Author: modernist

residential modern receive ann arbor awards

Six modern homes received Ann Arbor Historic Preservation awards this past Monday evening June 4th at the 24th Annual Ann Arbor Preservation Awards ceremony held at the City Council meeting! As Susan Wineberg, chair of the preservation awards committee states “Mid-Century Modern is getting more attention.” Six such properties were recognized, five of which are in the Ann Arbor Hills neighborhood.

Preservation awards are in recognition of superior maintenance of a significant property to preserve its essential historical, cultural or architectural value for a period of 10 years or more.

Let’s celebrate:

1. Kenneth and Elizabeth Baird – 1223 Pontiac Trail. Residence built by Jean Paul Slusser, designed by George Brigham (1939)

2. Kenneth and Elizabeth Nesbit – 1334 Arlington Boulevard, originally built for UM Professor Carl Rufus and his wife; House known by its “Moon Gate” in the front yard, inspired by original owners’ work in astronomy and world travels.

3. Jane and James Kister – 2250 Belmont Road
• Built in 1950
• Designed by Walter Sanders, UM Professor.

4. Peter Hinman – 1075 Chestnut Street
• Built for physician Dr. Lyle Elliott and his wife Pauline in 1961
• Designed by UM Professor of Architecture Robert Metcalf

5. Glenn Watkins – 1336 Glendaloch Circle
• Built in 1959
• Designed by UM Professor of Architecture Herbert Johe

6. Myron and Barbara Levine – 356 Hilldale Drive
• Built for the Levines in 1962 • Designed by Donald Van Curler

In addition, a2modern received a Special Merit Award for the promotion of modernism in Ann Arbor!

Related article:
See related full article at: Concentrate Media

exhibit: george nelson: architect, writer, designer, teacher

Central Figure in Defining Modernism

“GEORGE NELSON:
Architect, Writer, Designer, Teacher”

Opens at Cranbrook Art Museum
June 16, 2012

Note: a2modern is taking a field trip to the exhibit Saturday July 21. The trip will include a docent tour of the George Nelson exhibit at Cranbrook followed by a docent tour of the Frank Lloyd Wright designed Affleck home. The cost for the field trip is $25. Volunteers are needed to drive (carpool). Please email modernists@a2modern.org if you would like to join the caravan!
Space for this trip is limited so, please let us know of your interest.
We will be leaving Ann Arbor at 9:00 a.m. and will be leaving the Affleck house at approx. 2:30.

Bloomfield Hills, MI— George Nelson is considered one of the most influential figures in American design during the second half of the twentieth century. Operating from the western-side of Michigan as Design Director at the Zeeland-based furniture manufacturer Herman Miller for more than twenty-years, Nelson had his sights firmly focused on Cranbrook, which was also playing a defining role in the development of Modernism. This shared Michigan history comes into sharp focus in the exhibition, “George Nelson: Architect, Writer, Designer, Teacher,” which opens at Cranbrook Art Museum on June 16 and runs through October 14, 2012.

“Cranbrook and George Nelson helped to define what Modernism would be,” says Gregory Wittkopp, Director of Cranbrook Art Museum. “Although Nelson never formally studied or taught at Cranbrook, he traveled in the same circles as many of our legendary architects and designers.” It was Eero Saarinen, in fact, that first introduced him to the work of Charles Eames who ultimately helped him radically reinvent the Herman Miller brand and the look—and feel—of the American interior.

Organized by the Vitra Design Museum in Germany, the exhibition “George Nelson: Architect, Writer, Designer, Teacher,” is the first comprehensive retrospective of Nelson’s work. It has been touring in Europe and most recently in the United States at the Bellevue Art Museum in Seattle. Cranbrook is the final stop in the US tour and the last opportunity to see this major exhibition before the work returns to Germany.

With an architectural degree from Yale, Nelson was not only active in the fields of architecture and design, but was also a widely respected writer and publicist, lecturer, curator, and a passionate photographer. At Herman Miller, the renowned manufacturer of modern furniture design, Nelson had a major influence on the product line and public image of the company. He played an essential role in bringing the company together with designers such as Cranbrook’s own Charles and Ray Eames. Early on, Nelson was convinced that design should be an integral part of a company’s philosophy, and by promoting this viewpoint, he also became a pioneer in the areas of business communication and corporate design. Nelson was responsible for the production of numerous furnishings and interior designs that became modern classics, including the Coconut Chair (1956), the Marshmallow Sofa (1956), the Ball Clock (1947) and the Bubble Lamps (1952 onwards).

As an architect, designer and writer, Nelson was deeply interested in the topics of domestic living and interior furnishings. In the bestselling book, Tomorrow’s House (1945, co-authored with Henry Wright), he articulated the groundbreaking concept of the “storagewall.” The walls of a house, Nelson explained, could be used to store things by transforming them into floor-to-ceiling, two-sided cabinets. A revolutionary idea at the time, it anticipated the flood of consumer goods that the economic boom in the western world would soon produce, turning the single-family home into a small warehouse.

Nelson designed several private homes, including a New York town house for Sherman Fairchild (1941, together with William Hamby) and Spaeth House on Southampton beach (1956, together with Gordon Chadwick). As a committed proponent of industrial building methods, Nelson published numerous texts on the topic of prefabricated architecture. In the 1950s, he developed the “Experimental House,” a modular system of cubic volumes with Plexiglas roof domes that owners could assemble into personal habitations according to their own spatial requirements.

In addition to his preoccupation with architecture and the domestic interior, Nelson intently pursued the topic of office furnishings. Besides designing the first L-shaped desk, he played a major role in the development of Herman Miller’s Action Office, and in the 1970s he created his own office system, Nelson Workspaces. Similar to Nelson’s home furnishings and experimental architecture, this system was based on a variety of modular elements that could be freely combined.

The extraordinary diversity of design tasks taken on by the Nelson office extends far beyond the field of furniture design, although the latter forms the basis of his reputation today. Numbering among his clients were many large corporations including Abbott, Alcoa, BP, Ford, Gulf, IBM, General Electric, Monsanto and Olivetti, as well as the United States government. In his New York office, which he established in 1947 and ran for more than three decades, Nelson employed over fifty people at times, including familiar figures such as Ettore Sottsass and Michael Graves. Along with exhibitions, restaurant interiors and showrooms, George Nelson & Company designed kitchens, flatware and dishes, record players and speakers, birdhouses and weathervanes, computers and typewriters, company logos and packaging, rugs and tiles.

Nelson’s wide-ranging abilities culminated in the organization and design of the American National Exhibition in 1959, which was held in Moscow. Nelson and his associates selected several hundred industrial products manufactured by American companies and displayed them on a vast three-dimensional multi-level platform designed especially for the exhibition. He also furnished a “model apartment” and designed a large fiberglass umbrella for two other modular exhibition pavilions. The Moscow exhibition made history as the backdrop for the famous “Kitchen Debate” between Nixon and Khrushchev. Similarly spectacular was Nelson’s exhibit for Chrysler at the 1964 New York World’s Fair, which featured a Pop-Art-inspired, 64-foot-long “giant car” and a huge walk-in engine as part of the exhibition space. While this fair still celebrated the automobile, Nelson expressed a more critical view of automotive transportation in his essays and lectures on urban planning. As early as 1943, he outlined the mall concept as an auto-free shopping zone in the article “Grass on Main Street.”

After earning an architectural degree, Nelson began his career as a writer and journalist. Throughout his lifetime he was regarded as a brilliant publicist. He was not only co-editor of the eminent journal Architectural Forum, but also worked for many other well-known magazines including Fortune, Life, Industrial Design, Interiors and Harper’s. He also published more than half a dozen books on design topics. Nelson was one of the speakers at the first Aspen Design Conference in 1951 and a regular participant in the years thereafter. His engaging sense of humor and penchant for radical theories surely contributed to his popularity as a speaker at a wide range of conferences and symposiums. In 1961, at the height of the Cold War, he created a television program entitled “How to Kill People: A Problem of Design” — both an apt and bitingly ironic commentary on warfare from the designer’s viewpoint. Like the Eameses, Nelson was one of the early pioneers of multi-media lectures. He often used his own photographs for this purpose, many of which were taken on his wide and numerous travels. His photographic work and engagement with questions of everyday aesthetics found expression in the book How to See, which offered suggestions for sharpening one’s conscious perception of the everyday environment.

The exhibition is divided into five subject areas. Numerous furnishings by Nelson from the collection of the Vitra Design Museum—not only many classics, but also lesser-known pieces— form the core of the exhibition. They are organized in three categories:

1. Nelson and the House: Nelson as a pioneering planner and designer of the modern single-family home during the 1940s and 1950s: Sherman Fairchild House (townhouse in New York, 1941), The House of Tomorrow (bestselling book on modern housing, 1944), The Holiday House (model vacation home for Holiday Magazine, 1950), and Experimental House (design of a modular prefabricated house, 1952-57). Additional subjects: Storage Wall (1944), Herman Miller Casegoods (from 1946), Comprehensive Storage System (1959), Seating (Coconut Chair, 1956; Marshmallow Sofa, 1956; etc.) and kitchen design.

2. Corporate Design: Nelson’s work as a designer and design director for Herman Miller. Brochures, advertisements and vintage audiotapes document the development of corporate design at Herman Miller from the mid-1940s into the 1960s. In this context, corporate design programs for other firms, such as the pharmaceutical company Abbott (1959), also are presented.

3. The Office: Nelson as a prominent innovator in the development of the modern office environment: L-shaped desk as the forerunner of the workstation (1947), Action Office (1964), and Nelson Workspaces (1977).

4. Exhibition Design: This section will focus on the American National Exhibition in Moscow (1959), for which Nelson was responsible as head designer. Other topics include the Chrysler Pavilion at the 1964-65 New York World’s Fair, and Nelson’s exhibition work for the United States Information Agency.

5. Nelson as an author, editor, and one of the most important thinkers and visionaries in the realm of twentieth-century design. In addition to providing an overview of the numerous articles and books published by Nelson, this section of the exhibition will also show some of his films and slide presentations, in which he addressed the topics of urban planning, consumerism, and aesthetic perception in Western society.

The exhibition will be complemented at Cranbrook Art Museum with a second exhibition, “Vision and Interpretation: Building Cranbrook, 1904-2012.” Drawing from Cranbrook’s own rich collections, this exhibition presents the architectural legacy of Cranbrook as an artistic narrative emerging for the visionary ideas of George Gough Booth.

“George Nelson: Architect, Writer, Designer, Teacher” is an exhibition of the Vitra Design Museum, Weil am Rhein, Germany. The American tour of the exhibition has been generously sponsored by Herman Miller. Herman Miller also is the presenting sponsor of the exhibition at Cranbrook Art Museum. Additional support for the exhibition at Cranbrook is provided by the Alden B. Dow Home & Studio. Promotion of the exhibition is supported by an award from the Michigan Council for Arts and Cultural Affairs and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Museum Hours and Admission
Cranbrook Art Museum is open to the general public Wednesdays, 10am – 5pm; Thursdays and Fridays, 10am – 8pm; and Saturdays and Sundays, 10am – 5pm. Regular admission is: $8 for Adults; $6 for Seniors; $4 for Full-time Students with ID; FREE for Children 12 and under. For more information, please call 248-645-3320, or visit www.cranbrook.edu.

About Cranbrook Art Museum
Cranbrook Art Museum is a contemporary art museum, and an integral part of
Cranbrook Academy of Art, a community of Artists-in-Residence and graduate-level students of art, design and architecture. The Art Museum, which was established in 1930 and opened at its current site in 1942, is Eliel Saarinen’s final masterwork at Cranbrook. Today, the Art Museum presents original exhibitions and educational programming on modern and contemporary architecture, art, and design, as well as traveling exhibitions, films, workshops, travel tours, and lectures by renowned artists, designers, artists, and critics throughout the year. In 2011, the Art Museum completed a three-year $22 million construction project that included both the restoration of the Saarinen-design building and a new state-of-the-art Collections Wing addition. For more information, visit www.cranbrook.edu.

preservation news:

Architect Minoru Yamasaki’s work to be restored at Wayne State University
by John Gallager, from the Detroit Free Press:
“One of Detroit’s most significant works by famed architect Minoru Yamasaki will be restored thanks to a $1.8-million project beginning next month.

The work will restore the pools of water and surrounding sculpture garden at the McGregor Memorial Conference Center at Wayne State University.

The jewel-like McGregor Center has long been considered by many to be among the finest buildings designed by Yamasaki, the Detroit-based architect best known for designing the World Trade Center towers in New York City. Yamasaki died in 1986.

The McGregor Center was built in 1958. The pools remained filled with water until the early ’80s, when leaks and other functional problems led Wayne State to drain them. The pools have remained empty and something of an eyesore ever since.

See full article at: Architect Minoru Yamasaki’s work to be restored at Wayne State University

ann arbor women's city club tour

Interior view: Robert C. Metcalf’s home

This year, Robert C. Metcalf’s modernist home will be part of the Ann Arbor Women’s City Club tour Sunday June 3, 2012. This is a wonderful opportunity to experience Ann Arbor modern. Even if you have had the opportunity in the past to see this home, Bob added an addition in 2008 that includes an office and garage. Definitely worth seeing the seamless integration of the original 1952 home with the 2008 addition. See the Ann Arbor City Club website for further information and hold this date!

See annarbor.com article at Women’s City Club Features Metcalf home

conference: michigan historic preservation conference

Michigan Historic Preservation Conference

2012 Conference:“Model Change-Over: A New Era for Historic Preservation in Michigan”

The Michigan Historic Preservation Network announces that its 32nd Annual Statewide Preservation Conference will take place May 10-12, 2012, in Flint, headquartered at the historic downtown Masonic Temple.

A model change-over, for those of us who have lived in the automobile capitol of the world for any length of time, is a time of expectation. It happens every Fall when the assembly lines are stopped and re-tooled. At the North American International Auto Show in January, you then may find that your long-time favorite has some subtle restyling, or there’s the flashbulb-popping excitement of a completely new model. When the concept of model change-over is applied to historic preservation, however, and is introduced at a time of economic uncertainty and a significant change in our state’s political direction, it is anything but benign. In the work we do – in which an impossibly delicate balance is maintained saving irreplaceable historic buildings while using their preservation as a sturdy tool of economic revitalization – ill-designed adjustments under the hood can cause more harm than good…or inspire fresh, creative thinking.

Of particular interest to a2modern see May 10th 3:15-5:00 session on the Michigan Modern project.

Complete Schedule

exhibit: inside lafayette park

LAFAYETTE PLAZA, 1565 EAST LAFAYETTE STREET

What: An exhibition on Lafayette Park featuring THE SETTLEMENT SHAPE, a project by Milan Politecnico University; work from THANKS FOR THE VIEW, MR. MIES, a book forthcoming Fall 2012; and an installation by ROGUEHAA. Opening Reception
Sat. 4/14, 6–9 pm

Open to the Public
Sun. 4/15, 12–4 pm Wed. 4/18, 7–9 pm
Sun. 4/22, 12–4 pm And by appointment Contact: Noah Resnick (resnicns@udmercy.edu)

This exhibition is made possible by Milan Politecnico University, University of Detroit-Mercy School of Architecture, Lawrence Technological University, Wayne State University, RogueHAA, Detroit Creative Corridor Center, Lafayette Foods, Preservation Wayne, and the Deco Society.

tour and talk by original builder of a home designed by Arthur Browning Parker

When: March 8, 2012
Time: 6:00-8:00 p.m.
Wine + Cheese refreshments

Talk will be by Joe O’Neal who was the original builder for this unique home.

This home is currently for sale through Bob Eckstein, Edward Surovell, realtors. Bob will be the host of the tour and is sponsoring this event.

Location + Parking: The home is located at the end of Orchard Hills (on a dirt road). The house is right next to the Palmer House. Street parking on Orchard Hills is non-existent and the driveway parking is reserved.

We have arranged for a local shuttle service to run from 5:45 p.m. to 8:15 p.m. continuously from the site. Please park your car on Awixa Road and either walk to the site or take the shuttle. The shuttle will pick-up at the corner of Awixa and Orchard Hills. If you do decide to walk, the distance is .35/mile.

Description of Home:
Stunning mid-century home designed by architect Alfred Browning Parker the father of the “Tropical Modernist” school of design.
Absolutely unique for this area, Parker’s tropical modern style is not linear and rectangular as in the mid-century “California” style- but flowing and very organic in shape; spaces are defined by curved
walls, the roof’s peak line is not linear but an arc, the ceiling below tent like. The curved walls are stunning Magnolia tree wood, well cared for and unblemished.

Like Frank Lloyd Wright his friend and mentor, Parker’s homes were designed to integrate into an environment, draw in the outside, and take advantge of a site’s unique qualities. The Floyd House follows the curved contours of a steeply sloped wooded south facing hillside and every room looks into a valley of hardwoods contiguous to the University Arboretum. There are other Wright influences, among them: the public spaces are volumous and the private spaces more intimate, the home has a carport (enclosed on three sides), the home is very understated from the street, and great attention was placed on materials, detail and craftsmanship.

Shortly before his death in 1959 Frank Lloyd Wright recommended Parker as an American Institute of Architects (AIA) Fellow. Parker is the only architect Wright ever recommended. Alfred Browning Parker passed away in March of 2011 after having
completed over 6,000 commissions, predominantly residential homes in Florida where he had his practice and taught at the University of
Florida.

This event is free and open to all interested in seeing this unique home! An event not to be missed.

Questions about a2modern? Visit the a2modern website or contact modernists@a2modern.org.

preservation award for "In Memoriam, Carlson Terrace, 1957-2007"

Ethel Goodstein-Murphree has received the 2011 Ned Shank Award for Outstanding Preservation Publication from the Historic Preservation Alliance of Arkansas for her article, “In Memoriam, Carlson Terrace, 1957-2007.”

This article, published in Preservation Education and Research, the journal of the National Council for Preservation Education, examines the challenges of preserving mid-century modern architecture through a case study of how this project designed by Edward Durell Stone was lost. Built in three phases between 1957 and 1964, Carlson Terrace offered functional, low-cost housing to accommodate the influx of married students who flocked to the campus early in the post-World War II era. For 50 years, Carlson Terrace was called “home” by generations of University of Arkansas students. But after falling into disrepair, it was razed in 2007, adding to a growing list of works by the Fayetteville native that have been demolished or irrevocably altered.

Ethel Goodstein-Murphree is associate dean and professor of architecture in the Fay Jones School of Architecture at the University of Arkansas. She has a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. Goodstein-Murphree is strong advocate for the preservation of mid-century modern architecture. Please see the entire news release

See also a very interesting video on You Tube called “Clean Lines, Open Spaces: A View of Mid-Century Modern Architecture” that Professor Goodstein-Murphree served as architectural advisor.

conference: Society of Architectural Historians-Detroit

What: Society of Architectural Historians
Where: Detroit
When: April 18-22, 2012

Program and further information

The Society of Architectural Historians is a group that resonates fully with the emphasis on placemaking that is key to Michigan’s future because buildings are among the most significant ingredients of “place.” At the recent 2011 Annual Conference in New Orleans, there was buzz about coming to Detroit. Members already know that the City has magnificent buildings – from early 19th century remnants to stunning Mid-Century Moderns – because they know the auto industry produced wealth unparalleled by any other city of its time. Those influencing the look of Detroit were carmakers shaping American taste and on the cutting-edge of everything from architectural style to materials to color. Other manufacturing cities also produced wealth, but it was one thing to make steel, construct railroad cars, and assemble cash registers, and quite another to be sculpting the American automobile – the direct route to the national psyche with promises of freedom and speed.

– Janet Kreger, 2012 SAH Annual Conference Local Committee