Michigan Modern: Design That Shaped America

October 17, 2016 12:45 PM

"I’m always shocked when critics of the mid-20th Century architectural style known as Michigan Modern decry that period as a silly time of tail fins on cars, uncomfortable furniture, and shiny, kitschy buildings. Shocked, because I think Michigan Modern, properly understood, remains our greatest architectural expression."

Now an encyclopedic new book on the period brings this important design phase into sharper focus. “Michigan Modern: Design that Shaped America,” was edited by Amy Arnold and Brian Conway of the Michigan State Historic Preservation Office. The book, published by Gibbs Smith and running to 352 pages, sells for $50 and packs an astonishing array of photos, essays, interviews, and perspective on the architecture, automotive and furniture design, fabrics, and more of the period roughly from the 1940s through the 1970s.

Michigan led the design world in this period with architects like Eero Saarinen and Minoru Yamasaki, furniture makers at Steelcase and Herman Miller in west Michigan, fabric makers like Ruth Adler Schnee, and so many more players too numerous to name.

The Michigan Modern Project

Detroit Free Press: How one architecture firm continues to define Detroit's skyline

Detroit Free Press: Buildings time forgot: Architecture tours focus on mid-century modern

Film trailer: The Radiant Sun: Designer Ruth Adler Schnee:

The Radiant Sun explores the life and work of mid-century American designer Ruth Adler Schnee, who has been called a “Detroit treasure” and an “American legacy.” Along with her family, Schnee fled Nazi Germany soon after Kristalnacht, and settled in Detroit. An internship with industrial designer Raymond Loewy and degrees from RISD and Cranbrook under Eliel Saarinen prepared her for a design career. With her husband Edward Schnee, she formed Adler-Schnee Associates, a design studio and store that helped bring modernism to Michigan. As a space planner, Adler-Schnee collaborated with noted architects including Yamasaki, Fuller, and Wright. The pivotal exhibition Design 1935–1965: What Modern Was (1991), featured Adler-Schnee’s textile designs. At age 90, she continues to work as a space planner and textile designer. The film The Radiant Sun adds Adler-Schnee’s story to the growing scholarship on the American Modernist–era and expands knowledge about women designers’ influence on the built environment.

2015 Kresge Eminent Artist: Ruth Adler Schnee (highly-illustrated pdf)

posted by mandolin conspiracy (28 comments total)

Thank you for this! This is something my partner can bond over. He grew up in Detroit and various smaller places in Michigan, and he looks for anything from Michigan to be proud of. Even though he's sworn off ever going back, he supports that place like no one else. On the other hand, I'm a design nerd with an absolute fascination with mid-century design. The textile on the left of page 12 in the PDF is fabulous.
posted by FirstMateKate at 1:01 PM on October 17, 2016 [2 favorites]

I love a good church that looks like a UFO landed in a suburban park.
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 1:09 PM on October 17, 2016 [18 favorites]

Which is incidentally a pretty accurate description of the Nativity, depending on who you ask.
posted by a halcyon day at 1:12 PM on October 17, 2016 [18 favorites]

So lots of pictures of "good" modern design, anyone have any examples of the opposite, aside from dumb looking tailfins on cars?
posted by Keith Talent at 1:12 PM on October 17, 2016

I'll take dated and somewhat impractical over, y'know, full-on brutalism. And the architectural expression of this style seems to incorporate the only thing I actually like about brutalism, anyway, namely the extensive use of negative space.
posted by tobascodagama at 1:21 PM on October 17, 2016 [2 favorites]

Ridiculous Jetsons tailfins on cars and Brutalism's aw(e)ful concrete excrescences will always signify the future to me (where "future" implicitly equals "good"). Hadn't heard the term Michigan Modern before, will have to have an online rummage. Nice FPP.
posted by comealongpole at 1:54 PM on October 17, 2016 [1 favorite]

I once went to a church in Tulsa OK that was literally a spaceship. It had a saucer section and a drive section complete with tail fin, winglets, and an exhaust port. I'll find it and post a link.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 1:56 PM on October 17, 2016 [5 favorites]

Of more recent vintage is Steelcase's pyramid, not too far from Grand Rapids. It was recently sold and is in the process of being turned into a data centre.

This is something my partner can bond over. He grew up in Detroit and various smaller places in Michigan, and he looks for anything from Michigan to be proud of. Even though he's sworn off ever going back, he supports that place like no one else.

Heh. Growing up as a Michigan/Detroit-adjacent Canadian, when people make sweeping generalizations about the area, I get rather annoyed.

Getting back to Michigan Modern, if you ever find yourself in the Greater Detroit Area, you should visit the Cranbrook. I was ten when I went on a field trip to the Cranbrook Institute of Science, and I was pretty imprinted by the whole Cranbrook complex. It's nifty.
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 2:22 PM on October 17, 2016 [6 favorites]

Unlike many other artistic and architectural movements, Googie and its less silly compatriot "Michigan Modern" is almost entirely unhampered by a sense of gravitas and having to present itself as Serious and Important, and still can achieve sublime, beautiful design.

Experiencing a Gravitas Shortfall would be an excellent Culture ship to be all decked out in Googie and Michigan Modern goodness.
posted by tclark at 2:22 PM on October 17, 2016 [5 favorites]

Oh man, this is my childhood. My dad worked at the GM Tech Center for 35 years. My childhood public library is photographed in the amazon preview of the book. It's on my wishlist now. It feels good to put a name on all of it!
posted by Tesseractive at 3:07 PM on October 17, 2016 [5 favorites]

Schnee! A Cranbrook alum.

If you imagine away the decay, Detroit's is probably the most attractive of all downtowns, architecturally speaking.
posted by praemunire at 3:23 PM on October 17, 2016 [5 favorites]

Let's not be so hard on the tail fins. They were bold and off-the-wall at the time. Not part of the natural evolution of the automobile, but a fantasy lagniappe. "Imagine you're flying!" It's charming and childlike. In our time, we have our own, much nastier version of tail fins on our cars: the mean, macho, Darth Vadar look of front ends, and the Jeep Wranglers that look like bank vaults on wheels. People in the future will say, "What was going on in the early 2000's that everyone wanted their car to look like a fortress, or a scowling alien?"
posted by Modest House at 3:48 PM on October 17, 2016 [16 favorites]

I think my parents still go to that church.
posted by Huffy Puffy at 4:28 PM on October 17, 2016

It's hard to believe but in 1950 the second most important city in the country was Detroit. It is like an object lesson in bigger they come harder they fall.

What were their leaders thinking? Were their leaders thinking? Did they loot and run? Is there a good analysis with 20/20 hindsight on who and how and when Detroit got hollowed out?

I believe the tail fins were to psychologically captivate everybody's inner airplane pilot or rocket man. See spoilers on today's Mustangs and Subaru WRX-STI's and Porsches.
posted by bukvich at 5:31 PM on October 17, 2016 [2 favorites]

Mid-century "the future is NOW" design is one of the best things the US ever did. And people who scorn tail fins on cars have no style. I keep hoping they'll come back.

That or the El Camino. If Chevy brought back the El Camino, I estimate they would make roughly a billion dollars.
posted by middleclasstool at 5:44 PM on October 17, 2016 [6 favorites]

Seriously, though, there's a forward-thinking optimism to that design that we lost in the '60s and '70s. We stopped dreaming about the future. I wish we hadn't.
posted by middleclasstool at 5:46 PM on October 17, 2016 [2 favorites]

On the contrary, Edward Durell Stone is our greatest American architect. All those little brass thingies. Love 'em.
posted by octobersurprise at 6:01 PM on October 17, 2016

Squeeeee!!! This has been a huge part of my life for the past four years. I wrote the National Historic Landmark nominations for Lafayette Park and the McGregor Memorial Conference Center (both listed in 2015), and my firm restored the reflecting pool at the McGregor Center.

I've had the honor to meet Ruth Adler Schnee several times and she is amazeballs. Also got on a very rare tour of the GM Tech Center which was awesomely cool.

If you are anywhere near Cranbrook, they are sponsoring a lecture series associated with the book launch. The official launch party was last Sunday, but on the 23rd is a panel on Yamasaki (my co-workers are speaking) followed by features on designing America's homes and the GM Tech Center. Finally, our Michigan Docomomo Chapter is holding a Michigan Modern Tour Day next Saturday, the 22nd, in Lansing.

Thanks so much for posting this!
posted by Preserver at 6:46 PM on October 17, 2016 [8 favorites]

The staircase in the GM Tech Center reminds me of the old World of Motion Pavilion at EPCOT Center. (Speaking of the decline of futurism...)
posted by The Underpants Monster at 6:47 PM on October 17, 2016

What were their leaders thinking? Were their leaders thinking? Did they loot and run? Is there a good analysis with 20/20 hindsight on who and how and when Detroit got hollowed out?

Well, there's a bunch. Compared to other cities of its size and importance at its peak, Detroit did not build the mass transit systems you would see in other cities. The "Motor City," right? Drive everywhere - it's the American dream!

The Rouge River complex was tooled up for the war effort - after the end of WWII, it was a vertically integrated system for everything from steelmaking to "final car" - where someone drives the car off the line into shipping.

Racial injustice.

The OPEC oil embargo - foreign automakers started making smaller cars that were more fuel efficient and reliable than Detroit products.

"Right to work" states. NAFTA. Etc. Why pay union workers who, from Ford's union busters on down, asked for just a slice of the profits, in Detroit?

Various corrupt mayoral administrations as Detroit declined.

Lots of factors.

But Detroit's still there. There's lots of history and infrastructure still standing. There will be a next act.
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 6:49 PM on October 17, 2016 [8 favorites]

Contemporary cars are loaded with design elements just as unfunctional as tail fins and a lot less pretty. The real "design" went into making what were at the time the world's best engines and it was called "engineering."
posted by spitbull at 6:50 PM on October 17, 2016 [4 favorites]

Re: bad modern design
The campus at Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, OK! I love modern architecture and mid-century style, but ORU is modernism as designed by someone who didn't get the point of modernism. SO MUCH GOLD.
posted by aabbbiee at 2:32 AM on October 18, 2016

People in the future will say, "What was going on in the early 2000's that everyone wanted their car to look like a fortress, or a scowling alien?"

Blame Nixon and/or Reagan, and decades of drip-fed propaganda about a significant proportion of one's fellow citizens being PCP-fuelled killer zombies one needs to defend against.
posted by acb at 4:14 AM on October 18, 2016 [1 favorite]

In our time, we have our own, much nastier version of tail fins on our cars: the mean, macho, Darth Vadar look of front ends, and the Jeep Wranglers that look like bank vaults on wheels.

It's also a reaction to the rounded-over beige blobs and oddly-proportioned crossovers that got us through the 90s-00s by rebooting the mean, macho muscle cars that grown adults wanted when they were teens. Similarly the way Michael Graves' whimsical interior objects and appliances feel dated* now since everything is sleekly industrial-inspired.

Don't ask me to explain the angry catfish Prius though.

*dated, in that they can be identified as objects from a prior time, not that they are outdated or any less pleasant to use; I place Graves' kitchen appliances in the same category as Alessi as items that are a bit more than they are less.
posted by a halcyon day at 7:58 AM on October 18, 2016 [3 favorites]

Blame Nixon and/or Reagan, and decades of drip-fed propaganda about a significant proportion of one's fellow citizens being PCP-fuelled killer zombies one needs to defend against.

Sometimes, they're marketed as defending against literal killer zombies as well. There was one car manufacturer who I can't remember now that marketed one of their SUVs with a Walking Dead tie-in.
posted by tobascodagama at 8:14 AM on October 18, 2016

we have our own, much nastier version of tail fins on our cars: the mean, macho, Darth Vadar look of front ends

It used to be all about the rear end.
posted by rocket88 at 8:54 AM on October 18, 2016 [1 favorite]

Lots of Americans are struggling with the aesthetics of many recent car designs because they're no longer being designed primarily for Americans. For example, recent Lexus styling is aimed primarily at the Chinese market.

Of course there's also the common phenomenon of people getting to around 40 or so and starting to dislike everything new.
posted by LastOfHisKind at 10:42 AM on October 18, 2016 [2 favorites]

The real "design" went into making what were at the time the world's best engines and it was called "engineering."

Lets not do this. Huge amount of skill, thought, effort, and expertise go in to both the aesthetics and the function of a car. Both have deep ramifications for the user experience. Both are valuable. Dismissing one while elevating the other expresses only ignorance of the real collaborative process it takes to make wonderful functional things.
posted by subtle_squid at 7:01 PM on October 18, 2016 [5 favorites]