Michigan Modern


Book Description

Michigan Modern: An Architectural Legacy takes readers on a privileged tour of iconic buildings and interiors designed by some of the world¿s most renowned and celebrated architects and interior designers. Each of the 34 selected projects is carefully documented to record its place in art history and the story behind both its architect and client.




Mid-Michigan Modern


Book Description

"In this new expanded edition, Susan J. Bandes adds descriptions of additional buildings and discusses projects by ten additional architects"--




Michigan Modern


Book Description

Michigan Modern: Design That Shaped America is an impressive collection of important essays touching on all aspects of Michigan’s architecture and design heritage. The Great Lakes State has always been known for its contributions to twentieth-century manufacturing, but it’s only beginning to receive wide attention for its contributions to Modern design and architecture. Brian D. Conway, Michigan’s State Historic Preservation Officer, and Amy L. Arnold, project manager for Michigan Modern, have curated nearly thirty essays and interviews from a number of prominent architects, academics, architectural historians, journalists, and designers, including historian Alan Hess, designers Mira Nakashima, Ruth Adler Schnee, and Todd Oldham, and architect Gunnar Birkerts, describing Michigan’s contributions to Modern design in architecture, automobiles, furniture and education.




MSU Campus-- Buildings, Places, Spaces


Book Description

"From early landscape gardeners influenced by Ossian Cole Simonds and the nationally known Olmsted Brothers, to the vision of President John Hannah, the consistent intent has been to interrelate architecture and the campus park. The result is a campus whose development reflects major trends in American architecture and whose creators include local, regional, and nationally known architectural firms."--BOOK JACKET.




Architectural Missionary


Book Description

The first and most prolific professional architect to reside permanently in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, D. Fred Charlton used the local Lake Superior sandstone to craft the distinctive style found in buildings throughout Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Born in England and trained there as a civil engineer, Charlton came to Detroit in the late 1870s, seeking work as a draftsman. Much like his peers of the time, he had no formal training as an architect and learned his trade by working at several prominent firms. The last, Scott & Company, sent him to Marquette in 1887 to open a branch office. Three years later, Charlton opened his own firm, and over the next twenty-eight years, he designed more than four hundred buildings, including residences, commercial structures, schools, courthouses, and churches throughout the region, which offer an invaluable insight into the tastes of Americans before the World War I and provide a unique vantage point for studying the evolution of the architectural profession. Deftly adapting national trends, he provided the communities of the Upper Peninsula with modern structures worthy of any place in the nation. Many of his buildings remain to this day, monuments to the skill of this English-born architect who made a place for himself upon the shores of Lake Superior. Anyone interested in architecture and in the history of the upper Midwest will find this read both fascinating and informative.




North Michigan Avenue


Book Description




Cleveland Architecture, 1890-1930


Book Description

This study looks at the architectural transformation of Cleveland during its "golden age"--roughly the period between Civil War reconstruction and World War I. By the early twentieth century, Cleveland, which would evolve into the fifth largest city in America, hoped to shed the gritty industrial image of its rapid growth period. Encouraged by the spectacle and enthusiastic response to the Beaux-Arts buildings of the Chicago World's Exposition of 1893, the city embarked upon a grand scheme to construct new governmental and civic structures known as the Cleveland Plan of Grouping Public Buildings, one of the earliest and most complete City Beautiful planning schemes in the country. The success of this plan led to a spillover effect that prompted architects to design all manner of new public buildings that adopted similar Beaux-Arts architectural characteristics over the ensuing decades.




Architecture in Michigan


Book Description

A pictorial survey of Michigan architecture from 1831 to the present. Architecture in Michigan, a pictorial survey of Michigan architecture from 1831 to the present, explores the architecture of Detroit and many other cities, towns, and villages. Here is Romantic Michigan, before the Civil War, with dozens of examples of Greek, Gothic, and Italian villas from Grosse lIe to Grass Lake, Tecumseh, and Ypsilanti, as well as Gothic churches. Then there is Glorious Michigan of the exuberant 1870s and 1880s, when architects evoked the Paris of the Second Empire and the doctrine of John Ruskin cast its peculiar spell. And Discreet Michigan, when the wealthy, following the lead of the Vanderbilts in New York, revived the Renaissance as the proper style for Michigan dynasties. And finally Modern Michigan, with Albert Kahn, the greatest factory architect in history, Eliel and Eero Saarinen, the talented Finns, the time when the buildings of modern Michigan began to acquire an international reputation. The expanded text of this unique book dips deep into Michigan history, covering every generation since Michigan entered the Union in 1837.




Alden B. Dow


Book Description

Alden Dow (active 1930s-1970s) produced more than five hundred designs—often daringly modern structures. This book traces Alden Dow's life and work as well as the intensely personal philosophy that governed everything he did: houses, churches, schools, business and civic structures, and even a new town in Texas. Dow changed the face of his hometown of Midland, Michigan, leaving more than one hundred buildings, including his Home and Studio, a National Historic Landmark. 185 color and 220 black-and-white illustrations.




American City


Book Description

"In the 1910s and 1920s there was more steel going up in Detroit than anywhere outside of New York and Chicago. The result was the country's first high-tech metropolis, a city of lavish monuments and glittering skyscrapers." "The list of major architects who designed buildings for Detroit includes Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies van der Rohe, Stanford White, Daniel Burnham, Cass Gilbert, Albert Kahn, Minoru Yamasaki, Philip Johnson, and numerous others." "Detroit's public buildings - its museums, libraries, schools, and monuments - are second to none in terms of their overall scale, materials, and detailing. Hotels, stores, theaters, and other commercial venues display a breezy cosmopolitanism consistent with the city's position as both a technology hub and a crossroads of immigration." "Overwhelmed by the sheer beauty of the buildings they encountered on a 2003 visit to downtown Detroit, writer Robert Sharoff and photographer William Zbaren were inspired to create American City: Detroit Architecture, 1845-2005, the first new large-format book on the city's architecture in more than thirty years." "The fact that many structures are either endangered or marginally in use makes the book all the more compelling. In 2005, the National Trust for Historic Preservation placed "the historic buildings of downtown Detroit" on the list of the country's most endangered landmarks." "The book also includes examples of interesting new architecture as well as numerous historic buildings from the 1920s and earlier that have been maintained or in some cases painstakingly restored."--BOOK JACKET.