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Category: Architecture

ArchBlogger does Bill Massie's "An American House 08" at Cranbrook

A couple Fridays ago, ArchBlogger was reminded why he loves his day job as Detroit News Art Guy.

First he got to interview Corine Smith, a Dutch photographer whose haunting photos of nature reclaiming downtown Detroit are up through the end of the month at Hamtramck's Design 99 gallery.

Then he got to go out to one of the prettiest places in the world -- Cranbrook -- and go through architect-in-residence Bill Massie's "An American House 08," a built-from-scratch experimental modern house in front of the Cranbrook Art Museum.

(Finishing touches are still being applied to the house. Cranbrook hopes to be able to give tours later in the summer. Call the Art Museum at 248-645-3323 for updates.)

Massie's an engaging, overbright guy whose enthusiasm for architecture is downright contagious. Click on the link below for a video tour of the home, and see if you don't agree.

Category: Architecture

Mystery banners on Michigan Central Terminal

Three huge banners suddenly billow from the upper stories of Detroit's elegant, long-abandoned, train station just west of Tiger Stadium.

ArchBlogger has no idea what they say, nor who put them up. A couple of the banners appear to be yellow and white, a bit like the Vatican flag, but A.B. assumes that's not what's going on here.

Anyone know anything about these? A.B.'s all ears.

Their purpose may be unclear, but the banners are a lovely sight gusting on a windy day.

Category: Architecture

Construction wonderland at I-75 / Ambassador Bridge Gateway Project

ArchBlogger's never met an architect who wasn't nuts about construction sites, and much the same applies to A.B. as well.

(Well, truth be told, it may be genetic. A.B.'s hardly ever met a boy who didn't love vast industrial sandboxes either.)

Anyhow, the endless construction wonderland at the foot of the Ambassador Bridge that engulfs the closed mile of I-75 is as dramatic a scene as we've had in metro Detroit in some time. It's well worth a look. (A.B.'s photos, he regrets to say, inevitably understate its dizzying scale.)

The Gateway Project is currently Michigan's largest sandbox, with enough construction cranes to thrill any 8-year-old or curious adult.

The following pictures were all taken where Bagley Avenue in Mexicantown crosses I-75 and the construction trench.

The helpful AAA construction website says the work is supposed to be finished by late 2009 (read: sometime well into 2010).

The project is slated to wrap up by the end of next year.

The site is a visual symphony of huge cranes.

In-fill housing on Detroit's East Ferry Avenue

So here's a familiar ArchBlogger dilemma.

On the one hand, it's grand and good that newish rowhousing has sprouted on the vacant lots that used to pockmark E. Ferry, once home to the city's industrial elite, circa 1895.

The problem? The rowhousing just isn't that great. Oh, it's fine, it's good, it's -- we say this all the time in this area, don't we? -- better than nothing.

One thing A.B. will concede: The new Ferry rowhouses are waaay better than the thuddingly suburban-looking Crosswinds townhouses just north of Comerica Park.

On East Ferry, new gabled rowhouses share the street with 1890s Victorians.

But that's not setting an awfully high bar. (A.B. apologizes to the unnamed firm that built Crosswinds, most of whose work he very much admires. He puts the blame squarely on the client.)

The thing with Ferry is that it's the home to some of Detroit's best Victorians -- marvelous Queen Anne brownstone-and-brick structures, many with Richardsonian Romanesque overtones (i.e., big, thick arches).

"Substantial" comes to mind with most of E. Ferry's great old houses.

For a splendid example of this design type, check out Ferry's first block just east of Woodward. Four spectacular small mansions were lovingly renovated into the Inn on Ferry Street, an "urban boutique hotel" that is really the only place to stay in downtown Detroit.

(Full disclosure: No. 84 E. Ferry, where you register to stay at the Inn, was the Hodges family manse from 1905 to 1969. As A.B. likes to say, the Hodges were something in this town before the Depression. By the way, A.B. has no financial interest in the Inn whatsoever.)

But back to that new rowhousing. On balance, A.B.'s inclined to say that by eliminating unsightly vacant yards in between Victorian mansions, the rowhousing has done us a great favor, and its developer -- who could have put up most anything, after all -- deserves a respectful nod. That it could have been better -- doesn't anyone look at historical examples for ideas? -- goes without saying.

But, here it comes again: It's way, way better than nothing.

The old and the new, in a slightly discordant relationship.

Category: Architecture

Designs for NYC's High Line Park

From the New York Times comes the following article and slideshow of renderings for Manhattan's High Line -- a mile-and-a-half elevated railroad that snakes between buildings on the West Side, now slated to be a narrow park suspended in air.

Sound too good to be true? Amazingly, it seems like it's going to happen. And real-estate values are said to be rising all along its route.

(By the way, you'll find the link to the slideshow in the picture caption on the article that will pop up when you hit the link above.)

Category: Architecture

A few more words on Seattle...

ArchBlogger wants to warn readers that this posting has ADD, and will hop from topic to topic without warning.

But before too many weeks elapse, he wanted to get up a few other pictures from Drizzle City, particularly the ones below of a tear-down and its uber-magnificent neighbor across the street.

Like Birmingham, Rochester and other Detroit-area towns, Seattle neighborhoods are being hit by the big-foot, tear-down phenomenon, in which a small house, often two bedrooms, makes way for the mansion with a five-car garage, built to the very edge of the property line.

This is happening in particular in one of the small-home neighborhoods of great charm that A.B. wrote up in the blog just below this one, Madison Park.

What's interesting in the pics below, however, is the considerable size of the tear-down -- easily a three or four-bedroom colonial.

An unsually big house for this little neighborhood falls to make room for something utterly humongous, like its neighbor directly across the street (photo below).

Seattle used to be a low-key town with few pretensions. Boy, has that gone with the wind. Selling price on this pile? Easily several million.

There are still signs of the old Seattle, however -- not least this hand-wrought fence in front of an appropriately modest, gorgeous little Madison Park number. The mansion dwellers above probably drive by this and wonder when the riff-raff will finally get chased out of the neighborhood.

A nice exercise in arty, do-it-yourself fencing -- typical of the high level of whimsy you see on a lot of Seattle homes.

An art object AND a fence for the dog.

The funny thing is that Seattle already had an absurdly big ego back in the 1980s when ArchBlogger lived there, even though it was a much pokier, less-handsome town in many ways (at least at the level of big downtown buildings).

A.B. can't imagine what it must be like living there now. Decades ago, Seattleites who'd never been out of the country were convinced their town could beat Paris hands-down. They must be complete insufferable these days (apart from A.B.'s pals there, who, of course, are all marvelous).

Category: Architecture

Seattle's Craftsman bungalows

It's one of those constants in American residential design, circa 1900 to 1930, that has always intrigued ArchBlogger for what it says about respective parts of the country.

Houses built in that era for ordinary people -- mechanics, plumbers, factory workers and schoolteachers -- throughout the industrial East and Midwest generally underlined their inhabitants' low status with utilitarian appearance and lack of ornament.

Just think of Hazel Park, or much of northeast Detroit. (Northwest Detroit has a bit more flair.) These humble dwellings were shelter, pure and simple. Factory workers didn't need to put on airs.

But similar homes built for similar people on much of the West Coast betray a grace and whimsy that surprises the newcomer from Back East.

It's another reflection, perhaps, of the greater egalitarianism -- and reduced class consciousness -- you find as you march westward across the continent.

A look reproduced all over the Seattle area. (All photos by ArchBlogger.)

It's as if the builders wanted to emphasize that modest lives lived in modest homes didn't need to look ugly or utilitarian, that even ordinary people deserve a few architectural grace notes.

The best examples of this, of course, are the Craftsman bungalows one sees in much of the West, with their exuberant gables, exposed roof struts, leaded-glass windows, fireplaces and ample windows.

Dig those roof struts, and the way gable echoes gable.

It all started with the arts-and-crafts magazine "The Craftsman," published from 1901 to 1916 by Gustav Stickley of Mission furniture fame. The publication influenced a generation of homebuilders, particularly on the West Coast.

Indeed, Seattle's Craftsman houses come as no surprise. In 1911, a company called Craftsman Bungalow set up in Seattle, and started selling floorplans and designs.

ArchBlogger's not entirely sure why this design movement mostly confined itself to the West, but given the trajectory of American history, it makes a little sense.

If the factory culture of Detroit represented ironclad security for its workers, if not much elegance, the Western cities -- due to the surrounding natural beauty? -- whispered that out there you could not only be secure, you could have your little piece of la dolce vita.

Why go with a simple chimney when it can have some design oomph?

An exuberant overhang on an otherwise modest dwelling.

Would you like that in a Spanish design? Note the front door -- set on an intriguing angle within its little arch.

In any case, the striking thing about Seattle's endless neighborhoods of small homes that cluster near downtown is how handsome many of the them are.

Here the Michigan skeptic will stand up to object that Ferndale and Royal Oak, to name just two towns, have their share of good-looking bungalows.

And that's true. They just have fewer per square mile than similar towns out West.

In general, working-class neighborhoods of greater Detroit -- and Cleveland, Dayton, New York, Indianapolis, Boston and so on -- are plainer and more strictly functional than their Western cousins.

So at the end of his recent Seattle visit to attend his nephew's high-school graduation (thank you, thank you -- he's very proud), A.B. took an afternoon to scout the close-in neighborhoods of Wallingford and Madison Park for smallish, gorgeous homes, just a mile or so from Drizzle City's staggering collection of glistening new skyscrapers.

A classic. And given real estate prices, which don't appear to have been touched by the recent downturn, it's probably inhabited by a neurosurgeon.

Even one-story houses come in for handsome treatment.

It'd be so nice to come home to.

Category: Architecture

Grace, even in decline

Some buildings and streetscapes still possess a mournful beauty even while crumbling in on themselves -- a fact that struck ArchBlogger hard while zipping past the intersection of Detroit's Grand River and Martin Luther King Blvd. a few weeks back.

In Detroit, of course, it's easy to dwell on these things, the stock of falling-apart buildings being what it is. So before he waxes poetic over dilapidation, A.B. wants to signal to any out-of-towners that the city does have some thoroughly intact neighborhoods anyone would be proud of, from the very tidy to the drop-dead gorgeous. Just think Indian Village, Boston-Edison, and the adorable Rosedale Parks.

With that proviso out of the way, it is true that years ago when A.B. moved to New York City for grad school, any number of people said to him, "Oh, you're new here? Doesn't New York's decay depress you?"

To which ArchBlogger would reply, "Are you kidding? I'm from Detroit. I love this stuff!"

(That question was posed back in 1984 -- before the city's astonishing resurgence, in which it's become a sort of Disneyland for the super-rich, and all its buildings have been scrubbed and buffed to within an inch of their lives.)

And truth be told, he does find beauty in abandonment, which A.B. attributes in part to growing up on an Avon Township (Rochester Hills) dairy farm that his dad stopped working when he was just 6, at which point all our lovely buildings -- Victorian barns, milk shed, chicken coop -- started their slow-motion collapse.

As evidence of the forlorn beauty such collapse can muster, A.B. presents the following bittersweet images from Detroit's near-west side.

Rural Kansas or downtown Detroit? You choose.

-

If these walls could talk...

Category: Architecture

Stampede in Ann Arbor

Alright, so this is more art -- or public art -- than architecture. But ArchBlogger couldn't help throwing it in, since it's so... grabby and unexpected.

This cute little yellow cottage on Ann Arbor's Old West Side has suddenly sprouted a herd of, well, linear steers -- or something.

The herd prepares to cross the street.

There wasn't anybody to ask when A.B. barreled by in his car, before slamming on the brakes in astonishment. But it's certainly a punchy visual addition to an otherwise sedate residential neighborhood.

Mooooooooo.

Category: Architecture

On Detroit's vast avenues -- a reader weighs in

ArchBlogger loves his loyal readers.

The following interesting observation comes from Roger Gienapp, in response to A.B.'s blog on the old Trumbull Avenue Presbyterian Church on Grand River. Gienapp, by the way, is an architect with Detroit's Hamilton Anderson Associates.

Dear ArchBlogger:

I enjoyed today's blog about the beautiful old Trumbull Avenue Presbyterian Church on Grand River, and your comparison to the Jefferson Market Library in New York.

Inadvertently perhaps, you may have hit upon a key point when you stated that "...the avenue's breadth swamps the low-rise buildings on either side."

The asphalt desert at Grand River and Trumbull in Detroit.

The design, or lack thereof, of the streets themselves in our city has done more to destroy the architectural character of the adjacent structures than any other force at work.

Major arterials, like Grand River, were designed for street cars in the median and curbside parking. As traffic increased throughout the 1950's, due in part to the removal of the streetcars, what had been local roads became highways leading to the suburbs.

Streetcars disappeared to make room for left-turn lanes and parking was removed for another traffic lane. Businesses and retail stores along the route gradually disappeared as speeds increased and the very purpose of the street changed.

Then came the interstate highways which removed the very traffic the road was redesigned to accommodate. The result is an environment totally hostile to pedestrians -- as well as a road with no parking and, consequently, no "street life" to support businesses.

Contrast the environment you highlighted with what is beginning to happen on Gratiot, which suddenly has a new landscaped median near downtown.

The result is a reduction in the perceived open space between buildings on either side as well as the reduction of the amount of asphalt in favor of green landscape -- an entirely different look and feel! Traffic apparently has not been hurt, and with the introduction of curbside parking, a few of the local retail establishments have begun to reappear.

Many of our architectural treasures are lost to all but the most perceptive observer.

If more of our major streets, such as Grand River and Michigan Avenue, were given similar treatment, our beautiful old buildings would be given a greater chance to survive.

Medians with landscaping, which reduces pedestrian-crossing distances, and curbside parking could create the kind of environment people want to be while accommodating current and future traffic needs.