plants. Ford dismissed local knowledge and experience, and ignored the advice of his own agronomists who said rubber could not be grown in plantations in Brazil.
For the creation of the new city and plantation, he ordered the clearing of a section of virgin rainforest the size of a medium-sized American state. The plantation and the town were an unmitigated failure both economically and socially. Rubber was never produced commercially and the town was abandoned by Ford in 1944. Today Fordlandia is creeping back to life because the houses are free and the school is full again. The golf course, however, has disappeared, and the state-of-the-art hospital is also steadily being consumedby the rainforest.
Fordlandia is the first in a series of creative endeavours through which Dubowitz investigates the psyche and architecture of megalomania.
Dan Dubowitz, who trained as an architect, now practices as an urban designer and artist. Director of the design practice Civic Works, he is currently cultural master planner for the regeneration of part of the south bank in London. His artistic work ranges from his permanent city-scale artworks, such as the Peeps in Manchester, to long-term photography projects.