April 2017

Frank Lloyd Wright in Ann Arbor

Author: Grace Shackman

Thanks to Frank Lloyd Wright, Bill and Mary Palmer raised their family in a work of art.

On a Saturday morning a little over a year ago, a group that included prominent local architect Larry Brink; Doug Kelbaugh, dean of the U-M’s Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning; builder Bruce Niethammer; and George Colone, a heating specialist from Hutzel Plumbing & Heating, met to discuss a failing radiant heat system beneath the concrete floor of a fifty-year-old house. If it had been just any house, the solution would have been obvious: jackhammer the concrete and replace the pipes. But on hearing that suggestion, owner Mary Palmer recalls, “I nearly fainted. It wasn’t acceptable.” The reason so many people shared her concern was that the floor in question was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.

The group worked out a solution that would preserve the part of the radiant system that still worked, about a third of the total. Hutzel would install a new boiler and radiators to heat the rest of the house–but would hide all the new components behind couches, inside cabinets, and under beds.

“ ‘Change’ is not in the vocabulary up there,” says Bruce Niethammer, who’s worked on the house since 1974.

Larry Brink trained under Wright and has consulted on hundreds of Wright homes. “The Palmers maintained their house the best of all owners,” Brink says. “They took the best care of the house from day one.”

But while staying true to Wright and his principles, Mary and her husband, Bill, made the house their own, using it to express and enhance their interests in music, yoga, gardening, and art. “You take something, it becomes part of you, you become part of it,” explains the Palmers’ good friend Priscilla Neel, who is also an architect. “That’s what makes a building individual.”

It was quite a coup in 1950 to get the foremost architect of the century to design a house for a young couple in Ann Arbor. The Palmers had no “in” with Wright; they just asked him. But from meeting Mary Palmer fifty years later, it is clear why she would be drawn to Frank Lloyd Wright. A gracious lady with a hint of a southern accent (she grew up in North Carolina), her whole demeanor–her simple but elegant style of dress, her artistic sense, and her concern with doing things right–fit into a whole, like the perfectly integrated details of a Wright design.

Mary and Bill Palmer met as students at the U-M–Mary in music and Bill in economics. After graduation Bill was asked to stay and teach. In the early years of their marriage, the Palmers lived in an old farmhouse on Geddes, now the home of attorney Clan Crawford. The older women in the neighborhood befriended Mary. “They broke the rules about not inviting instructors to dinner parties,” she recalls. “These ladies knew gardens, literature–they were rich in what Ann Arbor had to offer.”

Elizabeth Inglis, who lived in the family estate on Highland (today the U-M’s Inglis House), was one of these remarkable women. One morning she phoned Mary to tell her that the road behind her house was being extended for building sites. Mary called Bill at work, and he came home at lunchtime. Mrs. Inglis, in gardening boots, showed them what she considered the best lot. “This is the most beautiful place in the city,” she told them. The young couple took her advice and bought both that lot and the one next to it–a total of one and a half acres of varied terrain.

Mary, a woman of wide intellectual interests, spent hours reading at the U-M’s architecture library while thinking about what kind of house to build on the site on Orchard Hills Drive. At the time she was very interested in antiques, so it might seem natural that she would have been drawn to a traditional style. But she was also very interested in Japan, one of Wright’s sources of inspiration. She had visited Japan, audited classes on Japanese art, and taken Japanese language classes.

Mary’s reading led her to Wright. The architect was then eighty-three years old but still active. Hoping to see one of his homes for herself, Mary telephoned Gregor and Elizabeth Affleck, who lived in a 1941 Wright house in Bloomfield Hills. The Afflecks responded by inviting the Palmers to dinner. Bill and Mary drove to Bloomfield Hills on a frigid February day. “We had an ‘experience,’ ” Mary recalls. “And they had as much of an experience showing it to us as we had. How it felt to be in one of Mr. Wright’s buildings opened up to me!”

On the way home Mary said to Bill, “Let’s see if we can get Mr. Wright.” Bill agreed it was worth a try. He thought that the project might appeal to Wright: Ann Arbor, despite the presence of the U-M architecture school, had no example of Wright’s work.

Mary wrote Wright a letter that concluded, “I hope you will design our house and we will not have to go to a lesser architect.” Her mother, who lived in Raleigh, North Carolina, had told her that Wright was going to be lecturing at North Carolina State, so Mary suggested in her letter that they could meet there. Wright agreed.

The Palmers attended the lecture and then gave Wright a topographic map of their property. “He opened it and looked at it,” Mary recalls. “Then he looked up, rolled it back up, and said, ‘I’ll design your house.’ It was that simple.” Not known for false modesty, Wright told them, “Wouldn’t it be wonderful for your children to grow up in one of my houses?”

Thinking back, Mary Palmer suspects Wright accepted the commission because “he saw a young couple who were really going to build–who wouldn’t back out. There was a big falloff of clients, many who went to him for designs never built.”

Some months later, the Palmers picked up the house plans at Taliesin, Wright’s home and studio in Spring Green, Wisconsin. Wright delivered the plans and left the Palmers alone to review them. The most striking detail was that the design was made up of equilateral triangles instead of the rectangles of a traditional house.

“I must say when we looked at the triangular module it was a surprise,” Mary recalls, “because we didn’t ask for it. But I had some background, because I was familiar with the Anthony house in Benton Harbor.” As he had with the Anthony house, Wright had produced a floor plan without a single conventional ninety-degree angle–every angle is either 60 or 120 degrees.

Although familiar with architectural styles, the Palmers had never seen preliminary plans and were not quite sure how to interpret them. When Wright returned to the room after about fifteen minutes, he told them to take the plans home and think about it. They showed the plans to Mary’s family in North Carolina, who also found themselves at sea. After a month or two of pondering, they got back to Wright and told him the house was too small.

Mary expected some resistance, because “the plan looked so perfect as it was,” but Wright replied that he was just trying to keep costs down for their sake. “He enlarged the house with no trouble,” she recalls. Wright made the bedrooms several modules larger, added a mud room and pantry to free up space in the kitchen, and put a study for Bill at the back of the house.

The plans, now kept at the U-M’s Bentley Historical Library, detail not only the building materials but also the design and placement of the furniture (most of it built in) and even the color scheme–Wright’s signature “Cherokee red.” For the exterior, the architect specified red tidewater cypress, sand-molded brick, and a matching perforated concrete block. Part of the roof would be flat; the sloping portion would have red cedar shingles. Although Wright was not big on basements, he included a small utility basement under the kitchen. The rest of the house would be constructed on a concrete slab finished with a red glaze coat called “colorundrum.” (Maintaining the slab’s appearance was a major goal of the recent heating repair.)

The Palmers hired Erwin Niethammer, Bruce’s uncle, to build the house. “He was one of the best builders around,” recalls local architect David Osler. Niethammer was also well suited to the job because he was not easily intimidated–“He didn’t take nonsense from anyone,” according to Osler.

Mary Palmer recalls that Niethammer was “receptive to the unusual. He looked at the plans and said he’d never seen anything like it, but thought he could build the house.” He also told her they were the most “beautiful set of plans he’d ever worked with.”

Gathering the materials was probably the biggest challenge. The cypress had to be specially ordered, the blocks specially fired. Working with Fingerle Lumber and Niethammer, the Palmers found the best craftsmen in the area to make the built-in furniture.

Bruce Niethammer was only four when the house was being built, but he still has a vivid memory of a Sunday drive his family took to the site. “We saw the house up on the hill and piles of dirt and lumber,” Niethammer recalls.

“It was an event,” recalls Priscilla Neel, who visited the site regularly during construction. So did Bob Metcalf, a U-M architecture prof and future dean. “It was a unique experience for a town to have a Frank Lloyd Wright house,” Metcalf remembers. David Osler, too, was a frequent visitor. John Howe, the head draftsman at Taliesin, came by periodically to make sure things were going all right, but so far as these sidewalk superintendents could tell, Niethammer seemed to do fine on his own.

Of course the Palmers, living just a few blocks away, also viewed the progress of the house. “When it was being constructed, we all went out to see it over and over,” recalls the Palmers’ daughter, Mary Louise Dunn, then about ten. “We saw it was going to be marvelous.”

Mary Palmer says she left most of the decisions about the house to the architect. “Mr. Wright was not autocratic–just sure of himself,” she recalls. “He would say ‘I don’t think you’d like . . . ’–and he was always right.”

The Palmers moved into the house shortly before Christmas 1952. The large triangular living area at the center of the home was ideal both for family life and for entertaining. It has windows on two of its three sides, and a pyramidal ceiling formed by three triangular sections.

The room is still arranged exactly as it was in Wright’s plans half a century ago, with a grand piano as the focal point. People sitting on the built-in couch, a parallelogram, look toward the piano and onto the grounds beyond. Between the couch and piano on the right is a large brick fireplace. On the left side of the room are the Wright-designed dining table and chairs, and tucked behind them is the kitchen, separated from the living area by specially manufactured perforated blocks.

The ceiling in the sleeping wing is much lower, as is common in Wright houses. (The architect was a short man, and some have speculated that he would have made the rooms higher had he been taller.) A more pedestrian architect might have switched to a conventional design for this less visible area, but Wright continued his triangular pattern, even designing hexagonal built-in beds in the master bedroom and children’s rooms. (Mary Palmer used to have sheets specially made but now just folds them under.) The house is situated so that the bedrooms get morning sun.

The living room’s unexpected angles and peaked ceiling, the sun pouring in the large windows, the view of the landscaped backyard–all combine to create a breathtaking experience. After almost fifty years, Mary Palmer says, she is still continually amazed by the beauty of the house.

When the Palmers first moved in, their two children, Mary Louise and Adrian, were still young, and they tried to lead as normal a family life as possible. “We used the house,” says Mary Louise Dunn. Asked whether it was hard to live there, Dunn replies, “There was always a standard of how to treat the house–higher than most, imposed by the house. There was no basement rec room, no place that wasn’t absolutely beautiful.” But, she adds, “the payoff, if we couldn’t do anything like everyone else, was that it was so special.” The semirural location (it was outside the city limits until 1999) also allowed activities that couldn’t be done in a more urban setting, such as taking Sassafras, the neighbors’ donkey, down to Nichols Arboretum to ride. When Dunn was a teenager, she had parties like other kids, rolling up the rugs and dancing to rock ’n’ roll.

After living in the house a few years, the Palmers put in a terrace off the living room. Wright had said that the terrace, which was part of his original plan, would be a good place to have weddings, and in time both Mary Louise and Adrian would be married there.

In 1964, after a visit to Japan, the Palmers built a Japanese garden house, which they used as a guest house and meditation area. By then Wright was dead, but Taliesin’s John Howe designed it in the same style as the house, complete with a three-section pyramidal ceiling. The last major change was a garden wall that Brink executed, using Wright’s design with a few necessary modifications.

Elizabeth Inglis suggested that the Palmers wait a year before starting to landscape, so that they could see what they had. Since the site was once an orchard, there were some beautiful trees on the lot, including apple trees that went back several decades. When they were ready to begin, Inglis sent her own gardener, Walter Stampfli, over with flats of pachysandra and euonymus. The garden turned into a lifetime passion for both Palmers. “It was a real collaboration between Mother and Father,” recalls Dunn. “Mother was the artistic one. She gave unstinting consideration to the whole garden, considering it from every angle.” Of her father she says, “He was a great gardener, actually planting, appreciating plants, doing cuttings, watering, fertilizing.” The garden, which even today is being further refined, follows the site’s natural contours and uses a limited palette of plant materials. Although formed with great art, it looks utterly natural.

Mr. Wright, as Mary Palmer calls him to this day, did not see the house until it was finished. She remembers his first visit: “He didn’t look at the house. He went right to the piano and sat down and played.” Asked what he played, she replies, “Something he composed extemporaneously.” Music was a shared interest for the architect and his clients: Wright once told Mary, “If you didn’t like music, you wouldn’t like my architecture.” Wright, whose father had been a music teacher before studying for the ministry, often compared his architecture to music.

Wright stayed overnight with the Palmers in 1958. Invited by the U-M architecture students to give a lecture, he agreed on the condition that he would talk only to them and not to their professors. Wright slept in one of the Palmers’ hexagonal beds and had oatmeal for breakfast.

On an earlier visit to Michigan, in 1954, when he was to lecture at the Masonic Temple in Detroit, he stayed with the Afflecks but came to the Palmers’ for dinner. Gil Ross, a U-M faculty member and the first violinist of the university-based Stanley Quartet, was a close friend of the Palmers, so they asked him if the quartet would perform for Wright. Mary recalls that they opened with a Haydn quartet. When the first movement ended, Wright stopped them, saying something was wrong. Everyone looked uncomfortable–the Stanley Quartet were first-rate musicians. Then Wright explained that their playing was fine but that their location bothered him. He walked over and helped them move their music stands and chairs between two piers leading out to the terrace, where he thought the music would sound better.

Many of the Palmers’ friends were people connected with music. “I first knew the music faculty as teachers, then as friends. It was the beginning of all our friendships,” recalls Mary. Both Palmers were active in the University Musical Society and the Ann Arbor Symphony Orchestra and often entertained musical luminaries in their house. Dunn recalls meeting such performers as Lena Horne and Frederica von Stade.

The Palmers’ yearly caroling party is also fondly remembered by those who attended. “About twenty families would sing and then eat. Mary’s was a perfect place for it because of the sensational acoustics,” recalls publisher Phil Power, whose parents, Eugene and Sadie Power, were good friends of the Palmers. Dunn recalls that at Christmastime her mother would bring out a special set of Welsh bells, spanning two octaves, to add to the music from the piano.

Mary’s interest in music segued serendipitously into another interest: yoga. Bill Palmer got to know many foreign students in college, and Mary first heard of yoga through his Indian friends. When she went to the Y to sign up for her first yoga class, she was pleasantly surprised to run into her good friend Priscilla Neel putting her name down for the same class.

Palmer and Neel’s original teacher was an American, as was her replacement. Both teachers did their best, but in retrospect, Neel says, the exercises were “by rote-more like calisthenics.” When the second teacher was leaving, she told Palmer and Neel that they should take over. The second teacher had encouraged them to read some of the yoga literature, including B. K. S. Iyengar’s Light on Yoga, which came out in 1966 with a foreword by violinist Yehudi Menuhin.

“Of all the artists who come to Ann Arbor, the one I’d really like to meet is Mr. Menuhin,” Mary Palmer told Alva Sink, whose husband, Charles, then headed the University Musical Society. Later, when Menuhin came for a concert, the Sinks invited the Palmers to a small party afterward. Mary took Iyengar’s book with her and told Menuhin that she wanted to go to India and study with the author. “Without batting an eye, he said, ‘You must go,’ ” she recalls. “He was pleased someone knew about this dimension of his life.” When Bill was on sabbatical, she traveled to India, carrying a letter of introduction from Menuhin, and met with Iyengar in Poona.

“She came back very enthusiastic,” recalls Neel. The women and a few friends began to practice yoga at the Palmers’ house. “One of us would read [Iyengar’s book] on tape. Then we’d put it on and learn the positions,” recalls Neel. In 1973 they convinced the Y to sponsor Iyengar’s first visit to the United States. “Then he came and showed us how to really do it,” Neel recalls. For the next decade, until he retired, Iyengar visited Ann Arbor regularly. After coming to Ann Arbor, he was invited to cities all around the country and attracted students to India, where Palmer and Neel helped him open a yoga institute. “Mary always entertained when Iyengar was in town,” Neel recalls. “He’d stay at her house.”

Iyengar was only one of many guests over the years, some drawn by fascination with Wright’s architecture, others by the warmth of the Palmers and their shared interests. “Mary’s an incredibly gracious hostess,” says Anne Glendon. “The house and her intellectual interests are a unified whole.”

Glendon recalls a spring party to honor Carl St. Clair, then conductor of the Ann Arbor Symphony, when “the grounds were beautiful with daffodils.” David Osler, whose wife, Connie, started the docent program at the U-M Museum of Art, remembers a gathering at the Palmers’ in honor of Marshall Wu, the curator of Asian art. “Magic,” says Osler. “It was a warm fall evening. The moon was out. Everything was waxed and polished.” One party that stands out in Mary’s mind is a dinner she gave for Yehudi Menuhin. “He liked to sit on the floor, so we had tables sitting on the floor with white tablecloths.”

Different visitors respond to different aspects of the house. Architect Ralph Youngren, impressed to find all the original furniture still in place, was intrigued by “the odd-shaped drawers and dressers” and by the Palmers’ attention to detail, down to the special red gravel they ordered for the driveway. Ann Arbor Building Department head Larry Pickel was struck by how the hexagonal shape of the beds made it impossible to put pillows next to each other.

“I was fascinated by being in a Frank Lloyd Wright house,” says retired U-M surgeon Herb Sloan. “I’d been in Wright houses that were museums, but not one where someone lived.” Judy Dow Rumelhart, who used to live across the street, remembers how she “adored going out in the teahouse. It’s a romantic house–another world.” Mary Louise Dunn says that even her teenage friends responded to the architecture: “You couldn’t be human and not recognize it’s unique.”

Although the Palmers were generous in sharing their house, Bill and Mary also guarded their privacy. They opened their home to the general public on only two occasions. In the 1980s they allowed it to be shown on the Women’s City Club Tour, helping to make that year’s tour the most lucrative ever. A few years ago Mary opened her house for a UMS fund-raiser that sold out instantly.

Bill Palmer died in November 2000. Mary is still enjoying the house. It’s Wright’s only house in Ann Arbor–unless one counts a house on Holden Drive that was built in 1979, twenty years after Wright’s death, from plans he drew–and living in one of his buildings is a continual balancing act. “All owners of Frank Lloyd Wright houses are plagued by curious people,” says Brink. On a recent visit to the house, while looking out a window with Mary Palmer, I saw a car slow down and creep along as it passed the house. Mary told me that happened all the time. As if anticipating this kind of attention, Wright designed the house for maximum privacy. Not much can be seen from the road, and what is in view tells very little about the delights inside and out back.

“She was the perfect client for Mr. Wright,” says Bruce Niethammer of Mary Palmer. Even after Wright’s death in 1959, the Palmers kept the house as close as possible to his original conception. At first Mary worked closely with John Howe and Larry Brink; Howe has since died, but Mary still works with Brink. For instance, Wright designed chairs for the living room, but the Palmers used some Scandinavian chairs instead. Mary was never satisfied with them, and turned to Brink for help. Using Wright’s original design, he figured out how to make Wright’s chairs and had them fabricated by Phipps of Port Huron.

And of course, it wouldn’t be a Frank Lloyd Wright house without a challenging roof–but again Brink, with Niethammer executing the plans, has devised improvements that keep the look of the house intact while keeping the Palmers dry. “Mr. Wright lived on the edge in his architecture,” explains Niethammer. “Low sloping roofs are not really suited for cedar shingles. It’s too shady–too flat. It’s pretty, but it holds moisture, because the water doesn’t run off.” Close attention to maintenance has saved the sloping roof, while the original tar sections of the flat roof have been replaced with lead-coated tin.

Palmer, still as enamored of Wright as ever, bristles at any criticisms, saying, “Everything you hear about Mr. Wright has two sides.” On my original visit she had me move from the couch to the Wright-designed chairs to show me how comfortable they were, and later she had me make the same test with the dining room chairs. She is appalled that people will say to her, “But do you really live here?”–or, worse, “I think it’s an interesting house, but I certainly wouldn’t want to live here.” She is unambiguously not in agreement: “I can’t imagine having something so fulfilling in so many ways–visually, the tremendous serenity, the fantastic drama.”

Beyond its own pleasures, the house has given the Palmers opportunities to meet fascinating people, many of whom ended up as friends. “Anyone interested in architecture comes to Mary’s,” says Brink. Bob Metcalf recalls a big Wright symposium in the 1970s attended by all the leading Wright scholars. In honor of the event, architecture students painted a 120-foot canvas of a building Wright designed but never built for a site in Kansas, and hung the canvas from Burton Tower. The event ended with a big party at the Palmers’ for all the participants. More recently a delegation of Japanese architects, led by Taliesin-trained Raco Indo, visited the house. E. Fay Jones, a Taliesin-trained architect best known for his Thorncrown Chapel in Arkansas, and the celebrated Indian architect Charles Correa, a U-M architecture graduate, have also visited.

“As a group, musicians seem to seek out the house as well as architects,” Mary says, remembering the time she got to hear Hephzibah Menuhin, Yehudi’s sister, play their grand piano. Menuhin was staying at Inglis House before a concert, and Gail Rector, then head of the University Musical Society, asked the Palmers whether Menuhin could practice on their piano. Menuhin came over and ran through her entire program. Asked if she listened, Mary replies, “Of course.”

More recently, the house gave her the opportunity to befriend members of the Royal Shakespeare Company, who gave awe-inspiring performances of Henry VI and Richard III under UMS auspices last March. Current UMS president Ken Fischer is a great friend and admirer of Mary Palmer, and when a group from RSC visited Ann Arbor a year before the performances to check out the facilities, Fischer took them to see the Palmers’ house. They raved about the experience, and when the whole troupe came the next year, another visit was high on their wish list. Mary responded by inviting all of the actors to tea–served on the “India Tree” Spode china that Wright had personally selected for the house.

Mary gained more than fond memories from the RSC visit. She actually acquired an addition to her house: a piece of “sculpture” for her garden. Tom Piper, an RSC set designer, had been among the first group to visit. When he returned the next year, Mary took him around the garden and said, winking, “Instead of charging, I ask advice. What’s missing is sculpture. I’ve been looking all my life, but nothing is right.” After discussing the question with the rest of the RSC group, Piper suggested they give her one of the ladders from the set.

Contacted by e-mail, Piper explains, “I wished there was a way to thank her for her hospitality and jokingly suggested that she should have the whole ‘hell mouth’ set in the garden. That seemed a little impractical!!! So I thought she should have one of the metal ladders as a memento of the play. Frank Lloyd Wright is a great hero of mine, and it’s wonderful to think of a bit of my set becoming a sculpture in the garden of one of his finest houses!”

The ladder, visible from the living room, is casually but artfully placed against a tree. As it rusts, it will fit even better into the ensemble of landscaping and house. It’s just the latest development in the continuing melding of Wright’s architecture with the Palmers’ interests and the greater community.

In retrospect, Mary Palmer says, “What attracted me to Mr. Wright was not pictures of the houses, not visiting other houses, but his philosophy that came into the house. It widened the whole reaction–how to live in the house, incorporating the landscape, the materials, the site–the whole big picture.”

Lurie Terrace at Fifty

Published In: Ann Arbor Observer, December 2014

Author: Grace Shackman

Lurie Terrace, a residence for active seniors of moderate means, was a real groundbreaker when it was built fifty years ago. “There were none [like it] to the best of our knowledge” recalls Bob Chance, one of the four architects who worked on it. The designers had no template to follow, just organizer Shata Ling’s vision.

Ling was a remarkable woman who was not only full of ideas but made them happen. Born in 1905 in Houston and trained as a social worker, she came to Ann Arbor with her husband, Daniel Ling, in 1943 for grad school – he in civil engineering and she in public health. She later returned to U-M to study community organizing and worked part-time for researcher Wilma Donahue, a pioneer in the new field of gerontology.

When Ling realized that local seniors lacked a gathering place, she and her husband bought an old house at 439 S. Ashley to use as a senior center, renting out a basement apartment to help cover the cost. Ling served as the unpaid director and organized activities such as art classes and choral groups. “It was almost an instant success,” recalled Daniel Ling in a 1985 memoir. When they outgrew that building, a generous donation helped them buy a house at 323 Packard, again making it work by renting out apartments. One of the renters there was U-M student Bob Creal, who later served on the board of Lurie Terrace for thirty-eight years.

The seed for Lurie Terrace was planted when Ling learned that many seniors who came to the center lived in inadequate rooms or small apartments, often paying more than they could afford. The problem was compounded by the fact that many of the older homes that offered low rents were being tom down to make room for apartments in the post-WWII building boom. There were four nursing homes in Ann Arbor, but no places for active seniors except for the Anna Botsford Bach Home, which housed just seventeen women.

Learning of new federal programs that would loan money for supportive housing for the elderly, Ling in 1961 converted the senior center board into a nonprofit entity known as Senior Citizens Housing of Ann Arbor, Inc. She then put together a proposal, convincing professionals, such as architect Jim Livingston, to sign on without knowing if they would ever collect a fee or not. Daniel Ling was the structural engineer. Wanting a site near downtown, she convinced the seller of property on Huron St. to keep the land option open for two years.

In the spring of 1962, the nonprofit was approved for a $1.7 million loan, payable over fifty years at 3.375 percent interest. However, it was another year before they could break ground while they ironed out the last details, including raising funds to finish the interior. The community responded with contributions, including a lounge furnished by the Kiwanis Club.

Meanwhile, the architects went to work on the design. Chance remembers Livingston coming into the office and saying “Bob, we’ve got a good one. You’re going to love this lady.” meaning Shata Ling. He was right. Chance developed a “profound admiration and respect for her,” describing Ling as “an intense, brilliant, no-nonsense, off-the-shoulder kind of gal.”

Livingston, who owned the firm, dealt directly with the clients. Kip Serota was the chief designer, while Linden Pettys did the drawings. Chance’s main job was to see that the design was carried out as planned when building began. But Chance says they worked as a team. “If there was a problem we’d work it out together to make it happen,” he explains.

“We started with what was generally expected, but Shata pushed-she wanted something different,” recalls Chance. The challenge, according to Serota, “was to create something with a modest amount of money that didn’t look like a public housing project.”

The size of the parcel and the number of units dictated a high-rise. But Serota made it different from most blocky low-income projects by designing two eight-story hexagon shaped towers. The ten apartments on each floor are accessed from corridors that branch out from a central elevator, rather than a single long hall. The hexagonal walls made for wedge-shaped rooms, but Serota explained those made the small spaces seem bigger, and gave residents different views out their windows. Chance remembers doing mock-ups to make sure that furniture would fit in the unconventional rooms.

Serota’s original design had balconies, but Livingston nixed them, saying that the residents would rather have more floor space. Serota still thinks they would have been a good idea: in the era before air conditioning they would have allowed residents to cool off, given an illusion of more space, and made the exterior more attractive. The section connecting the two towers contained the elevator, stairs, and a different activity room for each floor: a music room, a greenhouse, an exercise room, an arts and crafts room, and a library.

The most controversial part of the plan was locating the dining room on the top floor. Ling suggested that so all the residents, not just those living on top floors, could enjoy the view over downtown Ann Arbor and the Old West Side. She felt the bother of bringing food up and carrying garbage down was worth it. City officials disagreed. Characteristically, Ling didn’t back down, and eventually they relented.

The groundbreaking took place in May 1963. Sid Woolner, head of the federal Community Facilities Administration – soon to be folded into the new Department of Housing and Urban Development – called Lurie Terrace “a remarkable, intriguing design.” When construction started, Ling resigned from her by-then-paying position at the senior center to volunteer on the site. She was given a hard hat and an office in the old house that the contractors were using as headquarters before tearing it down. “She was one of the few clients I’ve had who read the specifications,” recalls Chance. She monitored every aspect of the project, including the doors, carpeting, slate, drapery rods, kitchen cabinets, and tile. She also fought to save the trees on the site.

Daniel Ling recalled that his wife “climbed ladders to check the construction and brought coffee to the workmen on cold winter days. With such feminine supervision, some of the men wanted to be informed if she became involved in another construction project so they could apply for the work.”

As the opening date neared, there was a steady stream of applicants to live in the 142 apartments in the new building, which Ling had named after her mother, Anna Lurie. To qualify, people had [to] be at least sixty-two years old and have an income of less than $4,000 a year if single, or $5,000 a year if married. There were also federal rent subsidies for twenty people who qualified.

The official opening was October 9, 1965 – a day so cold and raw that some of the participants watched from inside. The program booklet included a quote from Donahue, from whom Ling had gotten many of her ideas: “Not only is this a ‘break-through’ in retirement housing for middle-income people, but Lurie Terrace represents the practical application of U-M’s many years of work and study.” The New York Times published an article about Lurie Terrace, and in the early years there were visitors from around the world who wanted to learn from its example.

Ling stayed involved in the new residence for the rest of her life. Louise Bale, who later became active in Lurie Terrace, recalled her first glimpse of its creator while dining there with a friend: “Ling entered, dressed in a classic brown suit, her gorgeous red hair piled high on her head. She radiated warmth and vigor. Table after table of the residents looked up to greet her as she passed. A quick remark, an inquiry about someone’s health, an infectious laugh – everyone in that section of the dining room became livelier at once.” Ling died of cancer in 1969 at age sixty-four, just five years after Lurie Terrace was completed.

Serota left Livingston’s office to work for Minoru Yamasaki, who was expanding his staff when he got the job of designing the World Trade Center. Chance spent most of his career working as an architect for the U-M. Livingston continued in private practice, where he designed a wide array of local buildings including Weber’s, Kale’s Waterfall (later Szechuan West), and Lawton Elementary School, as well as apartment houses and private homes.

If Shata Ling and Wilma Donahue were alive today, they would be amazed at how their pioneering efforts have mushroomed. Every community in Washtenaw County now has a senior center. Catholic Social Services Resource Directory lists eighteen senior residences including independent living, assisted living, and memory loss units, plus sixteen subsidized or affordable places. For seniors who wish to stay in their own homes, there are a myriad of services including Meals on Wheels, senior cab service, home sharing, and home health care.

The revolution that brought about this new order started in 1965 with the passage of the Older Americans Act, part of LBJ’s Great Society program. “It moved the needle on the needs of seniors and how to respond,” explains Henry Johnson, U-M emeritus vice president, who is a neighbor and supporter of Lurie Terrace. “As the population aged, a more informed public began advocating for better senior services, which led to both private and public development.”

In spite of the newer competition, Lurie Terrace is usually full, although vacancies are not filled as fast as they once were. “It used to be that they [new residents] would move in literally the next day. They’d already have their things in the car,” recalls Mary Jean Raab, who has been a board member for twenty-two years and is now president.

Most of the original units were very small efficiency apartments ranging from 300 to 350 square feet. While a great step up from the rented rooms many of the first tenants came from, as Americans grew used to having more space, Raab says, “that was simply not the right mix of unit sizes,” and eighteen of them were combined to create nine large one bedroom apartments. Though the efficiencies are a bargain – rents start at $546 a month, including fifteen meals in the dining room – those larger apartments are now in the greatest demand, with a wait list of several years.

Raab also notes that there used to be more couples. “Today with more options [for support] to bring into the home, couples stay [home] more often until one person passes.”

Another change is the removal of the original ban on walkers and wheelchairs – the thinking then was that the residents had to be totally independent. But as residents needed assistance walking, many just hid their devices or had others go through the food line for them. “We now realize that seniors can be active mentally and physically and still need help,” Raab says.

Last year the board paid off the fifty-year mortgage. That frees them from HUD rules but also means greater responsibility. Since 2002, the board has spent $1.2 million on major updates – installing air conditioning, replacing plumbing, and putting in new windows.

“Fifty years after the first resident, we are thriving, still around, fulfilling our mission,” says Raab. She hopes that with all the improvements, the same thing can be said at the end of the next fifty years.

A Midcentury Modern House in the Old West Side

Author: Grace Shackman

Most people think of the Old West Side as a neighborhood of late 19th and early 20th century homes, but tucked in here and there on lots that were still empty after World War II are examples of Mid-Century Modern (MCM) houses. These houses are more numerous in Ann Arbor than most other cites due to the influences of the U-M architecture school that promoted this style and of the local citizenry who appreciated it.

Richard and Jean Wilson, the builders of the 1956 modern house at 805 Mt. Pleasant, were big fans of MCM even before they moved to Ann Arbor, having purchased modern furniture directly from the Herman Miller factory in Zeeland to use in their Jackson home, where they also ate off Russell Wright dinnerware. When Richard decided to pursue graduate studies in engineering at U-M, they began looking for a buildable lot in Ann Arbor that was also near schools for their two children. Christy and Rick were only five and six when they moved to Ann Arbor, but because the house was so important to their parents, they both know a lot about it, both from memories and from discussions they heard as they grew up.

View of the house before it was landscaped. The clever use of space, both inside and out, made the house and lot seem much bigger than its square feet. Shown are Christy and Rick and their mother Jean Wilson.

The Wilsons hired James Livingston, a U-M trained architect, who at age 34 was at the beginning of his career. His most famous project would be Lurie Terrace, also in the Old West Side. A former employee described Livingston as “selling basic lines of Modernism in an efficient way.” Rick Wilson assumes that his parents chose Livingston by driving around looking at other modern houses, something they continued to do most of their lives, adding “since dad had quit his job to go back to graduate school, there was a pretty limited budget to build a house, one that might have scared off other architects.”

Livingston started by interviewing the family about what they wanted, seeking specific information on how they conducted their lives, how they did daily tasks. He made the kitchen counters higher than was standard because Jean Wilson was tall. The Wilsons enjoyed playing Bridge, so a hidden storage spot was created in the living room to hide a card table. The wall that partially divided the living room from the study was sized so that their Hi Fi cabinet would fit there. Rick, who later studied architecture, recalled “visiting Livingston’s office on Washtenaw to look at the first drawings and then watching as they became refined and then became wood and bricks.”

When the crews started excavating for the half basement they found old bottles and broken glass, which the Wilsons deduced must have meant that the lot was once the neighborhood dump. This was often the case before regular trash pick up; people would use the nearest empty lot for this purpose. “It was fun for my brother and me. It was like archeology,” recalls Christy Wilson Klim.

Richard Wilson, Christy and Rick’s dad, sitting in an Eames chair. Other modern furniture can be seen in the background

The house was designed to take maximum advantage of the interior space and the topography of the land. A bi-level, the public rooms are on top and three bedrooms below. The living room and dining room, which flow together, run the whole length of the back of the house. The high post and beam ceiling make it seem roomier, as do the big windows looking out on to the back yard. The walls were painted white, charcoal, and pale aqua. Because the land slopes down, the bedrooms are at ground level on the backyard side, which means in Rick’s words, “You don’t feel buried at all. And in the days before air conditioning it was advantageous to be cooler.”

The Wilsons stayed in touch with Livingston after the house was finished. They became closer friends with their landscape architect, Russell Pelton, who kept refining the site. A graduate of U-M’s school of landscape architecture, Pelton understood the importance of outdoor planting to the look and feel of MCM houses. He often stopped by at supper time with a new plant or native tree that he had dug up and thought would be perfect for a certain spot in the garden. Christy and Rick remember that he was usually invited to stay for dinner.

805 Mt. Pleasant today.

The whole Wilson family worked on the hardscape of the back yard. Rick remembers helping lay the bricks for the patio, while Christy says “My role was mostly to get in the way and tease the helpers.” The back terrace was also a family project and makes a great point of interest when looking out back windows or sitting on the back deck.

The neighbors seem to have approved. The neighbor two doors to the north hired Livingston to do an addition on the back of his house and neighbors in the other direction, at 811 Mt. Pleasant, hired Livingston to make several additions that changed their traditional house to a modern-looking one.

Ann Arbor’s Steel Houses

Author: Grace Shackman

Once the object of neighbors’ wrath, Lustron homes have emerged as winsome modernist antiques.

Lustron homes were one of the most innovative solutions to the post-World War II housing shortage. Nine of them can still be found in Ann Arbor, in close to their original condition despite dire predictions at the time of their construction (1948-1950) that they would soon be a pile of rust.

Except for the cement slab they rest on, Lustron homes are made entirely of steel. The outside walls consist of two-foot square, porcelain-finished steel panels in either yellow or tan. The roofs are made of interlocking steel tiles. The inside walls are also of steel, as are the doors, ceilings, and the built-in furniture. A clever room layout of halls, sliding doors, and large windows makes maximum use of the space, and the 1,025-square-foot, two-bedroom houses feel much roomier than they are. Jane Barnard, owner of the Lustron at 3060 Lakeview, says, “The use of space is perfect. There is nothing I would change.”

Lustron homes were the brainchild of Carl Strandlund, an industrial engineer who worked for a Chicago company that manufactured porcelainized steel panels for gas station exteriors. Strandlund’s great inspiration was to use essentially the same material for housing.

For start-up money, Strandlund got a $15.5 million loan from the federal Reconstruction Finance Corporation, followed by several other loans. He used the money to take over a huge, twenty-three-acre factory in Columbus, Ohio. There he set up his sheet-metal presses, high-speed welding rigs, enamel sprayers, and drying ovens. His house kits, designed to be set up like giant Erector sets, began coming off the line in 1948. Each kit consisted of 3,300 individual parts and weighed 10 tons. The original price was $7,000.

Lustrons came to Ann Arbor through the efforts of visionary businessman Neil Staebler, who heard about them while working in Washington for the Federal Housing Administration in the years just after the war. He recalls, “I thought they were a swell idea. Lustron promised to be a durable material, which it has proved to be.” When he returned to Ann Arbor to live, he applied for the local Lustron franchise.

In all, Staebler was able to arrange for nine Lustron homes to be built: at 605 Linda Vista; 3060 Lakewood; 1121,1125, and 1129 Bydding; 1711 Chandler; 800 Starwick; 1910 Longshore; and 1200 S. Seventh. All but one were put up by Clarence Kollewehr, a carpenter who went on to become the business manager of Local 512 of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners. Kollewehr and his crew, which consisted of two other carpenters and two laborers, had some trouble erecting the first few Lustrons, but soon became so adept that they hardly had to refer to the building manual. If there were no snags, they could erect a Lustron home in less than a week.

Kollewehr has fond memories of the Lustrons, which he describes as “an engineering monument when you consider how they were built.” The only problem he remembers is that the outside panels would sometimes get chipped while being pounded in. But the kit was so well designed that it even included enamel paint in the color of the model, so that the crew could do quick touch-ups at the end of the day.

The Lustrons’ practical, progressive aura appealed especially to people at the U-M. But probably the best-known Lustron buyers were Ray and Olive Dolph, builders of the Dolph mansion in the Lakewood subdivision off Jackson Road. When they decided to move to a smaller house, leaving the mansion for their son, Charles, and his family, the Dolphs chose a Lustron, appreciating its nice house plan and new materials. Says Charles’s ex-wife, Marge Reade, “We were liberal about those things.”

Few people, it turned out, were as liberal as the Dolphs. “The city didn’t care much for [Lustrons], or the neighbors either,” recalls Clarence Kollewehr. “There were comments wherever we worked. The neighbors were not tickled.” After selling nine Lustrons, Staebler decided to switch to more conventional prefabs, finding the opposition to Lustrons “a hornet’s nest.” Lustron was going out of business anyway. Although the houses were well designed, the company never became financially stable and went bankrupt in 1950.

During the Lustron bankruptcy hearings, it was revealed that Wisconsin Senator Joe McCarthy, one of Carl Strandlund’s staunchest supporters in his loan requests, had been paid $10,000 by Lustron to write a 36-page article explaining how veterans could get housing loans. Although a direct connection between payment for the article and McCarthy’s support for the Lustron loans was never proved, many found it curious that McCarthy earned more per word than Winston Churchill, whose war memoirs then held the record.

In spite of the scandal and the warnings of early death by rust, ihe local Lustrons and others around the country have held up remarkably well. Ron Hin-terman, a former owner of the Lustron on Seventh, says, “It looks the same now as it ever did.” Of the Lakewood Lustron, Marge Reade says, “It looks as good as it first did. It will be recorded by history as quite a little card.”

Some Lustron owners have had to endure quite a bit of teasing. Rachel Massey, who recently moved from the Lustron on Chandler, says her friends dubbed it “the little Fleetwood.” Richard Sears, who lives on Bydding, says his friends compare his home to a refrigerator, asking him if a light comes on when he opens the front door.

When Bob Preston moved into the Lustron on Linda Vista, his friends threw a housewarming party. Most of the gifts were magnets, plus a can opener that came with a note: “In case you forget your house key.”

Owners find Lustron maintenance relatively easy once they get used to it. The outside is easily cleaned with a garden hose, while the inside walls respond nicely to soap and water. Rust is a problem only when the walls chip, and then it can be treated with a car-body product such as Rustoleum or Bondo. Over the years, owners have also taken highly divergent approaches to interior decorating. Massey had fun with Art Deco. Claire and Paul Tinkerhouse, the current owners of the Lustron on Linda Vista, have painted the walls with textured paint and decorated with antiques to downplay the shiny steel look. Jane Barnard keeps her decor clean and open so as not to let the lines dividing the steel panels make the house seem too fussy.

Jazz musician Ron Brooks, owner of one of the Bydding Lustrons, moved one of the walls to enlarge his living room and added dry wall. (Brooks was intrigued to hear of the Staebler connection, since his jazz club, the Bird of Paradise, is located in the garage that was part of Staebler and Sons car dealership, a business begun by Neil Staebler’s father.) The only current owner not to sing the praises of his Lustron is artist Richard Sears. “It’s not terribly efficient, hard to insulate,” says Sears. “If I could afford it, I’d tear it down and donate it to the landfill.” Sears has also made the most dramatic interior changes of any Lustron owner: he’s removed all but the bathroom walls so he has room to stand back and view his paintings.

[Photo caption from original print edition]: The innovative all-steel Lustron kit house made the cover of Architectural Forum in June 1947. When production started in 1948, the ten-ton, 3,300-piece prefab houses sold for just $7,000.

[Photo caption from original print edition]: Lustrons’ diverse room layout made the small homes feel surprisingly roomy. “The use of space is perfect,” says owner Jane Barnard. Barnard’s Lustron in the Lakewood subdivision was built as a retirement home by Ray and Olive Dolph; they moved into it from the nearby Dolph mansion.

Alden Dow’s Ann Arbor

Author: Grace Shackman

Inspired by a teenage trip to Japan, the Dow Chemical heir spurned the family business to devote his life to architecture. From city hall to the U-M’s administration building, he put a quirky modernist stamp on the city.

Judy Dow Rumelhart was walking down Fifth Avenue one day recently when it started to rain. Looking around for shelter, she spotted the Ann Arbor District Library, a building originally designed by her uncle, Alden Dow. “And I thought how lovely it is,” Rumelhart says. “The library is one of my favorites.”

Ann Arbor District Library

“The library and city hall are two of the ugliest buildings in Ann Arbor, and ISR [the U-M Institute for Social Research] is right up there,” says library board member Ed Surovell, expressing a dissenting opinion on the library and two other Dow designs. “They do not have the kind of imposing presence of a public building that creates civic pride.”

Alden Dow (1904–1983) is an unlikely figure to provoke such controversy. Though Frank Lloyd Wright once called him his “spiritual son,” Dow had none of the older architect’s egotism or self-promotion. Shy and studious, Dow had to be encouraged to take on major public commissions by his devoted wife, Vada. He got much of his work through family connections; his father, Herbert, was the founder of Dow Chemical.

Alden Dow’s entree to Ann Arbor was through his sister Margaret and her husband, U-M physician Harry Towsley. His first residential commission, in 1932, was the Towsley home in Ann Arbor Hills. Over the next thirty-six years, Dow designed seventeen more Ann Arbor buildings; in the 1960s, his work was so highly regarded that both the city of Ann Arbor and the U-M hired him to design their administrative centers: the Larcom Municipal Building (1961) and the Fleming Administration Building (1964).

Like Frank Lloyd Wright, with whom he studied, Dow sought to integrate his buildings into their environment. His motto was, “Gardens never begin, and houses never end.” Especially in his residential projects, he was capable of blending building and landscape brilliantly.

The going was tougher when the commission was a civic building downtown. He sometimes attempted to domesticate these urban settings by specifying massive upper-story planters, but in Ann Arbor, most of these have long since been abandoned as impractical.

Despite the common elements he sometimes used, Dow was no assembly-line architect. His Ann Arbor buildings have evoked comparisons as diverse as “a Mondrian painting” (the Fleming Building) and a “bureau of drawers” (city hall). But especially in recent years, those characterizations have not always been flattering.

Last year, shortly after taking office, U-M president Lee Bollinger announced that he wanted to move his office out of the Fleming Building, which he called “fortresslike.” (Its slit windows, arched entryway, and looming overhangs do give the Fleming Building a defensive look, but the popular belief that Dow designed it to shut out student protesters is unfounded—the plans were completed well before the campus demonstrations of the 1960s turned violent.)

Others have since risen to the building’s defense, including Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, the celebrated “postmodern” architects whom Bollinger retained to develop a new master plan for the university. But Bollinger’s comments are a sure sign of Dow’s declining stature in the city he did so much to shape.

Alden Dow was born in Midland in 1904, the fifth of Grace and Herbert Dow’s seven children. His parents had assumed that he would go into the family business, but they also encouraged his creativity by exposing him to art, historic buildings, and gardens. When he was a teenager, the whole family took a trip to Japan. “They went in a big ship and stayed for three or four months,” relates his niece Judy Dow Rumelhart. The trip exposed Dow to two of his greatest influences as an architect: the exacting simplicity of Japanese design and the striking modernism of Frank Lloyd Wright, whose newly completed Imperial Hotel the family admired.

Dow spent three years at the U-M studying mechanical engineering, but then begged his parents to let him switch careers. He transferred to Columbia’s School of Architecture and in 1930, while still a student, his father got him his first commission: a clubhouse for the Midland Country Club. Upon graduation, Dow joined a Saginaw firm and married Vada Bennet, his childhood sweetheart, in 1931. His sister and brother-in-law, Margaret and Harry Towsley, promptly hired him to design their home.

Towsley House

As originally designed, the Towsley house was basically a three-bedroom ranch, although much more elegant than those that would become ubiquitous after World War II. Its features included clerestory windows, a copper roof, and raised planter boxes designed to blend house and landscape.

Dow designed the interior of his houses in minute detail and even dictated the color schemes. “He loved strong colors, primary colors, and jewel tones,” recalls Rumelhart—“cherry red, cerise, emerald green, purple amethyst, ruby topaz.”

Considering Dow’s great interest in gardens, it’s ironic that his most influential innovation at the Towsley house was the way he designed the driveway: he specified an attached garage facing the street, believed to be the first in the country. “We thought the house looked like a gas station,” recalls family friend Jack Dobson.

Asked whether it was strange to grow up in such an unusual house, Rumelhart replies, “I loved the house. . . . and had a sense of pride of being in it. I thought all architecture should look like that.”

During construction, Dow fought repeatedly with city building inspectors, who he saw as trampling on his artistic license. For instance, he wanted to give the house unusually low ceilings, 7’6″ instead of the required 8′. Denied, he recorded his losing battles in a series of four bas-reliefs in the front hall; one shows an architect being stomped by an authoritarian foot while another depicts him strangled in red tape.

Although the house had been planned as a starter home, the Towsleys lived there all of their lives. They just kept asking Dow to design additions, which he did in 1934, 1938, and again in 1960. Dow put his latest ideas into each revision such as a landscaped backyard viewed through a big dining room window and so many built-ins that there was little need for furniture: he provided a built-in safe, walk-in refrigerator, clothes drawers that opened on both the bedroom and dressing room sides, and even metal drawers especially designed to store Margaret Towsley’s extensive collection of linen tablecloths. The original color scheme was vividly patriotic in the main living areas: cherry-red rug and turquoise walls.

In 1933, Alden and Vada Dow spent six months at Taliesin, Frank Lloyd Wright’s studio-home complex in western Wisconsin. While Alden studied architecture, Vada completed her own fellowship in painting, weaving, and pottery.

Dow and Wright maintained a friendship for years after the Dows’ time at Taliesin. The two architects visited each other in their homes and Dow even named one of his daughters “Lloyd.” They had a serious falling out, however, in 1949, when Wright lost a commission to design the Phoenix Civic Center because his fee was too high–and Dow agreed to take the job in his place. According to Craig McDonald, director of the Alden Dow Home and Studio in Midland, it was Vada Dow and Olgivanna Wright who finally persuaded their husbands to make peace.

After Taliesin, Dow set up his own firm in Midland. Despite the Depression, Dow Chemical was booming, and he designed homes for an ever-increasing circle of clients. As his reputation grew, he received commissions from as far away as North Carolina (a residence for the president of Duke University) and Texas (an entire company town, Lake Jackson, for Dow Chemical during World War II). But Midland always remained his base: of the 138 buildings he designed in his career, 104 are in his hometown.

Ann Arbor is second only to Midland, with eighteen Dow buildings. Surprisingly, very few are private homes; he built only two more residences here, both for doctors who knew Harry Towsley: the Sibley Hoobler house (228 Belmont Road) in 1949, and the Joe Morris house (7 Regent Drive) in 1962. Hoobler has since died, but Joe and Julia Morris still live in their Dow house and vividly remember the design process.

In the early 1960s, Joe Morris asked Harry Towsley whether he thought Dow would design him a house. Towsley suggested that he write and ask, and Dow responded by inviting Morris to Midland for lunch. During lunch, Morris recalls, the architect “talked about sailboats, about housing–he had an idea about housing for Third World countries by making plastic modular units and dropping them in by helicopter. When we returned, I told his secretary we hadn’t talked about my house. She said, ‘Wonderful. He needs to get his mind off his work.’ ”

The Morrises waited two years before Dow had time to work on their house. When they finally sat down to review the plans, they found that Dow had definite ideas about what he wanted. For instance, Joe recalls, Dow’s original plan did not include room to eat in the kitchen–“He said we would never eat in the kitchen.”

“We insisted we would,” Morris continues. “So he relented and designed a [built-in] kitchen table.” The furniture that Dow didn’t build in, he selected, including daybeds, dining room table and chairs, and the chairs and sofa in the living room. All of the built-ins and carefully coordinated furniture result in a very clean look. Morris calls it “magnificent simplicity.”

Joe Morris was one of many clients invited to visit Dow’s combined home and studio in Midland. A beautiful and unusual building, it was a good advertisement for his artistry.

Like the Towsley house, Dow’s evolved in a series of additions. It began in 1933 as a long train car–like studio. In 1935, he added its most striking feature, a room half-submerged in a pond. Officially called the “floating conference room,” but known informally as the “submarine room,” its ingenious use of water invites comparisons to Wright’s more famous Falling Water.

In Midland, Dow was able to build the low ceilings he was denied in Ann Arbor. “I got a kick out of his studio,” recalls Fred Mayer, U-M’s director of university planning. “He was about 5’6″, so the studio was designed for him. I’m 5’8″, so it was okay with me.”

The low ceilings and small proportions in Dow’s house reminded Morris of “Beatrice Potter homes in Peter Rabbit. There was the same childhood comfort in his home.” Bill Reish, who visited Midland in the seventies to discuss an addition to Greenhills School, recalls the “sunken room at duck-eye level, with ducks floating by.” Former library director Gene Wilson missed that view–“The pond was leaking the day I was there, so he had it drained.”

People remember Dow’s appearance as slightly eccentric. “He was wearing different-colored shoes, I think yellow,” Wilson recalls. Adds Rumelhart, “He wore his hair longer than the conventional doctors I was used to.”

Craig McDonald, who was Vada’s assistant in the last years of her life, recalls Alden as “quiet and understated. He was somewhat shy, but expressed himself through design.” The late Guy Larcom, who oversaw construction of Ann Arbor’s city hall, remembered him as “a small man, undistinguished–but impressive when he talked about architecture.”

“He could be very intense if he got excited about something,” Rumelhart says. “He could pick a flower and be overwhelmed. He had a creative intensity.

“I loved Alden,” Rumelhart continues. “He said it was okay to be a singer. The medical world was terrified of the arts, but he told my parents, ‘She’s talented. She should be doing what she is doing.’ ”

Dow’s peak period in Ann Arbor came during the 1950s and 1960s when he built six university and three civic buildings. The U-M’s Margaret Bell Pool (1952) was his first college commission; it opened doors, and he eventually worked on nine other campuses in Michigan.

Before it was built, the U-M had two pools reserved primarily for men, while women had only the “Barbour bathtub” in the basement of Barbour gym. Margaret Bell, head of women’s physical education, had long wanted to redress this injustice. According to Sheryl Szady, who has researched the history of U-M women’s athletics, “She said, ‘Before I leave, I’m getting a pool.’ ” Bell organized bridge parties, sold tiles, and organized benefit parties to raise the necessary funds. Margaret Towsley, a friend of P.E. professor Marie Hartwig and a generous patron of progressive causes, probably contributed to the project.

The new pool was state of the art. Designed for synchronized swimming and for Michifish shows (elaborate performances with costumes, lighting, and staging), it had an air flow system that sent cool air over the spectators in the bleachers and warm air over the pool. Underwater speakers allowed the synchronized swimmers to hear the music.

According to Szady, the day before the pool opened, Bell, Hartwig, and another woman “hopped in and played around.” At first, men were allowed to swim at the pool only on Friday nights. The pool became coed in 1976 when the building was enlarged to become the Central Campus Recreational Building. Last year the kinesiology department put on another addition, but Dow’s original building is still discernible, especially the second-story planters, the only ones in Ann Arbor that are still maintained.

In 1964, Dow designing two large buildings just a half a block apart on Thompson Street: ISR, the first new building in the country dedicated solely to social research, and the administration building, later named in honor of Robben Fleming, the university’s tenth president.

The two buildings have striking exteriors, but both have been criticized as being designed from the outside in, sacrificing interior utility to achieve an exterior effect. For instance, as originally designed, the massive white aggregate panels that face ISR would have left the offices behind them with no exterior windows. According to retired psychology professor Bob Kahn, one of ISR’s founders, Dow had to be persuaded to move the panels out slightly so that small slit windows could be added.

Dow planned ISR’s interior in detail. The space was divided into modules, each with a large open area facing a window wall, with two offices on either side of the open area and two slightly bigger offices in the corners. “The offices would be almost all one of two sizes to minimize status,” recalls Kahn. Dow was proud of the egalitarian effect, noting in his 1970 book, Reflections, “All occupants have a similar relationship, through glassed area, with the outside.”

But research projects did not always divide neatly into the modules Dow prescribed. And despite his egalitarian goals in designing the faculty offices, the ISR layout also perpetuated what, in hindsight, looks like a far greater inequity: while the researchers had private offices, the female support staff was assigned to desks that sat in the middle of the central area, without a shred of private space. Room dividers were eventually added–but these in turn blocked out light to the side offices.

Maintenance on the windows also presented a problem. They were locked with special keys and pivoted open to wash. People would open the windows to let in air, then not secure them because they didn’t have the key. Once, “a person on the fifth floor was leaning against the window when it pivoted,” recalls retired ISR administrator Jim Wessell. “He almost fell out. Luckily he was caught by someone nearby.”

The windows on the Fleming Administration Building opened the same way but were arranged very differently: in geometric patterns reminiscent of a Mondrian painting. While intriguing from the outside, the design created some very curious interior spaces, with long, thin windows in unpredictable locations.

Dow’s most unusual campus building, the Fleming Building, is also the most controversial. Ed Surovell calls it “a cube in space” and says of the entrance, “you have to hunt for it like a medieval castle.” People who work in the building complain of the “mazelike” layout.

The Regents’ Room on the first floor is designed with an arched ceiling, which, according to Craig McDonald, was used “to give a feeling of being in a larger space.” Two similar arches take up the rest of the first floor: the middle arch is a corridor connecting the east and west entrances, and the other serves as offices. The cavernous look has caused people to compare the space to a beer vault or a wine cellar, and audiences at regents’ meetings often decry the absence of windows and call it “the cave.”

Rumelhart defends the design, saying, “Alden took the assignment and created a painting. He was a great fan of Mondrian and he fulfilled that feeling.” Also siding with Rumelhart is architect Denise Scott Brown. Asked about the Fleming Building, she calls it “honorable architecture” and says it is “nicely proportioned.” “Taste cycles,” adds Brown’s husband, Robert Venturi. “There was a time when Victorian architecture was thought ugly and torn down. We have to be tolerant of the immediate past.”

Changing taste is one problem with the building, but of the more utilitarian problems, many are not Dow’s fault but are the result of growth. “It was never intended to have as many people as it does now. When there was a big lobby on every floor, it was more aesthetically pleasing,” says Dick Kennedy, retired vice-president for government relations.

“You’d get off the elevator and see a bank of windows onto the plaza,” recalls Kay Beattie, who worked in the building in its early days. “You had the feeling no one worked there.” Beattie also remembers that, in vintage Dow fashion, each floor had its own vivid color theme–longtime employees describe them with names like “Howard Johnson orange” and “football field green.”

As controversial as the Fleming Building is, it could have been even more eye-popping. According to Fred Mayer, university architect Howard Hacken vetoed Dow’s original plans to finish the exterior in white stucco with blue windows and gold trim. “Very rah-rah,” Mayer laughs.

Dow left a strong mark on the U-M campus, but it was nothing compared to his impact across Division Street. In the library and city hall, he defined the two most important buildings in Ann Arbor’s public life.

The library was built first, in 1956. “After the war there was no established library architecture,” recalls Gene Wilson, then a library staff member, later director. “Dow had built the Midland library, and we thought it was grand.”

His Ann Arbor design had all of the Dow hallmarks. Even today, after two additions, one can still recognize his hand in the elevated planter faced with turquoise enamel paneling and the lovely little garden on the south side.

“I always liked it,” Wilson says of the library. “It was state of the art for its time.” But, he admits, there were problems. “Dow was more concerned with visual impact–he wanted it to be noticed, he didn’t let function get in the way. There was a circulation desk but no reference desk, and there was no clear delineation between public and private areas. We had to scramble around to make [the layout] work.”

Like many other clients, the library also found that Dow’s elevated gardens were difficult to maintain. Wilson doesn’t recall exactly when the library stopped tending the second-story planters, but says, “it would have been very early. There never was a way to get to them except by a long ladder put up by the sidewalk–any maintenance was done by the janitor climbing the ladder. One day the ladder slipped and the janitor fell and broke his leg. After that we lost enthusiasm.”

Dow’s other great downtown project, the Ann Arbor city hall, has been a conversation piece ever since it opened in 1961; in addition to a chest of drawers, it’s been compared to “an inverted wedding cake” and “an upside-down carport.” It’s also been called “a poor man’s Guggenheim,” an allusion to Frank Lloyd Wright’s famous upward-spiraling museum in New York City.

The building is an inverted stepped pyramid, with the floors growing wider as they go up. The second floor is a large promenade that Dow thought might be used for public meetings or for city council members to step outside to caucus. (Rumelhart has always thought it would be a good place to perform plays.)

Inside, Dow put elevators, stairs, conference rooms, and department head’s offices near the building’s core. The space around the periphery of the building was kept open. “The idea was that there were to be no prestige offices, no best windows,” recalled Guy Larcom in an interview before his death last winter. “It was all open to public view.”

Kathy Frisinger, then the city’s assistant director of central services, oversaw the move into the new building. She remembers that although employees were glad to be together after being scattered at seven different locations, many didn’t like the open floor plan. “You could see from one end to the other,” she explains. “If you talked to someone, everyone could see you talking, see which office you went into.”

The promenade never got much use, and there were serious problems with roof leaks. Switchboard operator Mary Schlecht recalls that when it rained, the police department downstairs had buckets all over the place. The planters Dow specified on the second and third floors also leaked. “The plants grew well on the north side, but it got too hot on the south and you had to water almost every day,” a former employee recalls. City hall’s maintenance people, like their counterparts at the library, eventually gave up on the planters; they’re now filled with rocks.

Dow ordered the building’s furnishings with his characteristic eye for vivid color. “I’ll never forget that day when seven Steelcase trucks came. Big semi trucks drove up with turquoise and orange furniture,” laughs Frisinger, who supervised the unloading. “I saw mine were to be orange and I said, ‘I don’t think so,’ and did a quick switch.” Nonetheless, she says, “I basically enjoyed the building. I liked the big offices, the open spacious feel in the building. Dow was ahead of his time.”

As city hall has become more crowded, its once open spaces have given way to a warren of cubbyholes. Furniture and curtains have been placed in front of most of the big windows in the inner offices to give more privacy. The top floor, recently remodeled after the district court moved to the county courthouse, today comes the closest to the spacious feeling Dow originally intended.

Dow worked up to his death in 1983, but the debate continues on his rightful place in architectural history. The question of whether or not his buildings look good comes down to personal taste, and there can be no global or permanent answer. Setting that aside, a study of his Ann Arbor work shows that while many have serious practical problems, there were always reasons for what Dow did.

Near the top of the list of problems would have to be his flat roofs, a distinction he shared with his mentor, Frank Lloyd Wright. “Talk with any person about an Alden Dow building and they will sing its praises and then remember the trouble they had with the roof,” says Greenhills’ Bill Reish. Dow’s elevated planters were another recurring source of trouble. The only one still in use in Ann Arbor, at the U-M’s kinesiology building, supports a few scraggly plants. Ann Arbor has apparently tended its Dow buildings less carefully than his hometown. Craig McDonald reports that numerous examples of Dow’s elevated plantings are still flourishing in Midland.

Lighting could be listed among Dow’s greatest failures but also among his greatest successes. It was obviously a lifelong obsession and when it worked, it worked gloriously, as in the big windows that both let in light and created splendid views in his private homes. When his plans went astray, however, people worked in dark caverns such as those in the Fleming Building and ISR.

It could be argued that these failures were not so much design errors as a misreading of human nature, especially the need for privacy. “Human nature will confound you if you fight it too much, even with a good idea,” comments Fred Mayer.

Dow seems to have been the most successful in his smaller projects, particularly the private residences where he could think out the use of every inch of space. In the larger buildings, he was most successful in the ones built for a specific use, particularly those associated with family members such as Greenhills or the medical education building.

Some of Dow’s critics complain that he received the Ann Arbor jobs only because of his connections with the Towsley family. Certainly some of his work came directly through his sister and her husband, or as a result of friendships or community contacts made through them. Fred Mayer defends Dow on this score. “Having connections will give you a chance,” he says, “but if you don’t do something good, it won’t save you.”

Most of the serious criticism of Dow is aimed at his multistory buildings. Architects don’t like to speak ill of other architects, even dead ones, but off the record, several express doubts about Dow’s “bulky, boring” multistory designs.

“Nothing is related to human scale in ISR. It’s just a big white space,” says one architect–who goes on to describe the Fleming building as “weird.” But Mayer again comes to Dow’s defense. “He was a talented architect,” he says. “I don’t know if he will make it in the ranks of the great, but talent and creativity are evident in his best buildings.”

Dan Jacobs, who’s designed several additions to Greenhills, agrees. “I’m a great admirer of Dow. I admire the simplicity of his structural system.”

Despite the complaints, it should be noted that all of his Ann Arbor designs, except for one razed gas station, are still being used for their original purpose. Even the Fleming building, threatened during Bollinger’s term with a changed use, is still the administration building. Asked about Bollinger’s dislike of her uncle’s building, Judy Dow Rumelhart lets out a good-humored laugh–but then admits that she has chided Bollinger for his criticism of the building. “He can move out, but I hope he uses it for something else, maybe English classes,” she says. “Let it be used by someone to enjoy.”

An Alden Dow Chronology:

Between 1932 and 1970, Dow designed eighteen Ann Arbor buildings. Details are given only for buildings not described in the main story.

1932: Towsley home, 1000 Berkshire.

1949: Hoobler home, 228 Belmont.

1952: Margaret Bell Pool (U-M).

1956: Ann Arbor District Library, 343 S. Fifth Ave.

1958: Ann Arbor Community Center, 625 N. Main. Dow designed the building at the request of his sister, Margaret Towsley. Towsley not only contributed most of the cost, she also paid for many of the buildings furnishings–even dishes and towels.

1959–1965: Matthaei Botanical Gardens, (U-M). The gardens’ offices and conservatory are instantly recognizable as Dow’s work thanks to the turquoise-faced second-story planters (long since abandoned). Herb Wagner, professor emeritus of botany, remembers fighting to include a lobby and meeting room in the plans; more than thirty years later, Wagner says, it remains “one of the best university botanical gardens in the nation.” Dow also designed the garden superintendent’s house.

1960: Leonard gas station, 2020 W. Stadium. Possibly conceived as a prototype for Michigan-based Leonard, this simple, well-landscaped gas station was Dow’s first commercial work in Ann Arbor. It is the only Ann Arbor Dow building no longer standing.

1961: Guy J. Larcom Jr. Municipal Building, 100 N. Fifth Ave.

1962: Morris home, 7 Regent.

1962: Conductron headquarters, 3475 Plymouth. Keeve “Kip” Seigel, founder of the high-flying Conduction conglomerate, was a friend of the Towsleys. The low-slung brick building is currently the headquarters of NSF International.

1963: University Microfilms, 300 N. Zeeb. Dow met University Microfilms founder Gene Power, a U-M regent, through the Towsleys. To recycle water used in processing microfilm, he included a moat on the south side of the building, creating what he called “a reflecting pool for office and cafeteria.”

1964: Institute for Social Research (U-M).

1964: Fleming Administration Building (U-M).

1964: Michigan District Headquarters, Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, 3773 Geddes. Dow built some lovely churches in Midland, but this is his only church-related structure in Ann Arbor. Its four wings are grouped in the shape of a Greek cross; the teepee-like dome on top symbolizes the church’s early Indian missions.

1966: Towsley Center for Continuing Medical Education (U-M). Dow’s last major job for the university was arguably his most successful. One of Harry Towsley’s specialties was continuing education, and the brothers-in-law collaborated closely on a simple, straightforward building marked with Dow trademarks such as long corridors filled with windows and plants. “It’s state of the art, designed for traffic flow, with an auditorium and four break-out rooms, a huge lobby,” facilities coordinator Robert Witte says. “If I was ever asked to design a medical education building, I would design it off the Towsley Center.”

1967: Greenhills School, 850 Greenhills. Judy Dow Rumelhart was a member of the original planning committee for this private north-side school, and Margaret Towsley was on the first board. Dow laid out the building as a series of clusters, each with classrooms around the edge and a court in the middle. In the middle of each court is a common space called a “forum”; in the corners are areas for quiet activity, called “alcoves.”

Starting in 1968 with grades 9–12, Greenhills gradually expanded to accommodate grades 6–12. By opening alcoves and linking them to new clusters, Dow designed additions that felt as if they were part of the original. Over the years, the brown walls and curiously colored carpets Dow specified have been toned down, and doors have been added to control noise. Still, Bill Reish says, “It works wonderfully as a school.”

1970: 2929 Plymouth. After Gene Power stepped down from University Microfilms, he commissioned Dow to build this small office building just east of Huron Parkway. “I was glad I selected Alden, because my site presented a difficult design problem,” Power recalled in his autobiography, Edition of One. “The zoning regulations stated that floor space could not exceed 40 percent of the land area. There had to be one automobile parking space available for every 110 square feet of floor space, and the structure could be no more than three stories high. Dow met these requirements by raising the building on columns, with only a small entrance lobby and elevator area extending down to the ground-floor level. Most of the area on that level formed a parking lot beneath the rest of the building.”

Power’s son, U-M regent Phil Power, recalls the office as “a lovely place to work. It had a beautiful view of North Campus. It had a fireplace, shelves with Eskimo art, orchids, a nice sitting area, and was lined with bookshelves.” The building—which always reminded Rumelhart of “a giant toadstool”—is now rented to a number of small tenants.