around Lake Michigan

Without a doubt, this architecture trip is one to keep your bucket-list in your pocket and tick off projects as you go. Not only downtown Chicago is on the program, but of course the surrounding neighborhoods such as Oak Park and River Forest and the campuses of the University of Chicago and the Illinois Institute of Technology. Next, planopli travels via Racine and Milwaukee to Taliesin East. To conclude our adventure west of Lake Michigan on a high note, we descend to Plano.
After all the monumentality of Chicago, we seek purity in and around Detroit. Fine, honest, small-scale initiatives by young architectural firms are helping the car city, which was declared bankrupt in 2013, rise again from its ashes like a phoenix.

It would be futile to try to pinpoint a particular time, place or personality as the exact starting point of ‘modern’ architecture. But it is notable that the first major spread of the cloud skyscraper took place in the Chicago of the 1880s and 1890s. Before the great railway expansion to the West, Chicago was the main depot, nerve centre and transit hub. The city was the diagram of capitalism in its raw form. After the fire of 1871, the flat land on Lake Michigan provided a tabula rasa for an explosion of rapid construction thanks to the invention of the steel wire and the Otis lift.

Although he admitted the role of tall buildings in his ideal scheme, Frank Lloyd Wright had a notorious aversion to the modern city. While for Sullivan the ideal image of a tower was a vertically emphasised form, for Wright it was an interplay of interlocking horizontal levels. Wright understood the full meaning of modernity and managed to reimagine the suburban dwelling and weave a mythology around it.

Wright’s Taliesin in Wisconsin was like a living laboratory in which he could try out architectural and landscape ideas. His school, offices, residence, stables, windmill,… embrace the hilly terrain. The extending horizontals reflected the rock layers and the whole took on the character of a Japanese complex. From this remote oasis, Wright surveyed the world with a vision that was more comprehensive and less local than his thinking during the relatively stable family years in Chicago’s suburbs Oak Park and Riverside.

Occasionally, one designer emerges who so thoroughly rearranges the basic assumptions of a period that he deserves to be considered separately. Whether they like it or not, architects with such charisma become the founders of new traditions. In the formation of modern architecture, two figures of this imaginative and intellectual calibre stand out: Frank Lloyd Wright and Ludwig Mies Van der Rohe.

Mies van der Rohe’s contributions to the art and craft of high-rise construction are sometimes discussed as if he managed to single-handedly invent the steel-framed skyscraper. However, he worked with an American building language, from which he managed to extract a poetic statement. His imagery evoked efficiency, cleanliness, organisation and standardisation, thus fitting American big business. But Mies’ prototypes also became parents to a global progeny. However, crudely treated imitations were in the majority, reproducing many of the limitations and few of the qualities of the originals. Mies adopted symmetry, frontality and axiality for public buildings and monuments; and asymmetry, fluidity and interlocking volumes for homes.

The career of Finnish-born Eliel Saarinen and his son Eero originated at Cranbrook School in Bloomfield Hills, near Detroit. Saarinen senior combined an insistent Scandinavian sense of brick craftsmanship with cool rationality.

The 1950s in the United States was a period of unparalleled prosperity and relative optimism, when scientific and technological ingenuity made it possible to become increasingly sophisticated in the construction, maintenance and detailing of buildings. Among the pioneering works in this regard are the projects in the automotive industry. Detroit, with a population of 1.8 million, was the fourth largest city in the US after World War II. The Motor City was the undisputed centre of the US auto industry and Motown Records. With its stately buildings, it was known as the Paris of America. Prosperity came to an end in the early 1970s. The US economy was hit hard by the oil crisis. The generation that followed saw jobs disappear from the car factories, the population decline at lightning speed and revenues from municipal taxes evaporate. Detroit came to symbolise urban decay. By 2011, more than a third of residents were living below the poverty line, 40 per cent of streetlights were not working and 210 of 317 city parks were closed. People fled the city, leaving some 80,000 homes and other buildings empty. On 18 July 2013, Detroit became the largest city ever in US history to file for bankruptcy.
After years of recession, the city is slowly recovering. Mayor Mike Duggan committed to restoring parks. Detroit’s green character attracts people to buy one of the vacant properties for a pittance and refurbish it or to plant small initiatives among the –for the sake of pocketing insurance premiums– deliberately burnt down houses. That way, the city will flow a little again with creatives and highly educated people with creative ideas. America’s largest and most ambitious renovation project is breathing new life into abandoned downtown properties.

Very sincere thanks to Wim Supply for accompanying us on the prospecting trip (July 2022) and for preparing it!