Cranbrook Architecture: A Legacy of Latitude 1119834422, 9781119834427

Citation preview

Guest-edited by Gretchen Wilkins

03 | Vol 93 | 2023

Guest-edited by Gretchen Wilkins

03 | Vol 93 | 2023

CRANBROOK ARCHITECTURE: A LEGACY OF LATITUDE

About the Guest-Editor

03/2023

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46

William E Massie

Gretchen Wilkins

Introduction

Postgraduate Architectural Education In Situ

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Unprompted

54

Open-ended Investigations in the Choreography of Construction

Hive of Education Reflections on a Model of Architectural Education

Emily Baker

Gretchen Wilkins

Evolution Over Revolution

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Eliel Saarinen as Architect and Educator Kevin Adkisson

Provoking the Outliers

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Trajectories for the Near Future Drawn from the Enigmatic Past Hani Rashid

‘The Unmeasurable’

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Lessons from Cranbrook Tod Williams

Schooling Fishy Knowledge Pia Ednie-Brown

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Building A Dream Fertile Ground for Social Good Yu-Chih Hsiao

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62

ISSN 0003-8504

Guest-edited by Gretchen Wilkins

ISBN 978 1 119 83442 7

Unbuilding and the Recovery of Craft in Architecture

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The Interior Within Hand’s Reach

96

Tactile Proximity

Cranbrook Department of Architecture 1986–1996

Lois Weinthal

Dan Hoffman

Arrows

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The Long Lines of Influence in Architecture 85

Jesse Reiser

Forming Action

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The Subject in the Object Peggy Deamer

The Agency of Making

120

An Anatomy of Practice-based Pedagogy Gretchen Wilkins

‘ The inseparability of living and learning is a palpable quality of Cranbrook’s campus’ – Gretchen Wilkins

An Architecture of Marks

78 From Another Perspective

Reading Histories and Writing Futures

Adept and Apprentices

Ronit Eisenbach

Methods of Inspiration A Pedagogical Approach Based on Singularity

128

Ben Nicholson at Cranbrook Neil Spiller

88 Contributors

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Peter Lynch

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Front cover Emily Baker, Steel mock-up, Master of Architecture studio, Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, 2012. © PD Rearick

ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN May/June

Volume

Issue

2023

93

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Inside front cover SUBSTUDIO, Pattern and Form Study, 2021. © SUBSTUDIO Page 1 Yu-Chih Hsiao, Saarinen Window Pattern Study, Master of Architecture studio, Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, 2005. © Yu-Chih Hsiao

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Disclaimer The Publisher and Editors cannot be held responsible for errors or any consequences arising from the use of information contained in this journal; the views and opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the Publisher and Editors, neither does the publication of advertisements constitute any endorsement by the Publisher and Editors of the products advertised.

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ABOUT THE

GUEST-EDITOR GRETCHEN WILKINS

Gretchen Wilkins is Head of Architecture at the Cranbrook Academy of Art. She began this role in 2018 and served as Interim Dean of the Academy from 2021 to 2022. She was previously an Associate Professor at RMIT University, acting as Head of the Design Department at RMIT Vietnam and Programme Director for the Master of Urban Design based in Melbourne, Barcelona and Ho Chi Minh City. Before arriving at RMIT she was an Assistant Professor in Architecture at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Her practice explores new models for density, manufacturing and mobility in rapidly transforming cities, with particular interest in Ho Chi Minh City and Detroit. Related design projects include the Future Factory, exhibited as part of the ‘Letters to the Mayor’ event at Storefront for Art and Architecture (2014), and annual studios with the cross-institutional World Architecture Workshop, including Post-Oil Cities (Barcelona, 2008), Borderlands (Detroit, 2007), and Post-Waterfront City (Lianyungang, 2009). She is the editor of Distributed Urbanism: Cities After Google Earth (Routledge, 2010), and has contributed writing to 2, Princeton Architectural Press and the Urban Lab+ at University College London. Her research has been supported by the Australia-China Council, Japan Foundation, Holcim Forum for Sustainable Development, Asian Cultural Council and the James L Knight Foundation. She received her Master of Architecture from the University of Michigan and her PhD in Architecture from RMIT. 1

Text © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Image © Eric Perry

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Cranbrook Architecture is the product of an ambitious educational experiment conceived in the 1920s and built on rolling farmland some 20 miles (30 kilometres) north of Detroit. It began with newspaper publishers and philanthropists George and Ellen Booth who bought the land, and Finnish architect Eliel Saarinen whom they hired to transform it. The Booths’ ambition was to build not just a campus but a ‘hive of education’, where every person ‘from the cook to the well-digger’ was a teacher, and every space no matter how peripheral a ‘point of interest’ that should inspire curiosity, imagination and opportunistic learning.1 Towards that end, architecture became a central protagonist in the vision, creating spaces for experience-based education from kindergarten through to postgraduate level. Eliel Saarinen oversaw the design of the campus and became the founding President of the Academy of Art and Head of the Architecture Department, which launched in 1932. Although it has evolved considerably over the nine decades since then, the Architecture programme remains fundamentally rooted in Cranbrook’s founding principles, with experimental practice as the core pedagogy. Since its founding, the Department has graduated 451 students – fewer people than are enrolled in many single programmes of architecture today. It has always been a small programme (10 to 15 students total), but that number feels especially low in comparison to the impact of its alumni, and the wider Academy’s reputation as the ‘epicenter of the Modernist experiment’ in America.2 This issue of 2 endeavours to address that subject, exploring

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the link between Cranbrook Architecture as a place and a pedagogical model, and the pioneering practices it has and continues to engender. As a post-professional programme, this is its explicit goal: to convert nascent ideas and experiments into inventive and productive practices. But there is no set curriculum to guide that process, nor institutionalised metrics through which to measure it. On the contrary: its principal imperative has always been about ensuring the widest possible latitude for thought, experimentation and improvisational, cross-disciplinary work. So, what is it about this expansive approach that has proven to be so wildly generative? In this issue, Cranbrook alumni, current and former department heads, contributing architects, curators and invited scholars reflect on this question and Cranbrook’s model of open, practice-based pedagogy. These reflections consider architecture through various lenses: as a physical environment, as a form of practice, as an educational framework, as a cultural construct, as an experience and as a way of thinking. Ultimately the issue attempts to demonstrate the agency of Cranbrook’s exceptionally wide latitude for expanding the definition of architectural work.

Steven Holl, Addition to the Cranbrook Institute of Science, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, 1998 View of the new entrance hall (visible in the foreground), designed by Steven Holl, against the original Institute building designed by Eliel Saarinen, and the Acheson Planetarium.

INTRODUCTION GRETCHEN WILKINS

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Building a Campus for Self-education

For Saarinen, the opportunity to design the Cranbrook campus was itself an open-ended experiment, lasting 25 years and weaving between practices of architecture and landscape design, craft-based production, pedagogical design and academic administration. His famous advice to always design in consideration of the next larger scale is distinctly evident at Cranbrook, where he designed everything from the lighting to the landscapes to the academic model for the Academy he then directed. The first article, by curator Kevin Adkisson, is a rich visual introduction to the physical qualities of Saarinen’s Cranbrook campus, as well as his artistic, material and academic preoccupations as they developed over these years. Saarinen’s own home was an integral part of that programme, located at the centre of Academy Way, the spine of the Academy campus. It adjoins the home he designed for resident sculptor Carl Milles, and across the street from Artist-in-Residence/Head of Department housing. (The dual title reflects their dual role: mentoring through their own practice, and managing the academic programme as Department Head.) Academy Way also includes Artistin-Residence studios, the department/student studios and student housing. The result is a highly unique residentialacademic model in which students, faculty and administration live and work along the same street, sharing space in their professional and personal lives.

Eliel Saarinen, Saarinen House on Academy Way, Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, 1920s Saarinen House and Milles House are physically connected to each other and integrated with student housing, Artist-in-Residence housing and studios, student halls of residence and administrative offices. This is the academic, cultural and logistical spine of the Academy.

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Eliel Saarinen, Proposed plan of Cranbrook Academy of Art, 1925 The original, unfinished plan for the Academy of Art. The Williams Natatorium responds to early ideas about campus organisation and axes.

Elysia Vandenbussche, Natatorium Installation, Williams Natatorium, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, 2021 Vandenbussche’s installation in the Williams Natatorium studied relationships between art and architecture through 11 objects and a video projection. The piece was activated by the aeration mechanisms of the pool, visualising interactions between water, air, space and sound.

Saarinen was deeply invested in this live-work model, believing that the production of art and the production of ‘an atmosphere of art in which to live’ were equally important.3 Indeed, the model of a live-work community is something Saarinen experimented with before his arrival at Cranbrook, as architect alumnus Hani Rashid notes in his discussion of Hvitträsk, the home and studio compound designed by and for Saarinen, his business partners and their families outside Helsinki. The impact of this model on the Academy culture and pedagogy is significant, especially for how it untethers teaching from solely academic spaces. Critiques, strolling discussions or even project-based work can quite easily move outside of the department to the wider campus grounds. Architecture for Education

The inseparability of living and learning is a palpable quality of Cranbrook’s campus and a point that recurs in reflections throughout this issue. Architect Tod Williams describes the enchanted experiences he had growing up on the campus, not as part of the postgraduate Cranbrook Academy of Art but as a pupil at Cranbrook School for Boys. He returned many years later as an architect practising with Billie Tsien to design the Williams Natatorium (1999) on a site that completes an original, unfinished axis connecting the Boys’ School, the Academy of Art and Art Museum, and the Booth family residence. The Natatorium was one of several projects that continued to evolve the campus from the original Saarinen plan into the 21st century. Other additions include Rafael Moneo’s New Studios Building (2002), which houses the Academy’s Ceramics, Fiber and Metalsmithing departments; Steven Holl’s addition to the Institute of Science (1998); Juhani Pallasmaa’s Arrival Feature (1994); Peter Rose’s addition to the Brookside School (1996); and a new Middle School for Girls by Lake|Flato Architects (2011). There are countless other architectural, experimental and curatorial projects installed throughout Cranbrook’s more than 300 acres (120 hectares) each year, including temporary projects by Academy students, permanent campus artworks and curated exhibitions or events. A recent example is a collaboration between curator Kevin Adkisson at the Center for Collections and Research and Artist-in-Residence Iris Eichenberg, Head of the Metalsmithing Department. Each year, the project invites students and artists-in-residence to produce new work that interacts with an existing space or object in one of Cranbrook’s three historic houses: Cranbrook House (designed by Albert Kahn, 1908), Saarinen House (designed by Eliel Saarinen, 1930) and the Smith House (designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1950, and gifted to Cranbrook in 2017).

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Rafael Moneo, New Studios Building, Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, 2002 Intersection of the Eliel Saarinen-designed Art Museum (left) and Rafael Moneo’s new studio spaces for the departments of Fiber, Ceramics and Metalsmithing, and studentrun Forum Gallery (right).

In lieu of a set curriculum or common project brief, the culture of the Architecture Department is the programme’s primary generative force

Juhani Pallasmaa, Arrival Feature, Cranbrook Educational Community, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, 1994 Intersection of Faculty Way and Institute Way on the Cranbrook campus. The columns are made from six different types of granite that originate in Canada, pushed south to this site by glacial drift. They also form a sundial.

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Ed Ryan, ‘Speculative Histories’ exhibition, Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, 2021 above: Ed Ryan is a graduate of the 2D Design Department at Cranbrook Academy of Art. The piece is a window graphic and installation in the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Smith House, as part of the ‘Speculative Histories’ exhibition, curated by Kevin Adkisson at the Center for Collections and Research, and Iris Eichenberg, Head of Metalsmithing at the Cranbrook Academy of Art.

Ben Cook, DSS/SSD, Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, 2021 below left: This installation on Cranbrook’s campus used woven microfilm to span Lake Jonah (named for an adjacent fountain by Carl Milles), and was gradually un-woven and distributed across the lake’s surface via periods of rapid freezing and unfreezing. Ben Cook is a 2020 graduate of the Architecture programme at Cranbrook Academy of Art.

These projects realise in contemporary ways Booth’s desire for the campus to remain an active participant in the educational experiences of the Academy and Schools, not just a backdrop to them. He imagined it as a place where students and scholars could ‘meet together in their artwork’, an aspiration bolstered by the residential nature of the community. In her piece in this issue, Pia Ednie-Brown, Professor of Architecture at the University of Newcastle, considers the ways in which Cranbrook’s integrated architectural and pedagogical model functions as a ‘living pedagogical ecology’, and how that ecology might offer fresh perspectives on the conventional models of architectural education still so prevalent today. Navigating Latitude

In lieu of a set curriculum or common project brief, the culture of the Architecture Department is the programme’s primary generative force. As a function of the people in the department each year and their individual research interests, this culture is never static. A consistent presence year to year is the Department Head who, as the sole department ‘faculty’, and whose practice is an integral part of their position, leaves an undeniable imprint without directly scripting students’ work.

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Architecture Building, Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, 2018 View of the interior of the Architecture Department, which is located in the former Cranbrook Garage, an 8,000-square-foot (740-square-metre) facility with student studios, workshops, crit spaces, kitchen and lounge.

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In his contribution to this issue, former Department Head William E Massie (2005–16) reflects on the programme’s unique ‘proto context’ and how he leverages the act of making for subsequent acts of design. Architect Emily Baker, an alumna from Massie’s tenure, discusses her interests in the ‘choreography of construction’ and how this enables a rethinking of conventional design processes from details through construction. Alumnus Yu-Chih Hsiao discusses how his experience with unscripted and collaborative acts of making and exchange evolved into a lifelong practice of working across disciplines, within communities, for non-governmental organisations and in teaching. Former Department Head Dan Hoffman (1986–96) relays the very particular context in Detroit during his time at Cranbrook, and how the material complexities of Detroit’s

urban ‘unbuilding’ provoked sensibilities about making and craft that resonated through the work in the department in various ways. Architect Ronit Eisenbach, an alumna from Hoffman’s tenure, describes her interests in the embedded histories that materials can reveal – ideas that permeate her current practices in performance, teaching and collaborative art. In his piece, former Department Head Peter Lynch (1996– 2005) offers a deeper historical context for Cranbrook’s pedagogical approach and how he curated prompts to ‘cultivate practices of inspiration’ in lieu of a set curricular model. Professor Lois Weinthal, an alumna from Lynch’s tenure, recalls finding inspiration from her studies of the ‘tactile proximity’ of spaces ‘within hand’s reach’ and how this influenced her continued practice today, investigating spaces of the body and the interior.

Notes 1. George Booth, ‘Memoranda for the consideration of the Board of Trustees provided for in my Will for the administration of the Estate of Cranbrook as an Educational Centre’, 15 January 1927 (first written December 1926), George G Booth Papers, Cranbrook Archives, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, p 7. 2. MH Miller, ‘How Michigan Became the Epicentre of the Modernist Experiment’, The New York Times, 6 September 2018: www.nytimes. com/2018/09/06/t-magazine/michiganmodernist-architecture.html. 3. Nancy Rivard, ‘Eliel Saarinen in America’, Master’s thesis, Wayne State University, Detroit, 1973, p 9.

Cultures of Work

A consistent quality of the Architecture Department throughout different eras is its permissive culture of open experimentation, making and student-directed work. Architect Jesse Reiser, an alumnus of the programme from Daniel Libeskind’s tenure as Department Head (1978–85), recalls his experiences at Buck’s Rock Work Camp in Connecticut where, as at Cranbrook, he was allowed free rein to experiment in arts, crafts and performance. There was no prescribed programme – only the directive that you ‘not be idle, that you must work’. Cranbrook’s culture of immersive studio production in the department acts both as a catalyst for ideas and a refuge from prescribed conventions, a generative space that allows the author and their practice to continually inform one another. This is a topic that Yale University Professor Emerita Peggy Deamer discusses in this issue: how ‘the object and the artist get illuminated together’. Deamer raises this idea in the context of architectural work, or more precisely of architectural labour – a subject in which she is deeply invested through her work with the Architecture Lobby. The topic of architectural work and the precarious labour practices it supports is quite relevant to the department, where students arrive in search of broader ways to engage architecture, often out of frustration with those very labour practices. Recognising that these systems are designed, and therefore are not a de facto or compulsory part of architectural practice, yields productive conversations about other potential models, as well as important questions about what and whom architecture serves. I arrived at Cranbrook as Head of Department in the autumn of 2018 and enjoyed a year and a half before the global pandemic hit, changing both everything and nothing about architectural education and practice. As we tentatively emerge from that particular global crisis, we remain surrounded by many others, with architecture being implicated throughout. This burden for change falls equally on the shoulders of architectural practice and education, or perhaps new models that can bridge them. This is a topic I consider in my concluding piece in this issue. Choosing just a handful of people from among Cranbrook’s distinguished history for this issue was a challenge. My goal in selecting the contributors was to reflect on the uniquely practicefocused academic model and the diversity of practices that have evolved from Cranbrook Architecture over many years. This survey offers some specific examples of that work, but equally interesting are the questions it raises, such as how we best learn architecture, and to what end? Is architecture a body of knowledge, a way of thinking, a potent collaborative model? How is culture a form of curriculum? What other experimental models can we enact to broaden the culture of architectural education and practice, especially as we confront radical changes to the way we live, work and learn? 1

Text © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: p 7 © Balthazar Korab/Cranbrook Educational Community (S.19.867); p 8(t) Courtesy of Cranbrook Art Museum (CAM1928.39); p 8(b) Courtesy of Cranbrook Archives, Cranbrook Center for Collections and Research (POL4.81.1); p 9 © Elysia Vandenbussche; p 10(t) © Balthazar Korab/Cranbrook Educational Community (S.11.1169); p 10(b) © Christina Capetillo/Cranbrook Educational Community (S.22.132); p 11(t) Photo Eric Perry. Courtesy of Cranbrook Center for Collections and Research (SpecHist_SM_Ed_Ryan2D); p 11(b) © Ben Cook; pp 12–13 © Gretchen Wilkins

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Eliel Saarinen, Cranbrook School for Boys, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, 1927–30 Dormitory rooms are housed in simple brick buildings, while the study hall (left) features decorative limestone windows and patterned brick gable ends. Sculptor Carl Milles’s The Running Dogs (1929) sits in front of a pergola where each column features a unique design.

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Kevin Adkisson

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The Cranbrook campus is designed with a concerted effort to integrate art, craft and architecture. Cranbrook Center for Collections and Research curator Kevin Adkisson shares some of its stories and explores a variety of its external and internal spaces and the conceptual rigour that went into them. Collectively, the campus provides an inspiring backdrop to individual students’ creative journeys.

There is a warmth to the Cranbrook campus. Rambling groups of brick buildings house a series of schools, studios and museums carefully arranged among rolling hills and bodies of water. Sculptures and fountains dot the campus, working with the landscape and architectural ornament to lead the eye, then the body, between buildings. Set in Bloomfield Hills, around 20 miles (30 kilometres) from downtown Detroit, the campus is utopian in its apparent remove from the concerns of city life, a pedestrian landscape at the edge of the Motor City. Cranbrook’s architecture, a vibrant and intriguing strain of interwar modernism, celebrates the search for a better future through art. Using the principles of the Arts and Crafts movement, Finnish architect Eliel Saarinen used the Cranbrook project as a laboratory for his own architectural expression, synthesising many historic and contemporary sources with his considerable creativity. Every Cranbrook building rewards a close look. The lives of those who live, study and visit the campus are enriched by what he achieved. But what is Cranbrook’s achievement? How did Saarinen’s search for an appropriate form for each project result in buildings that flit between tradition and modernity? What were his techniques, as architect and educator, and how did his expansive and flexible pedagogical approach create such a lasting impact on this experimental community?

Eliel Saarinen, Campuses of Cranbrook Academy of Art and Cranbrook School for Boys, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, 1925–42 Saarinen grouped the red-tile-roofed buildings of Cranbrook School for Boys (left) around a series of quadrangles. Academy Way forms the spine of the art school, which grew over time from the Arts and Crafts Studios (centre bottom, 1928) to the Library and Museum (right, 1942). Load-bearing brick construction is used throughout.

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Creating the Cranbrook Institutions Between 1918 and 1942, newspaper publisher George Gough Booth and Ellen Scripps Booth established on their family estate the original six Cranbrook institutions – an elementary school, preparatory schools for girls and boys, an Episcopal church, an art academy and museum, and a science institute – which are linked by shared patrons and a shared campus. While programmatically separate, each institution is engaged in one mission: enrichment through investigation and experimentation in art, science and education. When Saarinen moved with his family onto the Cranbrook estate in 1925, he began a quarter-century-long commission as principal architect of the growing campus. His mandate from George Booth: Cranbrook must be an ‘eye-opener’. Saarinen took this to heart, writing that ‘the opening of the eyes [would be] the key program of the whole Cranbrook development’.1 Booth gave Saarinen an opportunity, and Saarinen ran with it. The commission was expansive: buildings and landscapes, furniture and textiles, andirons and silverware, and more. Saarinen put into practice his belief that architects should always design in relation to the next largest thing; architecture, to him, must harmonise from the teacup to the city plan. In his designs, individuality is key. His style quivers between the past and the future in an idyllic present. The projects are hard to categorise, as he put his own cast on everything. An exquisite sense of wonder and discovery permeates his work. Taken as a whole, the Cranbrook project represents one of the last and largest expressions of the Arts and Crafts movement in North America. It was the English Arts and Crafts that motivated George Booth to action. The movement also grounded Saarinen’s practice in Finland, but at Cranbrook he took it as a flexible starting point, adapting and repurposing its forms and ideologies until his death in 1950. Unlike so many other utopian projects that sprung from the Arts and Crafts, Cranbrook – both its architecture and its mission – continue today. First Cranbrook Buildings Saarinen crafted an architecture that is both familiar and associative, and highly original. To a visitor arriving today at his earliest campus buildings, opened in 1927, his style may appear quite traditional. Standing in the main quadrangle of the historic Cranbrook School for Boys (now the co-educational Cranbrook Schools), one is surrounded by two- and three-storey buildings of red Detroit-made common brick and red tile roofs. Like many American preparatory schools and colleges built in the 1920s, the formal arrangement traces its roots to Oxford and Cambridge. But linger a moment over the details – the structure and ornament – and what Saarinen designed reveals itself to be unique, new and inventive. Pause at the northeast entrance to the dining hall where the initial appearance of cool Classical symmetry of Saarinen’s quilt-like composition of limestone, wirecut Roman brick and leaded glass is quickly complicated by its irregular and whimsical detailing. The dining hall entrance, once considered, leaves a lasting impression of both originality, quality and correctness. What was Saarinen’s inspiration for this most unusual entrance? The quadrangle’s architecture surely met the client’s

Eliel Saarinen, Dining Hall, Cranbrook School for Boys, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, 1928 Each limestone square offers its own individual expression. The grid of brick is established and then violated. At the corner, geometric blocks serve no structural purpose but add interest and disrupt the symmetry of the composition.

brief for Arts and Crafts-style buildings, but it also incorporates trends in Art Deco styling, and German and Dutch Expressionist designs. Saarinen’s detailing also points towards more eclectic sources, such as American architect Claude Bragdon’s system of ‘Projective Ornament’2 in which repeated geometries, not historic forms, create new designs. The many influences are woven together with precision and creativity. The Hungarian architect and artist Géza Maróti, who partnered with Saarinen on ornament and sculpture at Cranbrook from 1927 to 1929, said that the buildings would be ‘like a good book, opened at the right page’.3 While the architecture of Cranbrook is meant to be discovered and read over several years of boarding-school life, the first buildings Saarinen designed for the Academy of Art, in 1928, are more straightforward. Craft workshops that made furniture, metalwork, book bindings, textiles and the like to outfit the Cranbrook campus were organised around an irregularly shaped courtyard in buildings of load-bearing brick walls and slate roofs. Forgoing the rich ornament of the School for Boys, the simple, gabled studio buildings and residence hall have a strictness of line and clarity of form.

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Eliel Saarinen, Kingswood School for Girls, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, 1931

right: The harmonious and serene Green Lobby features a rug designed by Maja Andersson Wirde for Studio Loja Saarinen (reproduction seen here), tiles made at Detroit’s Pewabic Pottery, furniture designed by Eero Saarinen, and painted decoration by Pipsan Saarinen Swanson.

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above: The simplification of massing and creative use of repeated motifs, particularly the telescoping form, unify the Kingswood design.

But a closer inspection of any individual wall again reveals Saarinen’s love of detail. Bricks of different dimensions are used to enhance or call out certain features, while elsewhere bricks form patterns of interlocking geometric shapes and running mortar lines. An arched passageway that decreases in dimension at one end is constructed of bricks laid in a basketweave pattern, a pleasing and structural answer to a visual desire for forced perspective towards the landscape. Without slavishly copying any one style, Saarinen took from the past certain materials, techniques and moods to shape a modernism that engages with history without repeating it. Adapting Modern Sources Coming quickly on the heels of the first buildings, Saarinen’s 1931 Kingswood School for Girls (now also part of the co-educational Cranbrook Schools) demonstrates that his manner of working – creating new modes of expression through creative adaptation of historic forms – is expandable. At Kingswood, the building massing is simpler, and the colours fresher: golden Mankato limestone, buff sand-cast brick, and verdigris copper roofing. In both structure and ornament, Saarinen narrowed his range of motifs, fixing on telescoping forms. Swinging into the building’s auto court through gates of telescoping ironwork under piers of telescoping stone, one sees chimneys, columns, light posts, leaded glass windows, brickwork and sidewalks all rendered in variations on this motif. Inside, handmade tiles and custom textiles, handwoven at Cranbrook under Loja Saarinen’s direction, continue the patterns and rhythm of the architecture. With assistance from his wife on

textiles, and from their children Pipsan and Eero on interior and furniture designs, the Saarinens built Kingswood as one of the most fully realised Gesamtkunstwerke in America. Kingswood opened just a few months before the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York staged its seminal exhibition ‘Modern Architecture’, which decreed that the International Style, with its flat-roofed, white-walled and ribbon-windowed buildings by Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier was the way to be modern. Compared to Le Corbusier’s architecture – machines for living – Saarinen’s Kingswood feels both luxurious and distinctly historic. Yet Kingwood demonstrates how Saarinen could deftly blend International Style approaches to programming and massing, Art Deco detailing and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Prairie Style within a single project. Saarinen absorbed and adapted these contemporary influences as confidently as he did historic styles. Architectural Forum claimed Kingswood showed ‘that brick may still be used with imagination and taste to produce an effect that is unusual yet entirely straightforward and unforced’.4 In 1930, Eliel and Loja Saarinen moved into their new home on Academy Way. Built to serve the Academy of Art’s President (a role Saarinen held until 1946), its brick exterior gives no indication of the jewel-box-like Art Deco interior. Again, the Saarinens designed everything, with much of the furniture, textiles and objects in the house executed next door in the Cranbrook studios. Saarinen House did more than simply act as a residence: it was a public-relations tool. Heavily publicised, it served (then, and now as a house museum) as a showcase for the family’s talents, as well as an advertisement for the graduate Academy.

Eliel Saarinen, Saarinen House, Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, 1930 The family designed every aspect of their home, much of which was then made next door. Geometric textiles from Studio Loja Saarinen unify the interiors just as the use of patterned brick exteriors creates cohesion across the campus.

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Saarinen as Educator Cranbrook Academy of Art provided Saarinen the opportunity to be both architect and educator, serving as President and Head of the Department of Architecture and Urban Design. Just as his buildings strike a balance between the familiar and the inventive, so too did his leadership. Conceived and opened during the same years that the famed Bauhaus was consolidated and closed, Cranbrook Academy avoided polemics and never operated under a bold manifesto like its oft-compared German predecessor. Cranbrook lacked the dogma of many modernist experiments, but it also eschewed the trappings of tradition found in the French Beaux-Arts teaching methods that then dominated American schools of art and architecture. Saarinen, who trained at Helsinki Polytechnic under such a system, abhorred what he called the ‘non-creative-school-booklearned-art-teacher’,5 believing that ‘creative art cannot be taught by others’.6 Academy students, therefore, have no required courses and follow no curriculum; instead, they create their own problems and design their own solutions. Saarinen respected the past, and encouraged his students to travel and study historic forms, but in the studio he demanded they avoid mimicry in favour of searching for contemporary forms. To see examples of such a practice, all an Academy student must do is walk through Saarinen’s architecture.

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A Monumental Final Building Saarinen’s theories are reflected in the layout of his last Cranbrook project, the Academy Library and Museum, opened in 1942. Students enter the library on one side to read the history of art, cross the open peristyle to see the history of art in the museum, and then, eyes opened to a world of possibilities, descend the steps towards their studios to make the future of art. While the stripped Classical styling is certainly grand, the scale is almost domestic – the columns are not even 40 feet tall. It is not a domineering building, but an ennobling one. Standing between the columns, surrounded by art, and looking out at an unfolding landscape of gardens and terraced fountains, one is uplifted. His beguiling ornament continues here, too, even though by this time many architects had abandoned such detail. Meandering linework emerges from the stone and brings the monumental scale of the building to the intimate scale of the hand. The curious and original ornament system – compared variously to ancient runes or Mayan carvings – was never explained by Saarinen. But where the ornament flowers, it inspires the curious visitor to pause, touch and examine the architecture, to wonder what they are witnessing. In rebuffing the International Style for Cranbrook (at a moment where, in private practice with his son, he was designing such buildings), the Library and Museum show Eliel Saarinen’s refusal to reject history and instead embrace its mysteries.

Saarinen’s Legacy Cranbrook’s long period of development gave Saarinen the opportunity to continually evolve his architecture with the times. As one visiting architect wrote: ‘Each building is but the latest step forward and never the last. Consequently, Cranbrook presents a permanent record – conveniently assembled in one spot – of his ever-changing interpretation of the spirit of contemporary life.’7 In the diverse array of buildings and objects eventually produced by his son, Eero Saarinen, his faculty, such as Charles Eames and Harry Bertoia, or his students, including Harry Weese, Ralph Rapson, Florence Knoll, Gyo Obata and Edward Bacon, one witnesses Eliel Saarinen’s theories of total design, insistence on quality and, most importantly, his demand for forms appropriate to the problem and the age. Saarinen’s legacy did not turn out to be his creative blending of historic and contemporary sources, but his insistence to be always searching. That Eliel Saarinen’s philosophies and not his style proliferated keeps the Cranbrook campus a singular gem. As author and former Cranbrook elementary school teacher Anne Morrow Lindbergh wrote of her first visit: ‘Cranbrook is beautifully done – too beautifully. As though it were wished there.’8 1

Notes 1. Eliel Saarinen, ‘The Story of Cranbrook’, unpublished manuscript, 1950, p 8. Saarinen Family Papers, box 8, folder 6, Cranbrook Archives, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. 2. Claude Bragdon, Projective Ornament, The Manas Press (Rochester, NY), 1915. 3. ‘Cranbrook School – Founded on Ideals’, The Magazine of the Women’s City Club, Detroit, May 1927, p 28. 4. ‘The Kingswood School for Girls’, Architectural Forum, January 1932, p 38. 5. Saarinen, op cit. 6. Eliel Saarinen, 'On the Cranbrook Development,' published transcript of an address given at the American Institute of Architects Convention in San Antonio, Texas, April 1931, p 4. Cranbrook Foundation Record Group I: Office Records, box 26, folder 13, Cranbrook Archives. 7. Kent Barker, ‘Eliel Saarinen: An Appreciation’, Journal of the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada, 21 (12), December 1944, p 270. 8. Anne Morrow Lindbergh, War Within and Without: Diaries and Letters 1939–1944, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich (New York), 1980, p 299.

Eliel Saarinen, Cranbrook Academy of Art Library and Museum, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, 1942 opposite: A ceremonial procession through the landscape, appropriate to the building’s role as a temple of culture, culminates not at a central door but an open peristyle. The building offers visitors the same opportunities for choice that Saarinen gave his students.

below: Enigmatic meandering linework ornament appears across the Museum and Library building. Saarinen’s shaped pedestal holds sculptor Carl Milles’s Torso of Folke Filbyter (1927).

Text © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: Photography by James Haefner, Courtesy Cranbrook Center for Collections and Research

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Hani Rashid

PROVOKING THE OUTLIERS Trajectories for the Near Future Drawn from the Enigmatic Past

Asymptote Architecture, Cervélo House, Toronto, Canada, 2018 Commissioned by bike manufacturer Cervélo, the building was designed as a monocoque structure to be three-dimensionally printed onsite. The form and tectonics are a merging of Hani Rashid’s work at Cranbrook, and in particular his thesis work on the Theatre of Memory, set against the engineered elegance of the aerodynamics of high-performance road bikes.

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Evoking a heady mix of the Cranbrook campus viewed from his window and the liquid viscerality of Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, which he was architecturally deconstructing at the time, architect and teacher Hani Rashid recounts his days as a Cranbrook student and the profound influence across the decades of those experiences on the work of his New York practice Asymptote Architecture.

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I have often wondered why the Cranbrook situation and ethos spawned so many robust vectors for America’s architecture and design culture in the latter half of the 20th century. Perhaps in part, Cranbrook, as a phenomenon, resulted from an unexpected nexus being a place between somewhere and nowhere. The emergence of the campus and grounds on the outskirts of Detroit was made possible with infusions of wealth from the city’s ballooning industrial complex. Cranbrook’s visionary founders, George and Ellen Booth, selected a location for their prescient vision of an art and educational enclave to confront what they perceived as the ever-louder drum beat of sterile modernity on the horizon. They chose a location far enough from the madding crowds yet close enough to Detroit’s centre to become an oasis that resonates with a certain gritty and sublime intensity even today. The Cranbrook masterplan and vision that eventually emerged from Eliel Saarinen’s drawing board was an impressive collection of near-monastic buildings and verdant landscapes that, in concert, catalysed all potential modes of creative and artistic meditation and production.  I believe that in many ways the Cranbrook that Saarinen meticulously crafted was a curious and vivid extrapolation of Hvitträsk, his 1903 ‘utopian’ enclave built on a bucolic lakeside site just outside of Helsinki. Initially conceived as a studio for Gesellius, Lindgren, Saarinen, his Finnish architecture office at the time, it was also a home for the partners and their entire families and, eventually, for the office staff as well. Perhaps most importantly, Hvitträsk eventually became a kind of self-referential laboratory where Saarinen explored his concepts and ideas prior to his eventual departure for Bloomfield Hills in 1923. When I visited Hvitträsk some years ago, I was intrigued by Saarinen’s obsessive deployment of esoteric motifs drawn perhaps from some arcane and ancient Nordic symbols. These enigmatic decorative elements found throughout the interconnected and superbly proportioned rooms afforded a strange and uncanny atmosphere to the whole place. The fluid tectonic narrative approach that Saarinen seemed to have so eloquently experimented with is, to my mind, the basis of the mesmerising beauty and mystical nature of the Cranbrook campus as it stands today. The elegant and cryptic architecture of the Cranbrook grounds speaks of a powerful confluence of discovery, craft, making, poetry, and a constant spatial musicality, making the whole environment so omnipotent and inspiring.  Gesellius, Lindgren, Saarinen, Hvitträsk complex, Kirkkonummi, Finland, 1903 Located on the shore of Lake Vitträsk, and originally the studio home of the architect trio Herman Gesellius, Armas Lindgren and Eliel Saarinen, the building complex’s tectonics, framed views and modernist DNA foreshadowed Saarinen’s designs for the Cranbrook buildings and grounds.

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Research at the Periphery  After having completed my undergraduate degree at Carleton University in Canada, I sought out an environment to essentially detoxify myself from what had been overly practical and painfully conventional training as an architect. Two young professors at Carleton, Dan Hoffman and John Maruszczak, suggested that I meet with Daniel Libeskind at Cranbrook and apply to the Master’s programme at the Architecture Department under Libeskind’s leadership. Meeting ‘Danny’ for the first time in the Cranbrook Academy of Art library, surrounded by so many books and, in particular, the original plates of Piranesi’s Carceri etchings (1720–78), was enough to addict me to this strange and mysterious place. I knew from that moment that this was the inspirational environment I needed, a curious combination, part art school, part academic institution, while being a bucolic retreat for obsessive creativity.

My initial conceptual work at Cranbrook centred on a fanatical analysis of Surrealism and Surrealist painting. I became fixated with the Garden of Earthly Delights triptych (1515) by Hieronymus Bosch and its obscure symbolism, uncanny strangeness and emotive pull. That painting seemed wholly apropos to my perception of Cranbrook and its environs. The obscurely ornamented pre-modern architecture organised around ideally situated fountains, populated by enigmatic bronze figures in perpetual states of choreographed emotion alongside such precise and prescribed framed vistas of Saarinen’s design, seemed to me to be a multidimensional living painting rather than merely a collection of structures and landscapes. Bosch’s painting, where human figures and architecture meld into such decisive and visceral liquid landscapes, seemed to be a distorted mirror on to these pristine grounds outside my studio window. 

Hani Rashid, Meditations on the Garden of Earthly Delights preliminary sketch, Master of Architecture studio, Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, 1985 Sketches of the notional symbolism and architectural structures of Hieronymous Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights (1515).

The elegant and cryptic architecture of the Cranbrook grounds speaks of a powerful confluence of discovery, craft, making, poetry, and a constant spatial musicality, making the whole environment so omnipotent and inspiring 25

Speculating on Ideation Upon completing my obsessive studies of Hieronymous Bosch, I delved deeply into some weird and genuinely wonderful medieval texts on the far reaches of alchemy. To confront formmaking and tectonics, I also set out to dissect and catalogue the Renaissance Farnese Theatre (1618) by Giovanni Battista Aleotti in the Palazzo della Pilotta in Parma, Italy. Although these and other seemingly disparate pursuits I took on seemed perhaps at odds with the self-motivated mission of making forwardthinking architecture, they nevertheless brought me to some unexpected notions and ideas for its future. As I look back on my Cranbrook-inspired process, I was, in some ways, perhaps unwittingly relishing the very last gasps of so many centuries of thinking and innovating that was soon about to change forever with the advent of computers and the digital age. The Cranbrook grounds, in some odd way, seemed to embrace this oscillation in thought and time. After graduating from Cranbrook, I returned to the world I had detached from two years earlier. After a brief stint collaborating with Libeskind on an installation we created for

the Milan Triennial (Il Progetto Domestico, 1986), I decided to start my architecture practice in the city. Despite being a young architect operating outside the close-knit architecture and design establishment, I realise that it was my experience of Cranbrook that, in some strange way, empowered and equipped me with a naive arrogance to take on the Milanese scene of contemporary design and architecture.  Shapeshifting Practice In Milan we created the first significant work from our studio, Asymptote; a design for a speculative masterplan for the Italian city of Lanciano. The project was a confluence and intersecting of many streams of interest drawn in part from my Cranbrook thesis work. A Giacomo Balla painting inspired the structural and organising principles. At the same time, the programme brief was assembled from a reinterpretation of the stories of Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532–64) by François Rabelais, and the architectural objects we devised were designed and inspired by Denis Diderot’s fanatical encyclopaedic drawings (1751). The project was a work of passion and a kind of love letter to a potential and vital architecture. However, given its perceived strangeness and intellectual complexity, it was awarded last place in the international competition. Nevertheless, it was a profound opening volley that set the bar for Asymptote’s ethos as an art and architecture practice centred on the exploratory, experimental and radical. In completing the Lanciano masterplan, I joined forces with Lise Anne Couture and we departed Milan to set up our practice in New York City. The first project out of our new studio in Manhattan was for a 1988 competition that called for designs for a 21st-century Statue of Liberty for the city of Los Angeles to commemorate West Coast immigration to the US. Situated directly above the Hollywood Freeway, our winning project was affectionally and enigmatically titled the Steel Cloud, a moniker inspired by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s Futurist musings: ‘We will sing of the vibrant nightly fervour of arsenals and shipyards blazing with violent electric moons; greedy railway stations that devour smoke-plumed serpents; factories hung on clouds by the crooked lines of their smoke; bridges that stride the rivers like giant gymnasts, flashing in the sun with a glitter of knives; adventurous steamers that sniff the horizon; deep-chested locomotives whose wheels paw the tracks like the hooves of enormous steel horses bridled by tubing; and the sleek flight of planes whose propellers chatter in the wind like banners and seem to cheer like an enthusiastic crowd.’1

Hani Rashid, Memory Theater, preliminary sketch studies, Master of Architecture thesis project, Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, 1985 The machinery and stage-sets of the Farnese Theater (1619) in Parma inspired the preliminary drawings for Rashid’s thesis work at Cranbrook on the design and making of the Memory Theater, influenced by the invention of the 16th-century philosopher Giulio Camillo.

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Asymptote Architecture, Lanciano Masterplan, Lanciano, Italy, 1987 A wood and plaster model of the proposal for the new Lanciano city plan. The encyclopaedic collection of architecture was drawn from Denis Diderot’s encyclopaedic plates (1751) and the texts of François Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532–64). The planning principals adopted Italian Futurist Giacomo Balla’s painting Speeding Automobile (1912) as an organisational template and inspiration for the interplay of structures and programmes.

For us, the proposed project was a tectonic poem and architectural work reflecting our perception of America’s vital future, a technological, cultural and sociological experiment to be erected at the close of the 20th century. Our design called for a new type of monument to usher in the quickly shapeshifting digital age that was now absolutely on the horizon. The Steel Cloud addressed the aspirations, desires and potential for the nation’s future. In reflecting and embodying notions of freedom of expression, technological prowess, vectors of inclusion and diversity, and celebrating the ‘society of the spectacle’, it became a highly debated and contentious work, especially as portrayed in mass media. Our vision for an 800-metre (2,625-foot) long tectonic scaffolding reclaiming the ‘lost’ space above the freeway populated with architectural event spaces devoid of commercial programming could not get traction in a world centred on commercial interests and problem-solving. In many ways, the elegance of the Steel Cloud mirrored the idealism and optimism that Cranbrook embodies even today. 

Asymptote Architecture, Steel Cloud, West Coast Gateway competition, Los Angeles, California, 1991 left: Proposal for a new monument to the influx of West Coast immigration to the US, situated above the Hollywood Freeway. The Steel Cloud was influenced by Hani Rashid’s work at Cranbrook Academy of Art, and in particular his analysis of the Farnese Theatre (1619) machinery, which is evident in this cross-section through the outdoor cinema boxes, sample gardens and booklets library. below: Large text screens situated above the Hollywood Freeway randomly sampled books and texts from searches taking place in the booklets library – a precursor to the emergence and power of social media born almost a decade after the design of the project.

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Asymptote Architecture, 3DTF Virtual New York Stock Exchange, 1999 above: The space was created as a real-time virtual-reality environment to assist the functioning of the actual trading floor in New York City. The project was conceived of as a cosmology for the financial markets based on Hani Rashid’s pre-thesis analysis and contemporary architectural reinterpretation at Cranbrook of Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights (1515).

Asymptote Architecture, Knoll A3 office system, New York, 2002 opposite: Aymptote’s office system for Knoll International employs a zero-carbon manufacturing and zero-waste strategy in the form of an organic modular system of fabric-clad pods for privacy and to embrace the social dynamics unfolding within the new digital workplace. The A3 pods were influenced by Hani Rashid’s own workspace at Cranbrook Academy of Art, which was located in and somewhat hidden beneath the centre of Saarinen’s peristyle – a monastic space conducive to creative study.

Today, Asymptote’s ongoing experiments, art installations, virtual-reality environments, building designs, masterplans, art installations, furniture and objects continually draw upon the discoveries and speculations made at Cranbrook. Asymptote is, as Cranbrook, a multidisciplinary art and technology laboratory situated at the periphery while constantly surveilling the centre. Our work, including projects such as the Cervélo House (Toronto, 2018), Knoll A3 office system (2002) and the Virtual New York Stock Exchange (1999), stems from the constant merging of a sort of dream logic with perceived necessity and pragmatism that has been and continues to be the core of our practice and studio ethos. Looking back at my time at Cranbrook, I now realise that it was never simply a school or institution. Instead, it is a place that gathers outliers, provoking in all a kind of informed risk-taking alongside a visionary pragmatism. 1 Note 1. Filippo Marinetti, ‘The Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism’ [1909], tr RW Flint, reprinted in Art in Theory 1900–2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, Blackwell (London), 2003, p 148. Text © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: pp 22–3, 27–9 © Asymptote Architecture / Hani Rashid and Lise Anne Couture; p 24 Courtesy of Cranbrook Archives, Cranbrook Center for Collections and Research. Saarinen Family Papers (1990-08, Box 11); pp 25–6 © Hani Rashid

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‘The Unmea Lessons from 30

Tod Williams

Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects, Natatorium, Cranbrook Schools, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, 1999 East-west section through the pool, oculus and landscape, with views of the evergreen forest along the north perimeter. A public viewing balcony to the west overlooks the central pool space below.

surable’ Cranbrook 31

Tod Williams attended Cranbrook School for Boys and Brookside Elementary School. The campus was his playground and instilled in him a keen sense of enjoyment of its vistas, fountains and pools, its smells and its textures. He co-founded his New York architecture studio with Billie Tsien in 1986, and returned to Cranbrook in the late 1990s to design and build the Natatorium.

I came to understand the Cranbrook Academy of Art campus as a child, with my feet and open eyes. My family and I happened to live a few miles away, and since I was a difficult child I was sent to Cranbrook’s Brookside Elementary School in the 1940s when I was three years old, and later to its School for Boys. Though I went home each night, I stayed on the campus as long as I could, spending my free time exploring, the campus and its ethos becoming a surrogate home. I learned to swim in Lake Jonah, the large outdoor swimming pool on the northern edge of campus, and later I became a lifeguard there for several summers. At the weekends, when not playing sports, I visited the Cranbrook Institute of Science and became a member of the Audubon Society. I was a collector of butterflies and minerals, and a vague observer of planets, losing myself and finding wonderment in the dioramas. Friends’ parents lived on the campus – I was welcomed into homes of artists, cooks, teachers and photographers. I explored their gardens and enjoyed working, being useful where I could, as long as it got me away from home.  While I never attended the Cranbrook Academy of Art, I lived it. As a passionate observer, I see it as a beautiful and brilliant model, so long as it connects to a larger world. Throughout the years, I have felt the best design at Cranbrook (and especially that of architecture and landscape) has existed where aspirational ideas and thoughts are grounded by the known and the practical. The land had originally been farmland. George and Ellen Booth, who founded the educational community, hired Eliel Saarinen to design the campus with the highest aspirations for what the school could be – loosely modelled after British boarding schools and the American Academy in Rome. Over a period of 25 years, Saarinen and George designed the Cranbrook Educational Community; the campus plan is rooted in the belief that celebrating the landscape and the arts are essential. Ultimately, it is about the personal commitment to community and that labour of love. The art of construction, the understanding and creative use of materials, all grow from the inside out and the outside in. Interior ornamental details, furnishings and comfortable habitation are all interconnected, not as one, but as an imperfect living assemblage. Today, many of us are more worried about metrics than emotions. The Booths and Saarinen aspired to create an ideal community: all things measured and in balance, with decisions sufficiently flexible to modify as life dictates.

Kingswood Upper School, Cranbrook Educational Community, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, 1995 The Cranbrook Educational Community presents an imperfect living assemblage. Originally designed as the counterpart to the Cranbrook Boys School, the Kingswood School for Girls sits next to Kingswood Lake on the north side of the Cranbrook campus, also designed by Eliel Saarinen and spearheaded by Ellen Booth. The high schools have been co-educational since 1985, now known as the Cranbrook Kingswood Upper Schools. This view from across the lake shows the bronze Dancing Girls sculpture by Carl Milles (1944) in the foreground.

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The Oval

In the 1950s and early 1960s I played football and ran track on the Cranbrook Sports and Recreational Field. It was exquisitely fitted to the landscape, married to the academic core and the Lone Pine Road’s street in front of the (then) designated School for Boys. This placement established harmonious relationships of architecture and landscape, and consciously ignored the regulations governing trackand-field. In this extraordinary space, young athletes and observers were energised and excited to take part and perform, to observe and be observed. The track was too short, too narrow, the curves too tight; we had to run hurdles on the grass, but exhilaration and spectacle helped, and we became as good as any in our state class. Our coach was a beloved history and ethics teacher who left to found the Upward Bound Educational Program; we competed and found our ethical cores. Booth and Saarinen wanted the convergence of the Athenian ideal, the academic and the aesthetic, to be centre-stage. Today, the original track has been removed and its natural turf has been replaced by a synthetic ‘grass look and feel’. The measurable survives – it is still a beautiful space; however, for those who knew it before, the emotional power is all but gone. The Observatory

One of the defining structures on the old Booth property was a barn with a silo. When Booth and Saarinen began to design the Boy’s School in the mid-1920s, they decided to use the site of the old silo to create a tower (now Hoey Tower) to house Booth’s favourite instrument – his telescope. It was an elegant idea, and the instrument for exploring the universe a perfect centrepiece to reinforce the Cranbrook School for Boys’ motto ‘Aim High’ and its iconic symbol of an archer. However, the tower-observatory scheme did not survive. The school was so lively and the lights so bright that visibility was not satisfactory for stargazing. In the early 1930s, the Institute of Science was built on a more remote, elevated and natural site; the observatory a more suitable, if less poetic idea.

Cranbrook School for Boys, Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, 1935 The original grass track-and-field at the Cranbrook School for Boys. Seen in the background is the octagonal tower of Hoey Hall, which was the observatory that replaced the former grain silo of George Booth’s original dairy farm. Cranbrook School for Boys was Eliel Saarinen’s first fully realised project in America (1927).

Carl Milles, Jonah and the Whale, Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, 1932 Jonah and the Whale overlooking ‘Big Jonah’, one of three interconnected landscaped pools designed by the Cranbrook Architectural Office with the landscape architect Edward Eichstaedt. The campus pools were in use from 1933 to 1999. Swimming is no longer permitted. Milles’s sculpture sits above Lake Jonah at the end of Academy Way, on the Academy of Art campus.

The Water

The Booth farm was hilly land amidst small lakes, ponds, marshes and streams. As their ideas evolved, with input from gardeners and engineers, Saarinen and Booth envisioned a system where the swiftly moving stream turned a wheel, pumping water uphill and activating a number of projects. This water-wheel system would be used for landscaping and to operate fountains and pools with a sophisticated process of recycling. One of these was Swedish sculptor Carl Milles’s fountain Jonah and the Whale (1932), which depicted Jonah emerging from the whale. Below this was the abstract, elongated kidneyshaped pool ‘Big Jonah’, a 12-foot (3.6-metre) deep, more than 200-foot (60-metres) long pool with a platform suspended over a waterfall spilling water. From there descended three tiers of progressively shallower, smaller and more natural pools where the youngest children were

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first introduced to water play. As the children grew stronger, they could ascend upwards to the bigger pool. Big Jonah is a campus centrepiece, an idealised and stunningly beautiful water body. In the late 1980s, however, due to safety issues, it no longer was used for recreation. Its function and aesthetic are inconsequential to the campus. One day, I can only hope it will be made safe and restored as a shallow reflecting pool.  The Natatorium

In the late 1990s, our studio Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects was asked by Lillian Bauder, the Cranbrook Educational Community’s President and CEO at the time, to design a competitive swimming pool, the Natatorium, which was completed in 1999. We had some experience with artificial pools, having designed one that received a good deal of attention due to its beauty, and another that was well received, competitive yet more conventional. As a standard practice, pools use air-conditioning to dehumidify, producing a consistent swimming environment, day after day, season after season, despite the weather outside. They are sealed containers. We believed then, as we do now, that this is not the way things should be – especially at Cranbrook. Thinking about the philosophical, sensual pleasures of Cranbrook’s systems served as inspiration. The Natatorium needed to be aspirational and practical, reflecting Booth’s and Saarinen’s ideals; it needed to employ as much of a natural flow of air as possible, and be able to open to the outdoors. Unlike conventional pools, this building is comfortable without being air-conditioned. Two oculi, both 30 feet (9 metres) in diameter, are equipped with roofs that slide back to reveal the sky. Its users like to swim with the oculi open, even in the winter. Twenty-foot (6-metre) tall mahogany panels open hydraulically to reveal views of the landscape. Air that enters vents out through the oculi, providing natural cooling. Generous windows visually connect the swimmers with the outdoors, offering a sense of the seasons. Snow and rain fall through the open roof and walls, and the scent of the pine forest replaces that of the chlorine.

Snow and rain fall through the open roof and walls, and the scent of the pine forest replaces that of the chlorine 34

Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects, Natatorium, Cranbrook Schools, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, 1999 left: The Natatorium connects interior and exterior experiences through large windows, two 30-foot (9-metre) ceiling oculi, and hydraulically louvred mahogany wall panels. below: Set into a steeply sloped grove of tall evergreens, it integrates with the landscape throughout every season. View of the snow-covered lawn connecting to the Academy of Art and Museum, and eventually to Cranbrook House beyond. bottom: Exterior view of the Natatorium on the Cranbrook Schools campus in 2005. Sections of mottled blue- and green-glazed walls connect the building to the original campus while asserting its own identity. This wall sits at the end of a long, green quadrangle designed but not fully finished by Eliel Saarinen.

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Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects, Natatorium, Cranbrook Schools, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, 1999 The plan of the Natatorium shows the central pool space with interior ramp that mediates the slope on the west side and provides a backdrop to the long green lawn at the main entrance. The building physically connects to the original Keppel Gymnasium through an enclosed walkway, elevated above a landscape path below.

Set into a steeply sloped grove of tall evergreens, the Natatorium is intentionally more of an experience than a work of architecture. From the outside, it is little more than a large, quiet brick building, largely hidden, to be discovered. Ironspot Norman-size bricks, which are slightly longer than the traditional kind, clad the exterior, allowing the building to relate to surrounding structures. A wall clad in glazed blue brick sits at the end of a long green quadrangle designed but not fully finished by Saarinen. The wall completes this court and is bent at the centre to acknowledge the axis which extends a quarter of a mile east to Cranbrook House. Behind the wall, an inclined path and stairway leads to an enclosed bridge that connects to existing locker rooms and nearby playing fields. Inside it is beautiful as well as functional. Interior walls are formed by warm-toned, ground-face concrete blocks; thermal-finish grey stone provides a non-slip surface for the pool deck. Blue- and green-glazed tiles add colour while mahogany, used for walls, railings and vertical panels, lends warmth. The rich-blue ceiling displays a constellation of lights formed by linear rows interspersed with a more random placement of downlights. Nurturing the Creative Spirit

In the spirit of the campus plan, the Natatorium is harmonious and deferential to its natural surroundings, both inside and out. The water is connected to the land and sky; the building breathes. One day, in 2022, I visited the campus. The pool was closed for the day, but in the vestibule, a choir was singing beautifully. When I confirmed that I was the architect, they responded with applause, saying that it was one of their favourite places to practise. Today it is being used as a competitive swimming pool, recreational centre, for classes, and even as a place for art installations – the enduring use of the building and the positive experiences of users are often immeasurable and most rewarding. Cranbrook is a campus that celebrates the senses, mind and the spirit. I carry it with me to each place and to each project. Amid a world of speed, metrics and screens – instant gratification – the unmeasurable and the possibilities of discovery nurture the creative spirit. 1

Cranbrook is a campus that celebrates the senses, mind and the spirit Text © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: pp 30–1, 35(c), 36–7 Courtesy Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects; p 32 © Balthazar Korab/Cranbrook Educational Community (S.08.388); p 33 Photos Richard G Askew (554703); pp 34–5(t), 35(b) Photos Michael Moran

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Cranbrook Academy of Art Water Carnival, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, 1950 George Booth’s vision of Cranbook as a family has been part of a long history of creative social events connecting the acquisition of knowledge, creativity and imagination with the enjoyment of life. Here, Lake Jonah has become the site of a festive water carnival.

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Pia Ednie-Brown

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There is much debate about architectural education and its usefulness in the face of vexing global issues and problems. Pia Ednie Brown examines the roots of Cranbrook’s pedagogy and assesses its relevance in this contemporary context. Her polemic piece calls for a fresh approach to architectural education, and the development of imaginative ecosystems to help it on its way.

George G Booth, Cranbrook farm, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, c 1917 Prior to becoming an educational centre, Cranbrook was a farm. This view shows vegetable gardens in the foreground, George G Booth on the right near the chicken yards, the Italian farmhouse, dairy and icehouse, hay barn, cow and horse stables. Most were demolished in 1926 to build the Cranbrook School.

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In recent decades, prominent voices have declared that architectural education has become fallow,1 stale2 and stuck in a void,3 subjecting its habits and assumptions to biting critique.4 In response, interest in ‘radical pedagogies’ has flourished.5 If we look to the meaning of ‘radical’ it refers to ‘the root’, coming from the Latin radix, radic-. For pedagogy to be radical implies that it taps into the very roots of learning – into the nature of its existence. Developing radical pedagogies is an ontological problem. This article examines Cranbrook’s early years to speculate on its ontological underpinnings. By unearthing the root forces through which it emerged, we can then ask how Cranbrook’s radicality might be instructive for the contemporary challenges facing architectural education. A Living Pedagogical Ecology George and Ellen Booth founded the Cranbrook Educational Community after purchasing a 174-acre (70-hectare) farm

in 1904. The Community began with a school for local children in 1922, gradually evolving into the educational centre it is today. In December 1926, George Booth penned ‘Memoranda for the consideration of the Board of Trustees provided for in my Will for the administration of the Estate of Cranbrook as an Educational Centre’.6 The Academy of Art was then in the planning stage. This document is significant for its attempt to lay out what mattered about Cranbrook in its early phase of development. Booth envisioned that Cranbrook’s complex of schools would come together in ‘family conditions’, where all generations and genders would ‘grow and develop together’.7 Understood as an integrated whole, nothing and nobody at Cranbrook were separate from its educational aims. Booth understood every employee – from janitor to professor – as ‘a Teacher’. Similarly, the campus grounds had pedagogical intent, where ‘seeing things in nature or on and about buildings is a

possible university course in itself’.8 Booth proposed ideas such as students learning business practice through exposure to the administrative work of running the schools. The upkeep of the grounds (‘road upkeep, grass cutting, cleaning drains, care of trees, care of wild life’9) should become part of student training. The ‘Memoranda’ noted the soil values of the property and envisioned a future arboretum to be cooperatively produced by students and faculty. He paid attention to the geology of the property (‘the bed of a Glacial Drift’10) and the great variety of stones found there. Cranbrook’s landscape is repeatedly referred to as a significant pedagogical framework, encouraging observational study, walking and social interaction. Scholars would ‘meet in their art work’,11 and students might assist the Masters in their work to gain experience, while also being paid fairly. And when building projects were occurring, fellows and students could actively participate in their construction.

Looms at Cranbrook Educational Community, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, 1934 An example of experiential learning on campus: future architects Benjamin Baldwin and Harry Weese with the looms they made, with their instructor and later Cranbrook president Wallace Mitchell.

Mary Chase Perry Stratton laying out Pewabic tiles for the Rainbow Fountain, Cranbrook Educational Community, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, 1916 Stratton was an important ceramic artist who co-founded Pewabic Pottery, notably producing architectural tiles. This image was taken by George and Ellen Booth’s son Henry and included in an album series he called ‘The Pleasures of Life’.

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In short, Cranbrook was set up to support learning through participation in the place itself. With everything being interrelated as part of an overarching pedagogical intent, Cranbrook was implicitly understood as an ecological entity: a coherent complex of interactions between diverse and varied times, materials and processes. The ontological roots of Cranbrook lie in its status as a living, pedagogical ecology. Cranbrook’s Imaginative Radicality In 1928, the influential process philosopher Alfred North Whitehead published an essay titled ‘Universities and Their Function’,12 followed by The Aims of Education13 in 1929. This was around the time that the Cranbrook Academy of Art commenced construction. Whether or not the Booths’ educational vision was directly informed by Whitehead’s philosophy – or vice versa – there are notable affinities that help explicate Cranbrook’s educational philosophy. Echoing Booth’s idea of crossgenerational ‘family conditions’, Whitehead asserts that the university must preserve ‘the connection between knowledge and the zest of life, by uniting the young and the old in the imaginative consideration of learning’. In this way, universities function to ‘weld together imagination and experience’.14 For Whitehead, ‘the central problem of all education’ is that of ‘keeping knowledge alive’.15 He rails against ‘inert ideas’, or education removed from and untested by personal, lived experience, where ideas are unable to be ‘thrown into fresh combinations’.16 This chimes with Booth’s commitment to education as hands-on, personally driven, supported through community, and – at the Academy – curriculum free. The pedagogical value of every aspect of Cranbrook lay in creating the conditions for inspiration, imagination and action. In steering education away from inert ideas, Whitehead uses the term ‘freshness’ repeatedly to describe an important quality of knowledge: ‘For successful education there must always be a certain freshness in the knowledge dealt with … Knowledge does not keep any better than fish … somehow or other it must come to the students, as it were, just drawn out of the sea and with the freshness of its immediate

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Eero Saarinen and Studio Loja Saarinen, Wall hanging, 1934 Tapestry designed by Cranbrook’s first Architect-in-Residence, Eero Saarinen, and produced by Studio Loja Saarinen, the commercial weaving studio led by Eero’s wife Loja, who also headed the Department of Weaving and Textile Design (the precursor to today’s Fiber Department).

importance.’18 If knowledge must be found living in the immediate environment, Cranbrook was set up to enable precisely this scenario. Furthermore, this fishy knowledge lives through imagination: ‘Imagination cannot be acquired once and for all, and then kept indefinitely in an ice box to be produced periodically in stated quantities. The learned and imaginative life is a way of living, and is not an article of commerce.’19 This raises profound issues concerning what counts as knowledge, its relationship to imagination, and how education can best work with this relationship. Keeping knowledge alive doesn’t mean that nothing

ever dies, but rather that the cycles of life and death are involved in processes of self-sustaining, imaginative reinvention. Knowledge and imagination work together through experience, where they are processed through disciplined cycles: one needs to work out how to catch the fish, cook it and arrange the occasion for eating it – all of which calls up our imaginative faculties. These acts lead to digestion, excretion and composting, feeding back into the nourishment of a system and impacting on the vitality of tomorrow’s schools of fish. Crucially, there is no fresh knowledge without an environment able to sustain its vitality. Keeping knowledge alive –

the central problem of all education, according to Whitehead – can be seen as an environmental and ecological problem. This point can be illustrated by a shocking series of mass fish deaths in Australia’s Murray–Darling river system in 2018–19. Millions of fish died due to extractive environmental mismanagement.20 To push Whitehead’s analogy, these dead schools of fish are suggestive of what might become of those ‘stale’ educational models gasping for air in the hostile environment of neoliberal universities. Contrast this with the living systems of knowledge sustained by indigenous Australians. Far from inert or stale, knowledge is rooted in Country as a living, holistic complexity, where the health of Country is intrinsically tied to the health of human community. When understood this way, ecological health is no less relevant to educational institutions than waterways. While care should be taken to avoid conflating very different cultural ontologies, it could be argued that the value of both Booth’s approach and Whitehead’s philosophy lies in their partial affinity with this understanding of Country – where a holistic integration lies at the root of knowledge, learning and life. This affinity is further suggested in a document Booth wrote on New Year’s Day 1939.21 He specifically wished to address Cranbrook’s roots: how did it start and what were its aims? Booth writes that he can’t pinpoint an originary moment in the coursing of every influence leading to it. He could only say that it arose through ‘an opportunity’ and a ‘powerful urge’ directed towards creating an educational complex, that in turn creates opportunity and cultivates the urge to learn. He writes that: ‘if those who come … do not or cannot make what they find at Cranbrook part of themselves then they have not found a work they can do in a very important way … I have been much inclined to let Cranbrook speak to each in such manner as their inner ear … .’22 Implicitly here, Cranbrook is a living, speaking entity, becoming part of those who work there, as they become part of Cranbrook. This is a living pedagogical entity that is constantly being (re)made and sustaining itself in networked loops, like all ecologies. This is also process philosophy in pedagogical action.

Fish deaths, Weir pool, Darling River, Menindee, New South Wales, Australia, 2019 Three successive fish kills occurred between December 2018 and January 2019, amounting to millions of deaths. In a subsequent report, the Australian Academy of Science noted that environmental mismanagement, caused by serious deficiencies in governance, was the primary cause.

George G Booth, ‘Cranbrook and its schools and other institutions’, 1 January 1939 This handwritten document aimed to unpack the purpose of Cranbrook, how it came about and its ultimate aims. The highly personal account of Cranbrook’s ‘backstory’ illuminates Booth’s broad and liberal purview for the educational complex, traced back to a number of his key childhood experiences.

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Carl Milles, Siren with Fishes, Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, 1935 Carl Milles was Artist-in-Residence, Sculpture at the Cranbrook Academy of Art from 1931 to 1951 and produced numerous works for the campus. Milles’s interest in sculptured water features meant that the formative years of the Academy of Art saw the grounds furnished with numerous sculptural fountains featuring fish, such as this one, along with Jonah and the Whale and the Triton Pool.

Jing-Ying Su, Swing Surface, Master of Architecture studio, Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, 2019 Autumn is the season of vision, from the leaves starting to turn orange to them slowly falling to the ground, then piling up on the earth to become an orange-yellow carpet. Swing Surface is a vague silver sieve under a big tree, for leaves to pause before reaching the ground. It is an installation on the Cranbrook campus that magnifies a beautiful but inadvertent moment in nature that strongly resonates with us.

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Like Whitehead’s fishy knowledge, ‘fresh’ is a word that Paul Goldberger has used to describe Cranbrook’s creative output: ‘If there is no clear style to the Cranbrook output, there is an overall impression that these works give, and it is one of freshness. More than a sense of modernity per se, they suggest a kind of fresh breeze blowing through Cranbrook – a breeze that gently, easily, altered ways of looking at things rather than radically changed them.’23 That Goldberger saw Cranbrook’s freshness as the product of gentle alteration rather than radical change is of obvious interest here. While a sniff of the conservative is arguably both apt and a reason for Cranbrook’s resilience, the process-oriented philosophy at its heart is both dynamic and rooted, set up for evolutionary momentum. The radicality at stake here is not a volcanic Modernist manifesto, but rather a fertile compost ready to cultivate vitality; a radicality rooted in the complex generativity of situated imagination.

Future Freshness Turning back to contemporary architectural education more broadly, its ‘staleness’ could be seen as a failing ecosystem. Can freshness be restored? Perhaps permaculture design, a handson, generative system of ecological ethics (often mistakenly reduced to systems for food production) offers some clues. Permaculture was developed within an Environmental Design programme in Tasmania, Australia (1969–79), led by architect Barry McNeill.24 The programme was characterised by student-initiated learning, with no set curriculum, quite like Cranbrook in important respects. As a student, permaculture co-originator David Holmgren completed the threeyear programme by developing a system for environmental cultivation in collaboration with then psychology lecturer and permaculture co-originator Bill Mollison. In most university settings today, the kind of educational freedom that made this possible is unthinkable. Tao Orion’s 2015 book Beyond the War on Invasive Species: A Permaculture Approach to Ecosystem Restoration makes a point of relevance to contemporary educational conundrums: ‘In order to repair degraded ecosystems, we must learn to think like an ecosystem.’ 25 Ecological thinking is arguably the key to future freshness. Booth, like Whitehead, approached education through forms of ecological thinking,26 and offer models for ways forward. Their time and situations are not ours, however, and without adapting their thinking to current conditions we can expect rotting fish. Nevertheless, if architecture schools want to freshen up, learn to think like imaginative ecosystems, and enhance their contemporary relevance, these processual educational philosophies call for new attention. 1

Notes 1. Sylvia Lavin, ‘Lying Fallow’, Log 29, 2013, pp 17–24. 2. Beatriz Colomina, ‘Beatriz Colomina on Education’, Architectural Review, 24 January 2017: https://www.architectural-review.com/archive/ar120/ar-120-beatriz-colomina-on-education. 3. Manon Mollard, ‘Francesca Hughes and Lesley Lokko on a Future for Architectural Education’, Architectural Review, 15 November 2021: https:// www.architectural-review.com/essays/pedagogy/ francesca-hughes-and-lesley-lokko-on-a-futurefor-architectural-education. 4. For example by Jeremy Till: http://www. jeremytill.net/architectural-education. 5. Pia Ednie-Brown, ‘Critical Passions: Building Architectural Movements Toward a Radical Pedagogy (in 10 Steps)’, Inflexions 8: Radical Pedagogies, April 2015: https://www.inflexions. org/radicalpedagogy/main.html#Ednie-Brown. 6. George G Booth Papers, Cranbrook Archives, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. 7. Ibid, p 1. 8. Ibid, p 8. 9. Ibid, p 5. 10. Ibid, p 6. 11. Ibid, p 2. 12. Alfred North Whitehead, ‘Universities and Their Function’, Bulletin of the American Association of University Professors (1915–55), 14 (6), October 1928, pp 448–50. 13. Alfred North Whitehead, The Aims of Education and Other Essays, The Free Press (New York), 1967. 14. Whitehead, ‘Universities and Their Function’, op cit, p 448. 15. Ibid. 16. Whitehead, The Aims of Education, op cit, p 5. 17. Ibid, p 1. 18. Whitehead, ‘Universities and Their Function’, op cit, p 450. 19. Ibid, p 449. 20. Australian Academy of Science, Investigation of the Causes of Mass Fish Kills in the Menindee Region NSW Over the Summer of 2018–2019, 18 February 2019: https://www.science.org.au/ supporting-science/science-policy-and-sectoranalysis/reports-and-publications/fish-kills-report. 21. George Booth, ‘Cranbrook and its schools and other institutions’, 1 January 1939, George G Booth Papers, Cranbrook Archives, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. 22. Ibid. 23. Paul Goldberger, ‘The Cranbrook Vision’, The New York Times, 8 April 1984, section 6, p 84. 24. Stuart King and Ceridwen Owen, ‘A Decade of Radical Pedagogy: Barry McNeill and Environmental Design in Tasmania, 1969–79’, Fabrications, 28 (3), September 2018, pp 303–30. 25. Tao Orion, Beyond the War on Invasive Species, Chelsea Green Publishing (White River Junction, VT), 2015, p 43. 26. For connections between Whitehead’s educational philosophy and ecological thinking, see Marcus Ford and Stephen Rowe (eds), Education for an Ecological Civilization, Process Century Press (Minnesota, MN), 2016, and Clare Palmer, Environmental Ethics and Process Thinking, Oxford Theological Monographs, Clarendon Press (Oxford), 1998.

Text © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: pp 38–9 Courtesy of Cranbrook Archives, Cranbrook Center for Collections and Research. Photo Harvey Croze (AA2461); p 40 Courtesy of Cranbrook Archives, Cranbrook Center for Collections and Research (FD221); p 41(l) Photo Henry Scripps Booth, (POL2.1114.2). Courtesy of Cranbrook Archives, Cranbrook Center for Collections and Research; p 41(r) Courtesy of Cranbrook Archives, Cranbrook Center for Collections and Research (2006-01); p 42 Courtesy of Cranbrook Archives, Cranbrook Center for Collections and Research, and the artist. Photo Richard G Askew (3120); p 43(t) Photo Graeme McCrabb for Menindee; p 43(b) Courtesy of Cranbrook Archives, Cranbrook Center for Collections and Research. George Gough Booth Papers (1981-01, Box 2, Folder 4); p 44(t) Courtesy of Cranbrook Archives, Cranbrook Center for Collections and Research. Photo Richard G Askew (3120); p 44(b) © Jing-Ying Su

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William E Massie

Postgraduate Education Dorothy Chou, Illusory Space, Master of Architecture thesis project, Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, 2015 Stripes are the simplest image; yet, when two-dimensional stripes extend to three-dimensional projections, another layer of visual effects is created. Chou’s intention in this work is for viewers to focus on the space and the scale of the graphics, so that they can feel and experience the integration of these.

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Architectural Benediktas Burdulis, Daylight Study, Master of Architecture thesis project, Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, 2016

In Situ

Daylight Study attempts to elevate the beautiful effect of sunlight entering interior space to a transcendent state, with the goal of creating an environment that is stimulating yet serene. The light is given a stronger physical presence as it is caught on the CNC-milled reliefs that have been created using custom-drawn CNC tool paths. The resulting shadows give these patterns a vibrating optical effect that makes viewers more aware of their own act of seeing.

From 2005 to 2017, William E Massie held the position of Architect-in-Residence/Head of Department at Cranbrook. Making is in Massie’s lifeblood and his tenure was characterised by students making larger-scale constructions. Dismantling the rather insular personal studio, Massie reintroduced a communal studio culture where students learn from each other and create in mutual association. 47

The culture in the Architecture Department at Cranbrook is rarefied as it relates to other institutions and postgraduate programmes, partially because of its size and context within the rest of the Academy. One of the most advantageous foregrounds of architectural education is the context in which it sits: quite simply, the most significant things around it. As I studied architecture and then taught at both Parsons School of Design and Columbia University in New York (1984–94), a proto context was palpable. This context – which was shared by every faculty member despite idiosyncratic intellectual specificity, every disciplinary excursion, and every developmental skill-building technique – was ‘urbanity’. When I taught at Montana State University (1996–2001), the same applied, but the proto context was ‘landscape’. Seemingly all faculty members, myself included, gave project briefs that asked the students, beyond the programmatic and theoretical conditions of the brief, to ‘consider’ a building in the landscape. The academic post that I held prior to moving to Michigan to become Head of the Architecture Department at Cranbrook Academy of Art was tenured Associate Professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (2002–5) where the proto context was, of course, ‘technology’. Unfortunately, the term ‘technology’ seems to be used for everything in the post-digital world so, for the sake of being as concise as possible, I will use the other less contemporary, former bailout term of ‘science’, which at least seems somewhat fresh today. Scientific endeavour was and is almost a room in which architectural design happened for the faculty and students alike at Rensselaer. Cranbrook’s Proto Context

I came to realise that the proto context at Cranbrook (where I was in post from 2005 to 2017) was, in fact, less obvious than those of the prior-stated institutions, but nonetheless palpable. When others view Cranbrook from the outside, the major context is often seen as history: the evolution of modern design and modern art, as well as the historic buildings of the campus itself. There is no doubt that this context exists, but when I was there, and still to this day, that context seems to be rather less useful than the proto context of ‘the studio’. This may be more in the forefront of my thinking because, at the time of writing, for the past two years, due to Covid-19, studio culture has been suspended and structurally changed. It is my contention that besides the direct education of an architect through the conventional academic conduits of studio, history, professional practice and ‘technology’, the way we have taught architecture is dramatically unique among other undergraduate and postgraduate disciplines. In large part, a provocation is given by one’s professor and then, in real time, many students in proximity to each other reveal the subject and object of their education while their professors react and give context to their revelations. In studying architecture at Cranbrook, this proto context of ‘the studio’ is supercharged, a type of amplification which requires the muting of the traditional curricular approach. It is amplified not only by the fact that within the department there is no curriculum,

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Hannah Dewhirst, Practice, Master of Architecture studio, Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, 2017 above: A generative collage pulling images directly from full-scale studio experimentation as a method of exploring the body, scale, mythology and future aspiration for work produced at Cranbrook. opposite: In the pursuit of new practice models, Dewhirst designed and built a full-scale ‘float tank’ as a precise research tool that explored altered perception of time, space, sound and colour. Working with this research tool for two years during her time at Cranbrook, she was able to test, document and choreograph a catalogue of qualitative effects.

and the work is effectively thesis-driven, but also by the very nature of the Academy, where all disciplines from Sculpture to Ceramics work in largely the same way. Subsequently, the students of architecture are exposed to a singular approach by all intellectual and creative endeavours, which is the context of others and the context of others’ experimentation, success and/or failure. The romantic preconception of an artist working in their studio is the lived reality. Studio Culture / Practice

Cranbrook Academy of Art comprises 11 departments, most of which are centred in the world of contemporary art, but all of which have a departmental studio structure that informs the Academy’s overall studio culture. Each department has one Department Head/Professor, so within the traditional definition of academy the critical structure comes not only from the Department Head, but also from the continuous dialogue between students. Beyond each individual student’s work, this dialogue’s value is worth the price of admission. Maybe that is why so many of Cranbrook’s graduates go on to teach. They are not only pursuing their own work but are involved from the inception in the development of their colleagues’ work, unrelated to the specific nature of their own. The students of architecture are engaged in a culture that more accurately mirrors architectural practice itself. In a strange way, the students within the Department of Architecture are not simply experimenting with their work, but experimenting with how to practise, developing a unique and individual new definition of rigour for themselves, conventionally defined by external academic forces. At Cranbrook, students must develop their own prompt or trajectory and then confirm or deny it. There are not strict studio hours, but there are scheduled weekly

meetings and critiques, and because of physical proximity and continuous access to colleagues and Department Heads, major conversations and critiques are often the result of breakthroughs, revelations, discoveries and sometimes frustration rather than scheduled moments of discourse – a type of discourse-on-demand brought forward by the production of the work. The work within the Department of Architecture is heavily influenced by the direct association of students in other departments. What I am referring to is the immediate struggle, friction and revelations that come from working at full scale with no abstract mediation, having to deal with intellectual assertions and materiality simultaneously, and how those two forces influence the outcome, which is typical in contemporary art postgraduate education. There is a logical tendency for the architecture students to be influenced by the world of contemporary art rather than architecture because this is the focus within this unique academic community. Because architecture students have to build the structure of their own enquiry and, for most, this is new, they naturally search for models within other disciplines at the Academy. Arguably, one of the performance hits that often results is that the work does not recentre itself within the discipline of architecture and remains part of the world of contemporary art, replacing artistic tropes with architectural ones. As a result of this condition, during my tenure, I made a conscious decision to attempt to displace the associative relationship of contemporary art with the associative relationship of buildings, primarily because I was well versed and experienced in building and not in the world of contemporary art, so if this methodology caused a performance hit based on the efficacy of the student work there would at least be a trajectory away from contemporary art and towards architecture.

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Architects are the authors of what we look through, not the authors of what we look at

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In 2005, I began heading up the department after the very successful and influential stewardships of Daniel Libeskind, Dan Hoffman and Peter Lynch. Having enormous admiration and respect for my colleagues, I was very aware of their work and that of of their students. My admiration for the work was centred primarily on the beauty of its opposition to conventional architecture and architectural education. I felt that the successes and the work of the past were in part being repeated, and my approach to criticising and altering what I perceived as a little bit of an echo chamber was to push the students to think less in terms of doing architecture by candlelight and more in terms of contemporary culture and contemporary methods of experimentation, which is still my personal pedagogical focus today.

The way I attempted to manifest this was ironically by disrupting the studio culture within the department itself. All students within all departments of the Academy are given their own individual studio space, not simply a desk located in close proximity to their disciplinary colleagues. The spaces are occupied by objects of their interest and their desire, tools of their experimentation, texts and reference material inspirational to their approach, a personal refrigerator, possibly a second pair of shoes, and often a comfortable chair acquired through dumpsterdiving. These studios leaned slightly too far towards domesticity to my mind, so my thinking was, eliminate them. Eventually, my students and I transformed the ‘shop’ space into what could be understood as a more traditional architectural studio space, allocating two desks to each student and eliminating the individual studios, creating one extremely large space which could be used improvisationally, collaboratively and individually – no walls. The shop was reconfigured in a smaller room and outfitted with my own personal equipment: a 4×8 CNC machine and a 4×8 laser cutter, along with some of the department’s primary woodworking tools. I was hopeful that if the student work became larger, it would become more experiential. I am sure my students at that time could clearly recall my obsession with the belief that architects are the authors of what we look through, not the authors of what we look at.

Qiang Qiang, Box of Light, Master of Architecture thesis project, Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, 2016 right: Light is the primary condition for all visibility; it exists even though one is not always aware of it. This project attempts to create an experience where light can be seen as a hint of time and space. opposite: The full-scale light construction space was installed on the campus of Cranbrook Academy of Art for the annual Graduate Degree Exhibition.

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Experimentation as Education

When I look back at my own postgraduate education at Columbia University, it is with intense admiration for all my professors and colleagues, but my experience was heavily influenced by the more unconventional approach of one of my professors, Hani Rashid. My memory of that studio was that each student worked individually on a series of conceptual ideas, but quickly those ideas were negotiated into a collective experiential ‘built’ experiment. It stood in great opposition to at least the conventional curricular structure and programmes given by professors to design a ‘building’. Another oppositional methodology was one that I felt hardwired for, which was attempting to mine architectural ideas and discourse with the added tool of making: that is, unlike the more traditional academic approach of coming up with a conceptual idea that results in something designed or built, instead allowing the experimentation of making to be a co-conspirator in the evolution of ideas and pushing the thinking outside of the typical purview of architects, which is abstraction as a force pursuant to reality. What I mean by this is a shift from working only ‘at scale’ as a surrogate of one-to-one reality, the drawing / the model. In retrospect, it seems as though Rashid’s approach to studio evidenced some residual effect from his time at Cranbrook.

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Academia should be a place to test the boundaries of the voice prior to it being muted by the pressures of the real

Jonathon Stevens, Wall System 001, Master of Architecture thesis project, Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, 2016 above: An ecological temporary mobile component system developed to stabilise and conserve valuable aspects of existing structures for future use, Wall System 001 comprises structurally insulated panels (OSB and expanded polystyrene) with lumber, steel and white oak brackets, cedarwood post, nylon kernmantle rope and a digitally printed wallpaper mural. It is 5 feet (1.5 metres) wide, 20 feet (6 metres) long and 10 feet (3 metres) tall. left: The brackets sandwich the existing wall to create a pocket for the lashed wood post to rest. Once joined, the system is stabilised by the weight of the wall that it is supporting. While demonstrating how a system of lightweight, sustainable parts can support an existing wall, this installation also questions the value of current building materials and techniques.

In certain terms, one could, on the surface, label my students’ work design-build. Within so many institutions, this idea of design-build somehow gets sequestered and partnered with building technology, a way of revealing how buildings are put together. Inherent in that is the conventional approach to architecture being taught by virtue of believing that how it goes together is secondary to what has been designed. This has only been reinforced by the frictionless quality of doing all the work digitally, which I would refer to as the deboning of architecture and architectural education. That is not the goal. If anything, the goal is to be empowered for the work to move out of abstraction to what I refer to as architectural policy or the real; the constant feedback loop of idea to making or fabrication as a way of learning design. Most conventional design-build programmes are exactly as it sounds: design, and then build what you have designed. My approach with my students at Cranbrook was exactly the opposite. It was to develop design through the very arduous nature of making, testing, looking, then repeat, all in pursuit of an idea and meaning. The current landscape of architectural education seems to be unlike the past. Now many institutions offer a Master of Architecture degree, where in large part the furthering of undergraduate methodologies becomes more rigorous, but without challenging the form of the education itself. Cranbrook could not and should not be where traditional architectural education exists. Postgraduate students experimenting with their own work as well as the actual academic fabric of architectural education seemingly becomes more essential rather than less. The liberal nature of experimentation is the essential connection back to traditional architectural education and forwards to traditional practice, as well as always underpinning academia. I believe the value of the education is not in the furtherment of self-expression, but rather institutionalising for each student the necessity of experimentation in the development of a truly innovative and unique voice. Academia should be a place to test the boundaries of the voice prior to it being muted by the pressures of the real. 1

Text © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: p 46 © Dorothy Chou; p 47 © Benediktas Burdulis; pp 48–9 © Hannah Dewhirst; pp 50–1 © Qiang Qiang 2016. All rights reserved; pp 52–3 Photos PD Rearick

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Unpro Un pro 54

Emily Baker

mpted Open-ended Investigations in the Choreography of Construction Emily Baker, Structural mockups for Folded-Tilt-Up, Master of Architecture studio, Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, 2010

Made of wire-cut foam and coloured cord, the mockup is an example of an early study of a structural/construction idea. It explores a structural relationship in which tensile members balance compressive forces in cantilevering arches. The concept considers how concrete structures might adapt in light of advanced fabrication techniques.

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Inventor, fabricator, architect and educator Emily Baker laments the rarity of open-ended architectural education that Cranbrook so exemplifies. She explains the bottom-up approach to design, material fabrication and use of emerging digital tools she developed while attending Cranbrook in the 2010s. She works at full scale and encourages her students to do the same.

Emily Baker, Spin-Valence, Master of Architecture thesis project, Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, 2012 opposite bottom: Spin-Valence, now part of Cranbrook Art Museum’s permanent collection, was exhibited on the Cranbrook campus during installation of the graduate degree show in 2012. The kirigami-based space-frame system was the product of iterative prototyping in paper and steel. Each panel is a single sheet of steel, plasma cut, folded and reattached to itself producing a thickened structural system from a single piece.

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Cranbrook has a mystique from the outside and can be as hard to pin down once inside. This nebulous nature is by design. Cranbrook Academy of Art contains one of the few instances of architectural education where truly openended inquiry is not simply available, it is the only option. Each student finds themself landed in a wilderness of ideas with no path out except by their own making. This is not to suggest that there has never been any zeitgeist within the school, because that would not be fully true. Even so, no one, including the department’s single faculty member, provides a prompt. This chance to stare into the void and then to act is a rare and valuable gift. It cultivates a particular type of creative individual, infused with questions that fill the following years and likely an entire creative life. Questions to Build On In 2010, I started in Cranbrook’s Architecture Department, then headed by Bill Massie, with some questions that arose from previous years in practice. I wanted to know how adaptations in the ‘choreography of construction’ – a term I began using after spending significant time observing construction sites – would impact both the structuring and the aesthetics of the buildings produced. One significant way that construction was poised to change was the proliferation of new fabrication techniques and digital processes. I thought of age-old construction systems – brick walls, thatched roofs, wood framing – all refined through use. Could new systems be derived and evolved to suggest new choreographies of construction, yet similarly tuned to materials, resources, human aptitude or even delight? ‘This time at school goes by quickly’, I was repeatedly told. ‘You need to know what you want to do while you’re there before you start.’ But the question of how to evolve construction did not conjure results in my mind. All I had were the actions I could take today, and the questions they raised for tomorrow. (Not a metaphorical tomorrow, but the real one coming in a few hours.) In a programme absent of courses or curriculum, all that was left to do was make work and reflect on it. I knew I wanted to focus on constructed experimentation and little else. Through drawing and writing, ideas formed, and I started to make objects. I imagined, for example, how adapting concretereinforcing with computational fabrication could suggest new structural configurations and choreographies of construction, and thus new aesthetics. Constructed studies such as a crude yet dynamic assembly of foam and paracord revealed a possible system of cantilevering arches and the beginnings of a formal and aesthetic language I would later call Folded Tilt-Up. Each quick-and-dirty study precipitated a more refined one, a larger one, a serial one of a specific joint, or an experiment with a new material process. Beginning with the end in mind may have benefits, but if you know too well how you want to end, then you are not on a path to discovery. One of the discoveries I made while at Cranbrook became my thesis work, the kirigami space-frame system Spin-Valence,1 which was exhibited in the grounds of the Cranbrook Art Museum in 2012 and is now part of its

Matthew Raybon and Mike Meline, Process mockup for Folded Tilt-Up, Digital Steel elective course, Tulane University, New Orleans, Louisiana, 2016 Student work from the Digital Steel advanced elective explored the same structural concept as the foam mockup that studio lead Emily Baker produced as a student at Cranbrook in 2010. Concrete is cast flat with integrally shaped joints and embedded plates that form a spine. The piece, an adaptation of tilt-up construction, is rolled into place to form a preconceived cantilevering arch with a tensile spine that offsets the cantilevering compressive arch.

permanent collection. It would be easy for me to depict the development of Spin-Valence as an inevitable result of clear motivations, but the real story is meandering and disjointed. Could I have arrived at this system, in which individual units are cut into continuous sheet material and pushed out of the surface to reconnect in a parallel plane, producing a structural lattice from a single folded part, in a more efficient manner if only I had laid out the problem more clearly? No. I did not set out to make a space-frame system, nor was it the only compelling idea I found as I sought choreographies of construction enabled by digitally cut steel. I needed to make a plethora of mockups and mistakes, have my intuition thwarted often, and fail, rather than succeed (as the adage ‘begin with the end in mind’ would encourage) as early as possible to reveal that which would refine the work and become a path of inquiry.

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Elegant Interconnection My questions from my studies at Cranbrook coelesced into a design approach that I cultivated as I began teaching and furthering my creative practice. Construction using digital processes seemed more often employed as a topdown methodology – the whole (often a non-normative geometry) conceived ahead of the details that make it up. My reverse approach of starting with a material/ process pairing to develop systems for construction that might then suggest a whole to later be parametrically informed, led me into relatively unexplored territory. I believe this route is more akin to the way many of our ubiquitous building systems have been created, refined then aestheticised – through use, and tuned by the hands of builders. Opportunities for resonance between construction and aesthetics can be uncovered that are not accessible to a designer removed from construction. Prototyping therefore became my priority in order to lead students into processes of iterative making, forming elegant interconnection among the details of construction, the means of structure and the aesthetics of the work. In advanced design studios such as the Audi-Fab Research Studio2 at the American University of Sharjah in 2013/14 and Design Through Prototype (DTP) at the University of Arkansas in 2019, students were asked to build at full scale with real materials from the outset. While not fully without prompt, the goals of the projects were broad, and the students were challenged with designing from the details towards the whole. Four refined systems emerged from Audi-Fab to deal with interior acoustics through the feedback loop of persistent making, one of which became a permanent installation in the school’s studios. Creating a pocket of relief in a noisy multi-floor atrium space, the Audi-Fab Acoustic Wall uses curved folding to create structural stability in 0.5-millimetre stainless-steel, parametric patterning to diffuse sound, and perforation to conceal absorptive material. The DTP studio investigated sculptural play/seating structures in partnership with the Amazeum children’s museum, and the semester ended with six fullscale prototypes ready to become holistic design solutions. One of these, Twister, an undulating dragon-like form that provides seating and a spatial edge to outdoor play spaces, was tested on the museum grounds in Bentonville, Arkansas, for the following year.

Amber Horton, Colt Malloy and Lindsay Steudtner, Twister, Design Through Prototype studio, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, Arkansas, 2018 Closeup showing details of connection in a large-scale prototype. The studio partnered with the Amazeum children’s museum to investigate play, shade and seating structures for its outdoor spaces. Twister creates an undulating and arching form from the cross-section of a C-shaped bench, providing shaded seating, threshold, and a spatial edge for play spaces.

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Audi-Fab Acoustic Wall, Audi-Fab Research Studio, American University of Sharjah, United Arab Emirates, 2014 The culmination of a two-semester sequence, this acoustically absorbent and diffusing sculptural partition provides respite from noisy stacked studio spaces, and curves around to enclose a space for quiet work and meetings. Hollow self-supporting columns made of digitally cut and curved-folded 0.5-millimetre stainless steel surround absorbent Rockwool, and sightlines through the wall allow glancing views in certain directions and privacy from others.

Nada al Mullah and Salwa al Khudari, Keswa, American University of Sharjah, United Arab Emirates, 2015 Keswa, a travelling public art installation and winner of the 2015 Christo and Jeanne-Claude Award for public art, which funded its construction, on the campus of New York University Abu Dhabi. Inspired by the abaya, a garment commonly worn by Arab Gulf women, it was constructed by its student designers, their process of iterative making in folded steel allowing them to design details with visual allusion to embellished stitching that are tuned to ease constructability.

Since students were more familiar with the top-down mode of design common to architectural practice, where an overall design precedes the details, they began hesitantly. However, progress accelerated rapidly once they built the first prototypes, moving through smallto full-scale mockups iteratively tuned for buildability, structural capacity and aesthetic quality. The idea that a design language might emerge from the necessities of construction was revealed to them through their work. Results consistently surpassed their ability to preconceive, creating confidence in facing open-ended problems – a crucial aptitude for designers in an uncertain future. Keswa,3 another student project from the American University of Sharjah that travelled the United Arab Emirates in 2015, started with a conceptual formal idea, but the details of construction and structuring were developed through iterative prototyping. This public art installation and winner of the Christo and Jeanne-Claude Award for public art was conceived of and constructed by third-year architecture students Nada al Mullah and Salwah al Khudari. As we crafted mockups of increasingly intricate folds and connections, we discovered necessary adjustments and opportunities for the fabrication process to enhance the reading of the piece and its buildability simultaneously. Two types of perforation patterns were designed for differing fold conditions during assembly, and they read as variations on the stitching in an abaya, the garment the piece references.

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Sukkah 8, Tulane University, New Orleans, Louisiana, 2016 A temporary installation on Tulane’s campus commissioned and funded by Tulane Hillel Student Association, Sukkah 8 forms a gathering place for students outside of the student union. The light and self-supporting bending-active wall system made of inexpensive laminate wood was developed through material investigation at full scale. The multi-year-level extracurricular designbuild project was accomplished in a very tight timeframe with a minimal budget.

A construction system that has been iteratively refined considerably speeds up the time for final construction. A pair of extracurricular projects to design and build sukkahs, temporary pavilions for religious observance, undertaken by students from Tulane University in New Orleans in 2017/18, exemplify the benefit of this approach to excel despite quick timelines and limited funding. Starting with material experimentation in inexpensive laminate wood sheets, students developed a material strategy that derived stability from active bending, and worked towards a holistic design that employed their tested material strategy. The resulting installations were both more daring and more refined than the timeline or budget might suggest.

If we cannot risk failure inside the academy, then we have given up our last good chance to innovate Emily Baker, Mohamed Ismail, Caitlin Mueller, Edmund Harriss and Nebyu Haile, Zip-Formwork, University of Arkansas Civil Engineering testing lab, Fayetteville, Arkansas, 2022 The Zip-Form system in 16-gauge mild steel was used to form a 16-foot (12-metre) shape-optimised concrete beam for structural load testing. This method of formwork production provides an easy and accessible means of producing curving surfaces that result from shape optimisation. The resulting beam reduces the amount of concrete by approximately 40 per cent while maintaining the same strength as a rectilinear beam.

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Easy and Free My recent work remains focused on making the construction and assembly of unique structures easier and thus more accessible. For example, since my time at Cranbrook, Spin-Valence, a tectonic assembly of one part instead of many, has been refined structurally and geometrically in partnership with researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Arup Engineers and Princeton University. Collaborations have been invaluable as this work continues. Another example, Zip-Form, was the product of a collaboration with mathematician and artist Edmund Harriss to transform his desktop mathematical toy into a habitablescale sculpture. We devised a simple and efficient manner of creating curving structural forms in steel and other sheet materials, without using moulds or heat treatment, both of which add to the complexity and expense of the work. Instead, using a simple jig we ‘zip’ parts together so that their sum produces the desired 3D surface. This necessitates a computational method paired with a physical process. Zip-Form was initially used to make a piece of public art, Curvahedra, installed permanently on the University of Arkansas campus in 2021, but the method was recently employed in collaboration with Harriss and Mohamed Ismail, Caitlin Mueller and Nebyu Haile, structural designers from MIT. The result, Zip-Formwork, a project completed in 2022, increases the feasibility of producing formwork for shape-optimised and formally complex concrete structures.4

Mixed reality as a construction technique, a focus of my upcoming work, offers rich opportunity in adapting choreographies of construction. It upends the topdown nature of building, allowing craft practices and improvisation back into construction, as in the tradition of the master builder. These are opportunities to humanise construction as it evolves, bringing joy into building and elevating construction labour. Preserving Ambiguity Academic spaces where the ends are difficult to predict now seem rare. Architectural education has more recently gone in the opposite direction, not only providing a project brief, but also dictating the contexts, ideas and methods deemed relevant at each step. Architecture and architectural education alike have attempted to circumvent the messy middle, the part of the design process that is not about shiny results but about questions, and to steer work towards presentable products at the earliest possible moment. We jumpstart our students with prompts designed towards outcomes with apparent depth. This method may make sense under the circumstances (a discipline that values slick visuals and quick turnaround), but who does this serve? And what significant work have we lost in the process? The irony is, we may find more sophisticated, relevant and nuanced solutions if the focus is not on the result, but on the process that gets us there. If we cannot risk failure inside the academy, then we have given up our last good chance to innovate. If there is no space to ask our own questions in the academy, then we have given up our chance to make innovators. Preserving open-ended spaces in architectural inquiry and education is critical if we desire depth. Perhaps a truth revealed by a programme that is nearly fully unprogrammed is that wading through ambiguity clarifies. 1 Notes 1. Emily Baker, ‘Search for a Rooted Aesthetic: Study in Spin-Valence’, in Fabio Gramazio, Mathias Kohler and Silke Langenberg, Fabricate: Negotiating Design & Making, gta Verlag (Zurich), 2014, pp 128–35. 2. Emily Baker, ‘Audi-Fab Design Build Research Studio’, 2014–2015 Architectural Education Awards, American Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA), 2015, pp 80–1: https://issuu.com/acsa/docs/ 14-15_arched_awards_book_complete. 3. Emily Baker, ‘Keswa: An Uncovering’, Journal of Architectural Education, 70 (1), 2016, pp 132–8. 4. Mohamad Ismail et al, ‘Zip-Formwork: Complex Concrete Formwork for the Global South’, International Association for Shell and Spatial Structures annual conference, 2022.

Text © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images; pp 54–5 © Photos PD Rearick; p 57(t) Matthew Raybon / Mike Meline; pp 57(b), 58–9(b), 59(tr) © Emily Baker; pp 58–9(t) Juan Roldan; p 60 © Magda Magierski ; p 61 Shawnya Meyers

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Yu-Chih Hsiao

Yu-Chih The Zig Hsinchu Hsinchu 2018

Hsiao, Zag Pavilion, Park, City, Taiwan,

Commissioned for Hsinchu Park’s 2018 ‘Tectonic Becoming’ exhibition, the pavilion uses CNC-bent stainless-steel bars and stainless-steel tubes with conical set screws to shape this weaving space. It still stands in the park today and citizens enjoy the greenery through its interesting and subtle atmosphere.

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Seduced into applying to Cranbrook by an inspiring lecture given by alumnus Joseph Wong about his experience there during Daniel Libeskind’s time, artist, designer and teacher Yu-Chih Hsiao’s world expanded upon his arrival. It incorporated all manner of creative output under the enigmatic yet highly practical Head of Architecture/Architect-inResidence William E Massie, and so a course was charted that still resonates today in Yu-Chih’s work.

Marcus Burrowes, Greek Theatre, Cranbrook Educational Community, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, 1915 Commissioned by Cranbrook founder George Booth, architect Marcus Burrowes designed this neoclassical amphitheatre with an open-backed stage. It is used today for various Cranbrook Educational Community events, including for the launch and graduation of each academic year for the Academy of Art.

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As an international student from Taiwan, I chose Cranbrook Academy of Art for graduate study because of a very specific story I had heard. On a rainy night in 1994, as a freshman of Shih Chien University in Taipei, my studio mentor Yu-Chien Ann brought us to Ming Chuan University (Taoyuan, Taiwan) for a speech by Joseph Wong. Joseph was a Cranbrook alumnus who had graduated in 1982, the same year as Ben Nicholson and Bahram Shirdel, and all were early apprentices of Daniel Libeskind who was Head of the Architecture Department from 1978 to 1985. Joseph recalled that when he was a Cranbrook student, a guest architect visited the department and joined Libeskind and the students to explore the Eliel Saarinen-designed campus. It was more of an expedition than a tour, as it felt like the guest was leading the students on a search for something mysterious. Together they noted the unique geometry of the spaces and landscapes, admired the sculptures, and roamed along the pathways, creeks and bridges through the forest and the womb-shaped ponds. ‘This is it,’ the guest finally said, as they reached an outdoor amphitheatre with a rectangular pool and fountain. He explained that based on Greek mythology, the pool was a mirror for Zeus to watch the people’s behaviour on earth. Joseph has a naturally deep and loud voice, so he didn’t use a microphone and the way he spoke made the story vivid and full of detail. I had never been to Cranbrook, but I was captivated by the scenes he built with language. That night, I recalled these scenes clearly in my head and decided to join this group for an amazing adventure.

WALKING INTO THE DREAM Early in September of 2005, on the first day I arrived at Cranbrook, I walked into that forest alone. I found the bridge, the creek, the pyramid-like sculpture, the small and larger womb-shaped ponds, and the Greek Theatre. The bigger mystery, however, was who the new department head would be, because Peter Lynch had departed earlier that year. When William Massie walked into the studio and asked us to call him ‘Bill’, an indescribable atmosphere was present. Bill was considered a giant of digital fabrication at the time. He loved new technology and always rode his yellow Segway around the campus. Ironically, the second reason I chose Cranbrook was to escape the digital architecture trend that was taking place. Many schools in the US had begun to focus on digital architecture in that era, but I had set my goals towards more basic geometric studies and material experimentation. I was not focused on computational software and processes. However, Bill’s energy and enthusiastic belief in fabrication really affected us all. We visited his factory, where he was building his American House 08 from scratch. In the second year he organised a department trip to Las Vegas to see his favourite trade show – The World of Concrete – and then to Palm Springs for a luxury midcentury modern architecture tour. Many property owners opened their doors for the first time just to welcome us, and I believe they did so because of the strong legacy of Cranbrook. On the first day of the school year, Bill brought a semitrailer into the Architecture studio for all the first-year students to use for their first project. He left us only a keyword – ‘chopping’ – and with that we began to work together. I started to research the patterns of the glass in the windows on the west elevation of the Cranbrook School Dining Hall (1928), which was one of Eliel Saarinen’s classic designs. I then applied this to the trailer, as a study of Saarinen’s work through light and shadow. This pattern study was also used to make a cardboard tower for the Academy’s annual ‘Fanfare’ fundraising dinner, and after the party I turned this tower into a dress named Saarinen Dress: A Tribute to Eliel Saarinen. I put the piece up for sale at the annual Cranbrook student auction, and that day I met a man who was very interested in it. He introduced himself as an architect and I was surprised to learn that he was Robert Swanson, son of Pipsan Saarinen Swanson who was Eliel Saarinen’s daughter. For a moment, I felt like I was walking into Cranbrook history. So, I made a quick decision to give this dress to Robert Swanson as a gift, because the piece had been made as a tribute to Eliel Saarinen: I felt this would make the perfect ending for the project.

Yu-Chih Hsiao, Saarinen Window Pattern Study, Master of Architecture studio, Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, 2005 By analysing the geometric logic of the window pattern which Eliel Saarinen designed for the west elevation of the Cranbrook School Dining Hall, Hsiao connects the patterns of its 15 windows to form a single pattern.

THE CRANBROOK DREAMERS The longer I stayed at Cranbrook, the more my dream expanded and connected me to others. In 2006 a project called Barter Table was made by a fellow student for an exhibition titled ‘Social Fabrication’ at Cranbrook’s studentrun Forum Gallery. The host invited participants to give away something they didn’t need by writing it down on a yellow

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Yu-Chih Hsiao, Saarinen Dress: A Tribute to Eliel Saarinen, Master of Architecture studio, Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, 2005 Displayed on a laser-cut acrylic hanger and measuring approximately 65 by 25 by 6 inches (165 × 63 × 15 centimetres), the dress applies Hsiao’s Cranbrook Window Pattern Study to a new form. Its main part is made out of a cardboard tower originally constructed by William Massie for a fundraising party decoration and subsequently transformed by Hsiao. The dress is now in the collection of Karen Swanson, a fourth-generation architect of the Saarinen family.

Yu-Chih Hsiao, The Trailer Project: Saarinen Shadow Project, Master of Architecture studio, Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, 2005 Applying his study of the window pattern which Eliel Saarinen designed for the west elevation of the Cranbrook School Dining Hall, Hsiao laser-cut cardboard with these patterns and installed it on the semi-trailer which had been brought into the studio of the Architecture department by the head William Massie. Hsiao created this project to express the shadow of Cranbrook’s legacy and the desire to build a new identity while honouring the original image of Cranbrook.

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sticky note and placing the note on a table. After everyone had offered something, each participant was invited to take one note from the table. I wrote down ‘a ski suit’, which was a gift from a second-year student, Maryam Kaykavoosi, to help me survive the Michigan winter, but which I couldn’t use because it was oversized. I took a note that said ‘free ride and picnic on the lake side’, because I was one of the few carless survivors at Cranbrook, and it was always fun to have a ride and go somewhere I had never been. A fellow student in the Ceramics Department, Julie Schustack, took my ski-suit note, and everybody was happy because Julie was known for always wearing ski suits on campus. This piece made a big impact on me as it was a perfect demonstration of the concept of waste = food,1 and planted a seed in my mind about how to frame future projects for social interaction or resource exchange. Back in the architecture studio, several projects continued to change my understanding of architecture and socially driven design. Two second-year students, Matthew Miller and Thomas Gardner, proposed building a house in downtown Detroit. They worked on this project together and with volunteers for three years, culminating in their graduate thesis project. Meanwhile, I started working with my classmate Doug Johnston, whose practice was all about social interaction, performance and DIY utopias. Participating in some of his experimental projects got me thinking more about social issues in architecture. We collaborated on a piece for the Academy’s annual Chair Show by researching the history of chair design at Cranbrook and producing a very comfortable Concrete Chair (2007) as a tribute to the Cranbrook mid-century Modernists we admired. Eventually we decided to collaborate for our graduate thesis project and produced a piece we called A Nest (2007). It was a woven space made of high-density polyethylene pipes, fabric and shredded paper, and was an invitation for people to find comfort together through relaxation, contemplation and conversation. MAKING MY OWN DREAMLAND On a sunny day in June 2007, I returned once again to the Greek Theatre for my commencement. There was an eagle circling in the sky, and our director Gerhardt Knodel made a remarkable speech I will never forget. Instead of just feeling sad to leave this dreamland behind, he encouraged us to continue to shape and influence the places around us, as we had done during our time at Cranbrook. After I returned to Taiwan in 2008, I set up Megaweave Design to shift my design practices to focus more on resource bridging and maximisation. The name of the studio was based on the title of my Cranbrook thesis, a mechanism for me to remember my Cranbrook experience. Through this practice I began to see architecture as a medium to connect people and resources, and as a vehicle for social good. For example, the Zig Zag Pavilion was originally an invitation to design a short-term architecture installation for the 2018 ‘Tectonic Becoming’ exhibition at Hsinchu Park, but I

Yu-Chih Hsiao and Doug Johnston, A Nest, Master of Architecture thesis project, Cranbrook Museum and Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, 2007 This photo, showing Hsiao relaxing inside the scale model, was taken just after he and Johnston had finished installing their degree show in Cranbrook Art Museum. Made of polyethylene tubing, nylon cable ties, fabric and shredded paper, A Nest was intended as a lightweight, mobile pavilion that could be easily assembled and disassembled. Participants not only enjoy the inner atmosphere but also join the construction process to build a social relationship through collaboration.

Yu-Chih Hsiao and Doug Johnston, Concrete Chair, Master of Architecture studio, Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, 2007 Made of concrete, wire mesh and threaded steel studs, the chair measures approximately 18 by 20 by 24 inches (45 × 50 × 60 centimetres) (shell only). During their second year at Cranbrook, Hsiao and Johnston fabricated this chair for the annual Cranbrook Chair Show, a tradition sponsored by the 3D Design Department and open to students from all departments, which encourages them to reimagine the possibilities of a chair.

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Yu-Chih Hsiao, Cupboard House – 2nd Stop, ‘Project: The Folly’ exhibition, Taiwan Contemporary Culture Lab, Taipei, Taiwan, 2021 The conceptual house design involves stacking four large and six small cupboards together, with one penthouse unit stacked on top. Each cupboard conceals a function to be discovered as visitors open the doors. The entrance to the penthouse is also hidden within one cupboard.

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chose to use the very limited budget to engage the CNC manufacturing industry of Hsinchu city, eventually creating a prefabricated, lightweight pavilion for citizens to find a corner for solitude and to enjoy the surrounding greenery. After four years it still remains in the park. That same year I was invited to design Tree Houses in the Dreamy Forest, which were three installations incorporated into the existing woodland as an emblematic campground. I created a different atmosphere for each treehouse, inviting people to listen to music, read and chat. For the treehouses’ skin, I applied the surfacecharring technique on local peacock cedar. The carbonised skin not only enhances the treehouses’ weatherability but also brings about colour variations. More importantly, past governmental anti-logging policies had created an over-dependence on imported timber in Taiwan, and the project served to highlight locally grown plantation timber entering the market.

Yu-Chih Hsiao, Tree Houses in the Dreamy Forest, Shangri-La Paradise, Miaoli County, Taiwan, 2018 Hsiao designed three treehouses with different perspectives but similar shapes. Each has a different function: one for gathering, one for reading and napping, and the other for music and soundscape experience. By using sustainably harvested local peacock pine to fabricate the shingles, Hsiao sought to promote the use of locally cultivated trees to the Taiwanese construction industry. .

In 2015 I established the Megaweave Club,2 a Facebook group to exchange resources for free. At the time of writing there are 6,170 members and it is quite active every day. When my Cupboard House project was invited to join the ‘Project: The Folly’ exhibition at Taiwan Contemporary Culture Lab in Taipei in 2021, I collected all the house accessories for free, mostly from the club. I also saw this participation as an opportunity to promote the club and recruit many new members during the exhibition. The Cupboard House was commissioned by JUT Art Museum, and its original purpose was as an information booth for the ‘Home 2025’ exhibition (2016–17). Instead of ‘designing’ an information booth to fit the client’s need, I shifted the project to utilise and demonstrate the ‘megaweave’ concept: I created a concept house by stacking cabinets with all the functions hidden inside but that were also open to the outside. The result provided exhibition information as required, but also an additional outdoor piece for the show. After ‘Home 2025’, it became one of my ‘tiny house’ series projects, and it continued to participate in other exhibitions. I also use the Megaweave concept as a strategy to engage communities, including collaborating with local NGOs, organising summer workshops in rural areas and remodelling an after-school tutoring centre. Additionally, I explore it through my teaching at Shih Chien University. I guide my students to use scrap material to remodel corner shops with a focus on producing benefit for their community. In 20I2 I began to serve as Chair of the Department of Architecture. During my six-and-ahalf years of service I continued to practise concepts of maximising resources and reshaping the atmosphere of the department by encouraging students to develop their creativity through reflection on their personal values. I was invited to join the consultant team of Hsinchu City (Taiwan) in 2019, tasked with helping the mayor to shape the city for a brighter future. In 2021, more than 40 of Hsinchu City’s public projects were included in ‘Taiwan Acts! – Architecture in Social Dialogue’ (2021),3 an exhibition showcasing over 100 projects with five themes at the Architekturmuseum in Munich, Germany. I see these as Cranbrook’s seed blossoming into a magic flower on this Far East island. I haven’t dreamt about Cranbrook since I returned to Taiwan, probably because I’ve been too busy building my own dreamland. 1 Notes 1. See William McDonough and Michael Braungart, Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things, North Point Press (New York), 2002. 2. https://www.facebook.com/groups/1596603907320118. 3. See Chun-Hsiung Wang et al, Taiwan Acts! Architecture in Social Dialogue, ArchiTangle (Berlin), 2023.

Text © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: pp 62–3, 68(t) Photos by Yuchen Zao; p 64 Photo by Roland London; pp 65, 66 © Yu-Chih Hsiao; p 67 Photos Doug Johnston; pp 68–9(b) Photo by Alexis Len

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Unbuilding and the Recovery of Craft in Architecture Dan Hoffman

Cranbrook Department of Architecture 1986—1996 70

Dan Hoffman was Architectin-Residence/Head of Department at the Cranbrook Academy of Art from 1986 to 1996. His tenure was concerned with the plight of contemporary Detroit during that time. He urged students to take to the city and make architectural responses/ interventions in its fabric – attempting to deal with real-world issues and to create a new Detroit centred on critical regionalism.

Adam Womelsdorf, Temporal Section, Master of Architecture studio, Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, 1991 A response to the ‘Temporal Section’ assignment given to students beginning their studies in the Architecture Department. Sectional slices of the flame were developed by dousing the layered wood frame and exhibiting them side by side.

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In 1986, there were no building permits issued in the City of Detroit. Once the vital administrative and manufacturing hub of the automobile industry, the city had been in decline for many years, the wave of industrial economy having moved on to the suburbs and beyond, leaving vast tracts of abandoned neighbourhoods in its wake. The situation had become so dire that abandoned houses were regularly set on fire by residents the night before Halloween in a macabre celebration of the city’s demise. Unbuilding had surpassed building as the dominant feature of the urban landscape. Located on the grounds of a wooded estate around 20 miles (30 kilometres) from the centre of Detroit, the bucolic setting of Cranbrook has historically been seen as a complement to the industrial environment of the city. Founded in 1904 by George Booth, publisher of the Detroit News, a paper that advocated for the rights of workers in the rapidly industrialising city, Cranbrook was designed and built by architects and artisans schooled in the Arts and Crafts tradition, most notably the Finnish architect Eliel Saarinen, the first director of the Cranbrook Academy of Art. Booth was the patron of the movement in the city, promoting aesthetic values of simplicity, utility and the beauty of nature and craft-oriented workshops and societies as an antidote to the alienating effects of the Fordist industrial practices of the emerging automobile industry. The Critical Environment Like much of the art world in the late 1980s, the fine-art disciplines at the Academy, including the Architecture Department, were exploring language-based, postmodern tendencies such as deconstruction and appropriation, having moved on from the material-based preoccupations of the anti-aesthetic work of the previous decade (conceptual art, process art and land art). As vigorous and compelling as these postmodern explorations were (the work of the department under Daniel Libeskind is particularly notable in this regard), the unprecedented situation in Detroit and its implications for architecture seemed a more appropriate and pressing issue for the students and myself as the new department head. Kenneth Frampton’s essay on ‘Critical Regionalism’, published in 1983,1 was a foundational reference for the department, framing place-based concerns in architecture through a dialogue between top-down (global, technological) and bottom-up (local, craft) modes of design and construction. In addition, its emphasis on material process and the embodied nature of experience provided a window into the physical circumstances of the city and how they could be approached and understood in creative ways. The challenge, however, was how these material and experiential concerns could be addressed in a situation of abandonment and decline. The work of ‘anti-aesthetic’ artists of the 1970s helped to fill the gap, applying a phenomenological and neo-Marxist critique to the logic and processes of technological culture at the height of its power and influence in the US. The work of the department began by reassessing the methods and practices of artists such as Gordon Matta-Clark whose

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cut-ups of abandoned buildings expanded the field of sculpture into architecture, treating buildings as sites to operate upon, rather than objects, demonstrating that it was possible to draw with a saw instead of a pencil. American sculptor Richard Serra’s early process pieces such as Stacked Steels Slabs (1969) demonstrated the absurd yet powerful effect of translating a found, industrial object to an architectural scale through the actions of a common verb. In her untitled latex, rope string and wire piece of 1969–70, Eva Hesse, another American sculptor, explored soft industrial materials that were responsive rather than resistant to applied loads (form-finding as opposed to form-making), opening possibilities for regenerative rather than regressive thinking about the nature of material construction. Beginning Work The work of these and other artists provided a new set of tools for the Architecture Department to assess and measure the phenomena of unbuilding in the city. In Burn (1994), a work by Karen Bermann, Jeanine Centuori and Julianna Preston, the students photographed themselves holding a mirror in front of burned-out properties, providing an eye-level view of the same district returning to its presettlement ecology of meadows and trees, anticipating the natural motifs utilised in the later design-build work of the department. A more direct engagement with the process of unbuilding is found in the 9119 Saint Cyril project (1988) by Jean-Claude Azar, James Cathcart, Frank Fantauzzi and Terence Van Elslander, where students purchased an abandoned house in Detroit from a demolition contractor for one dollar, dismantling it piece by piece over a two-week period, something that usually takes a few hours with the help of a bulldozer. The cleaned and sorted material was placed in a local gallery to be reclaimed by the community. The project reverses the constructive logic of building (design-build in reverse), and was an important step for the department in recuperating the craft of the building. The lessons from these early projects were distilled into a series of short exercises inspired by Richard Serra’s Verb List (1967). With titles such as ‘Form a Pour’, ‘Measured Body – Body Measure’ and ‘Temporal Section’, the exercises conflated a physical process with the activity of recording, introducing the idea that a building is itself a physical recording of how it was made. Adam’s Womelsdorf’s response to the Temporal Section assignment in 1991 sought to capture the momentary dimensions of a flame by setting fire to a stack of wooden dowels, extinguishing the fire, unstacking the dowels in layers and documenting the extent burnt sections. This concept is examined further in Recording Wall, one of the projects I did in a studio space in the department in 1991. Here, concrete blocks are placed and removed, one by one, to build and unbuild a wall. Each step in the process is recorded by a photo showing the builder placing a block with the image of the block being placed printed on its surface. The posture of the body in the photos, placing and removing each block, is both a sign and recording of the human effort involved in the construction which, like a film,

unfolds over time. The conflation of percept (the perceptual awareness of the effort in the placement of each block) and concept (the geometric and structural implications of its position in the construction of the wall) reveals the potential of embodied consciousness in architecture; the implications of which were explored by the work of the department. The project also served as an example of how material process could be studied in a studio setting. At the time, the department was in a former maintenance garage on the Cranbrook campus, with individual studios in 10 x 24 foot bays providing a staged setting for performing and recording the work. The robust construction of the building and the presence of a well-equipped shop and darkroom encouraged students to activate the space through an act of material construction and recording. Jean-Claude Azar, James Cathcart, Frank Fantauzzi and Terence Van Elslander, 9119 Saint Cyril, Master of Architecture studio, Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, 1988 Students purchased a house slated for removal near Detroit city centre for one dollar, taking it apart piece by piece and stacking it in a local art gallery.

Karen Bermann, Jeanine Centuori and Julieanna Preston, Burn, Master of Architecture studio, Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, 1994 Students documenting sites of burned houses in Detroit. Located near the city centre, the empty lots in the neighbourhood were reverting to the aboriginal prairie/meadow ecology of the region.

Dan Hoffman, Recording Wall, Master of Architecture studio, Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, 1991 A wall of concrete blocks with photos of each block developed on its surface with liquid photo emulsion. Typical of the ‘staged’ constructions of the speculative work in the department, the project records the means and effort involved in its construction as a critical tool.

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Design-Build: The Cranbrook Architecture Office In 1995, Cranbrook initiated a series of capital projects to update its campus buildings and infrastructure, providing an opportunity for the department to participate in the historic Academy tradition of artists-in-residence working in collaboration with students to design and build projects for the campus. By this time the department had developed a level of skill from its on-site studio investigations giving it the confidence to add to the historic campus buildings and settings. A separate design-build entity was formed within the department – the Cranbrook Architecture Office (CAO), named after Eliel Saarinen’s office while he was head of the Academy and staffed by students and graduates to undertake the work. Projects included a new campus entry feature and community mailbox enclosure, campus pedestrian and roadway lighting, pedestrian bridges, a reading pavilion and furniture for the Brookside Elementary School, selected exhibits for the Institute of Science in collaboration with Steven Holl, and a campus arrival plaza in collaboration with Juhani Pallasmaa.

The department had developed a level of skill from its on-site studio investigations giving it the confidence to add to the historic campus buildings and settings

Cranbrook Architecture Office (CAO) with Ted Galante and Alfred Zollinger, Trellis Bridge, Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, 1994 A design-build project for a bridge over the Rouge River on the Cranbrook grounds, the curved lattice is designed to support vines growing from the banks of the river.

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Cranbrook Architecture Office (CAO) with Jason Vollen, Alfred Zollinger and Mark Kolodziejczak, Brookside Reading Pavilion, Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, 1996 A design-build project for a reading pavilion for children at Cranbrook’s elementary school. Made of cedar shakes supported by a bent wood frame, the structure serves as a ‘cloak’ protecting the children from cold north winds.

The projects were designed collaboratively with a recently graduated student managing the construction. Cranbrook’s craft tradition was inspired by Gottfried Semper’s theories of architecture, with its emphasis on the importance of weaving in the building arts.2 Evidence of interest in weaving can be seen throughout Cranbrook, in the patterned brickwork and fluted detailing of Eliel Saarinen’s buildings, and in the refined carpets, wallhangings and window coverings designed by his wife Loja Saarinen, the first head of the fibre department at the Academy. The weaving metaphor is literalised and expanded in the Trellis Bridge (1994; CAO with Ted Galante and Alfred Zollinger), where a braced wood truss is wrapped by a bent wood lattice/trellis supporting vines growing from the banks of the river. It was also used as an inspiration for the Reading Pavilion (1996; CAO with Jason Vollen, Alfred Zollinger and Mark Kolodziejczak), a cloak-like shelter wrapped in cedar shakes protecting students from the cold north wind at the community’s elementary school.

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Jason Vollen, Tree Grove, Master of Architecture thesis project, Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, 1996 Conical terracotta units are stacked to create a flexible formwork that simulates the motion of a tree blown by the wind. The tree is part of a project inspired by the patterned terracotta blocks of American architect Louis Sullivan.

One might say that the critical stance of the early work was more a lamentation on the end of industrial culture than a response to the very real issues of disinvestment and institutional racism that continue to plague Detroit and other US cities

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Susan Molesky, Multiple and Fluid Boundaries, Master of Architecture thesis project, Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, 1996 Made of concrete cast in latex balloons, the project explores speculative tectonics through material-based, form-finding techniques, indicative of the later work of the department.

Responsive Tectonics The design-build activities in the studio began to have an impact on the students’ work, moving the focus from the critical and reflective concerns of unbuilding to those of responsive tectonics integrating material-based, formfinding techniques. The change was also influenced by the work on indeterminant architectural units by Peter Lynch, the future department head. The Multiple and Fluid Boundaries project (1996) by Susan Molesky is one example. Here, small units made of latex balloons filled with wet concrete were packed into a rectangular frame and left to harden. When the balloons were removed and the units reassembled, the asymmetrical pressures on the units were captured in the varying forms of the individual units. Further constructions packed air-filled balloons into a cubic container. Liquid plaster was poured into the container, filling the gaps between the balloons, creating a responsive, sponge-like network of internal spaces. Form-finding techniques were also deployed in the Tree Grove (1996) by Jason Vollen. Here, the geometry of the unit was based upon various sections of a terracotta cone (similar to terracotta pot, but open at two ends) which, when stacked loosely, were tilted in different directions to simulate the branching structure of a tree. When combined with branching and cap units, the loose stack was fixed by packing mortar into the joints, creating a formwork for a reinforced concrete core that solidifies and strengthens the structure. Reflection Completed near the end of my tenure, the design-build projects and responsive material studies show a path towards the reintegration of material process in architecture, the lessons of which have been applied by graduates of the studio in their teaching and professional work. Starting with meditation on the impact of unbuilding on the architecture of the city, the 10-year arc of the studio was informed by the slow, empirical process of making and thinking, and the construction of craft-based knowledge. Looking back, one might say that the critical stance of the early work was more a lamentation on the end of industrial culture than a response to the very real issues of disinvestment and institutional racism that continue to plague Detroit and other US cities. In the spirit of the work presented here, the Academy and future iterations of the department will continue to find new ways to address these and other pressing matters of concern through the creative energies of its students and its artistic traditions. 1 Notes 1. Kenneth Frampton, ‘Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance’, in Hal Foster (ed), Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, Bay Press (Seattle, WA), 1983, pp 16–29. 2. Gottfried Semper, The Four Elements of Architecture and Other Writings, tr Harry Francis Mallgrave and Wolfgang Herrmann, Cambridge University Press (New York), 1989.

Text © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: p 70 © Adam Womelsdorf; p 73(t) © Frank Fantauzzi, James Cathcart, Terrence Van Elslander, Jean-Claude Azar and Michael Williams; p 73(c) © Karen Bermann, Jeanine Centuori and Julieanna Preston; p 73(b) © Dan Hoffman; pp 74–5 Courtesy of Dan Hoffman. © Balthazar Korab/Cranbrook Educational Community; p 75(tr) Photo by Mark Kolodziejczak; p 76 © Jason Oliver Vollen; p 77 © Susan Molesky

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AN ARCHITECTURE

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Ronit Eisenbach

OF MARKS Ronit Eisenbach, filum aquae: The Thread of the Stream, Art Gallery of Windsor, Ontario, Canada, 2000 Detail of a 90-foot-long (27-metre) photomontage negotiating territorial boundaries within a body of water. The work was created by travelling along the Canada/US boundary on the Detroit River and photographing both banks simultaneously. Dividing the upper and lower halves of the image, the political boundary was drawn by the boat’s wake and marks the deepest part of the watercourse and the centre of the international shipping lane to the Great Lakes.

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READING HISTORIES AND WRITING FUTURES

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Architecture and its materiality can be reread as a series of marks by an architect – traces of things metamorphosing into other things, whether by industrial processes or by handicraft. Ronit Eisenbach was a graduate of the Cranbrook Architecture Department during Architect-in-Residence/Head of Department Dan Hoffman’s tenure. Those formative couple of years have led her to expand this perception of the world into her teaching and wider practice.

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A map of Esmeralda should include, marked in different colored inks, all these routes, solid and liquid, evident and hidden. It is more difficult to fix on the map the routes of the swallows, who cut the air over the roofs, dropping long invisible parabolas with their still wings … — Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, 19741

Ronit Eisenbach, Box/Frame/World, Master of Architecture studio, Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, 1991 As a mixed pile of black lava and white silica sand was sifted by granule size, a camera positioned above recorded a changing world. Time was implied by the change captured in the sequential images, which allowed a space for the viewer to imagine what occurred.

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A mark can tell a story of its own making. As architects we can examine a cast concrete surface, notice the traces of formwork, and speculate on the materials and methods. Curious about reading and writing the built environment, I entered Cranbrook wondering: How do our actions in the built environment leave marks? How do we read and write these? My student work began with bracketed explorations of physical evidence and marks that held the story of their making. This article traces the marks that an education at the Cranbrook Architecture Department left on me. At Cranbrook, unlike other professional programmes, there were neither classes nor assignments after the first semester; ideas were advanced through making, dialogue with the studio head and other artists-in-residence, seminars, and by the work and generosity of one’s peers. This was challenging and liberating for a licensed architect. The Architecture Department offered latitude, time and a fertile environment to identify questions worthy of pursuit. Its membership in the larger Academy of Art expanded the boundaries of architectural practice, catalysing new ways of working. The first assignment offered by Dan Hoffman, Architecture Department Head, when I joined the studio in 1990 was terse: ‘body measure, measure body’. I found inspiration in Archimedes, who stated in On Floating Bodies that the volume of liquid displaced by a body at rest is equal to the volume of the submerged portion of the body. I immersed my own body into a partially filled bathtub and recorded the difference in water levels, yielding a measure: 13 gallons, 12 ounces (49.57 litres). Left uncapped, the water held in jars evaporated, exchanged for air, dust and bugs. This indexical way of working and the interrelationship of ‘site’ (bathtub), ‘action’ (immersion) and ‘record’ (displaced water) became a conceptual structure that continues to inform my work. Over the next two years, the practice that followed was material, laborious and direct. I set up situations to explore and isolate interrelationships of sites, actions and records. I interrogated ‘sites’ as landscapes that gather, absorb and record unfolding actions, ‘actions’ that left marks or petrified gestures, and ‘records’ as evidence of actions as change. For example, later that autumn of 1990, no longer guided by an assignment, I designed Box/Frame/World. Black lava and white silica sands were placed on the studio floor, bounded by a rectangular frame whose dimensions were determined by my reach. A ceiling-mounted camera recorded the results of my actions – piling, pouring, raking, mixing and sifting. As the black granules were larger, they could be separated with a sieve. As I sifted the sand, the mixed pile diminished, and the cones of white and black sand grew; time unwound.

In contrast to the bracketed work within Cranbrook, outside the studio complexity expands exponentially. On a single site (however defined), the number of actions and records is infinite and can be difficult to connect. Layered histories multiply, some get erased, some are surfaced. There are many actors and observers. Actions unfold in seconds or over millennia, at varying scales – the hand, building, neighbourhood, city or territory. And while the chain of relationships between site, action and record may be impossible to reconstruct, there is room for speculation and alternative narratives. Perhaps most importantly, the record of an otherwise invisible action can shape both internal and external dialogue about the built environment. So, while the site/action/record conceptual structure was useful in studio, to be useful now it needed to grow in complexity. If an action can be an experience and a record an imprint on body or mind, shaping people’s actions and themselves, what new possibilities emerge? Opening Spaces of Representation Detroit offered opportunities to become an architecture educator, as well as artist and architect. While at Cranbrook, I had a chance to co-teach a postgraduate architecture studio at the University of Michigan with Dan Hoffman. I hoped to represent the condition of layered histories, honour people’s stories and counter the narrative of Detroit’s ‘empty spaces’. I chose to put the site/action/record way of working to new purpose, considering the scale of the city and of corresponding actions in works that represented layers of meaning and history. These hybrid cartographies sought to elevate lived experience and the daily actions that shape our environment, a perspective I felt was crucial to consider before acting as a citizen or architect upon a city. The studio began at the scale of direct action and empathy – with the hand. Hoffman and I created a conceptual and procedural scaffolding to build a map of Detroit that explored ‘the shared territory of the indexical and representational aspects of language and lived experience’2 and to which students could contribute. To convey the many ways the city is shaped by individual actions and understand the shared acts of living, students photographed still lifes in their own homes – pots on a stove, a hair in a drain, a book and ashtray – and created full-scale models of these spatial moments in plaster, wood and wax. Each student’s material section was flooded with plaster, and then placed within a grid. To locate the work and add an urban scale and context, a composite Sanborn map of a residential area east of Gratiot Avenue where only a third of the homes were standing was inscribed on the plaster surface. (Produced from 1867 onwards, the Sanborn maps documented

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properties and individual buildings in approximately 12,000 US, Canadian and Mexican cities and were used to help fire insurance agents assess risk. When compared, their record illustrates the effects that population and economy shifts had on urbanised areas.) Our new map combined two Sanborn maps —1950 at Detroit’s population peak (1,849,568) and 1990 when the population was recorded at just over 1 million residents. Each building’s footprint was then excavated from the plaster according to whether the home was inhabited, vacant or had been demolished. Like the city itself, the resultant relief map’s marks had many authors. It juxtaposed uncovered fragments of buried tableaux with a map of the past and present, hinting at the fullness of place. Similarly, filum aquae: The Thread of the Stream, exhibited at the Art Gallery of Windsor (now Art WindsorEssex) in Ontario, Canada in 2000, explores more of this real-world complexity. No wall marks the US and Canadian international border in the Detroit River, yet that line has a profound impact on people’s lives – their understanding and actions. Guided by maps and satellite, the action of sailing on that invisible line momentarily drew the border with the boat’s wake – an ephemeral mark. Ronit Eisenbach and Dan Hoffman, Detroit: The Map & Madeleine, Master of Architecture studio, Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1992 Like any city, this material ‘map’ of Detroit’s east side was a collective work, created by many students along with tutors Ronit Eisenbach and Dan Hoffman. It sought to capture the experience of a city as a work-in-progress, shaped at the scale of the hand and the neighbourhood, elevating how a place feels and what remains in place for its residents – even after the tangible structures are destroyed.

Ronit Eisenbach, Dana Reitz and Bebe Miller, Placing Space cross-disciplinary studio for postgraduate and undergraduate students, University of Maryland School of Architecture, Planning & Preservation with the Center for Creative Research and the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center, College Park, Maryland, 2006 opposite: Fabric panels hung on moveable tracks allowed participants to alter the dimensions of the enclosure, adapting their movement to the space and the space to their movement. Students soon discovered that shaping the environment through their own actions literally opened possibilities, creating a dynamic and fluid relationship between site and action. Dancer Tzveta Kassabova reaches towards an image projected upon the space that she defined.

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Opening Spaces of Enquiry It is not only architects who need to learn to read and write the built environment. Other people also bring talents, knowledge and professional perspectives to their reading. Artists are often attuned to colour and light. Dancers read a space’s volumetric characteristics. Biologists bring an understanding of living creatures, and local knowledge keepers bring histories and lived experiences. In the University of Maryland’s 2014 Placing Space studio, choreographers Dana Reitz, Bebe Miller and I brought together dancers and architects to explore reciprocal relationships of space, gesture and motion in real time. We designed an environment that enabled students to change the size, shape, volume and image of the space. Initially, participants created movement modules and designed static spaces. Once they asked ‘What if … ?’, the energy gathered. The question ‘What if the spatial configuration was not fixed but constantly changing?’ led to dynamic works in which people and architecture danced in concert. Emulating the Cranbrook Architecture studio, the workshop engaged us all in a relatively unexplored territory of architecture pedagogy – spatial experience as an embodied, shifting, temporal and dimensional condition. This situation of interdisciplinary pedagogy, shared enquiry and serious play left its marks on students in this workshop, much as the Cranbrook education had marked me. In Reitz’s words, students left with ‘kernels of genuine curiosity’3 to catalyse future work.

The workshop engaged us all in a relatively unexplored territory of architecture pedagogy – spatial experience as an embodied, shifting, temporal and dimensional condition

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Opening Spaces of Rehearsal In contrast to work in a space specially designed for enquiry, a space of rehearsal4 can be opened in situ in the thick reality of experience. These works sit amid the site/action/record dynamic as a performative installation that suggests, supports and allows for changing norms, increasing civic discourse, changing sites and changing effects. Such work can support placemaking and placekeeping efforts in communities facing or seeking change before policy or bricks-and-mortar actions are taken. Spaces of rehearsal, situated in the timeframe between site identification and future action, can explore alternative futures and engage community members in a process of shaping their places and building relationships. Ephemeral public art, design and performances are particularly suited for sites and communities in transition. Before actions lock in a particular future, a temporary intervention can spark conversation, imagination and action when there is still an opportunity to shape the eventual action in the built environment. Beyond educating architects and dancers, the horizon for this work is activist and catalytic, engaging the public with spaces and uses that are about to change, and thus shifting perceptions and encouraging local advocacy and engagement in the transformation of their neighbourhood. Placeholders was a performance and installation created with dance artist Sharon Mansur for a community seeking to bring attention to their commercial district and spark public dialogue about the potential impact of new light rail construction and resulting investments. This public performance unfolded in three sections, each in a different setting along one block of Long Branch, Maryland in 2014. As the dancers and props moved between the street, car park and playground, the audience followed, their collective participation linking locations and extending the work’s spatial impact. Through play and delight, Placeholders challenged spatial norms and offered an experiential shift of perspective in spaces people took for granted, contributing to a conversation about pedestrian access, local business support, and elevating the community’s diverse cultural heritage. HOT/COLD sought to spark a way to practise community in challenging circumstances – what Professor Ruth Morrow of Newcastle University named ‘prototyping the social’5 after her experience working in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Commissioned by Beit Ha’Gefen – the Arab-Jewish cultural centre in Haifa, Israel – for the exhibition ‘PLAY Haifa’ (curated by Mali Baruch) and the interfaith Holiday of Holidays festival, the site was adjacent to Wadi Nisnas, a predominantly Christian

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Ronit Eisenbach and Sharon Mansur, Placeholders, Long Branch, Silver Spring, Maryland, 2014–15 above: Placeholders unfolded in three settings along Flower Avenue – a community bracing for change. This diagram of movement and the relationship among dancers, participants, props and mural drawings records how both site and action were reworked in this performance installation. As the audience followed the dancers on the street, car park and playground, their participation connected locations and extended the work’s spatial impact. below: Props and dancers shifted the experience and understanding of public spaces. Repurposing quotidian spaces – a central reservation, car park and playground – highlighted the potential for change. Dancers Meredith Bove, Jessie Laurita-Spanglet, Sarah Oppenheim and Lynne Price’s inhabitation of the central reservation challenged the dominance of cars in an area where the business district was divided by a busy street.

and Muslim neighbourhood. Inspired by dinner tables as intimate, communal surfaces of memory and dialogue, HOT/COLD connected gallery and street. Within the gallery, the table’s topographic surface, carved from photographic records of a meal from preparation to dessert, invited touch, play and the breaking of norms. When participants’ hands warmed the table’s heat-sensitive coating, open-ended phrases in Hebrew and Arabic were revealed, potentially requiring translation, sparking discussion and playful exploration of what else was to be found. Outside, the table created spaces to gather and play. Against the backdrop of civic challenges and inflammatory rhetoric, perhaps these shared moments contributed in some small way to building relationships across difference.

Ronit Eisenbach and Ohad Meyuhas with Katie Levine, Or Shoval and Austin Raimond, HOT/COLD, 'PLAY Haifa' exhibition, Haifa, Israel, 2016–17 top: HOT/COLD engaged both the rarity and necessity for physical contact and the unsurprising connection between touch and dialogue. The table’s heat-sensitive surface affirmed human presence and invited curiosity. Its hidden messages celebrated human interaction as a playful act. above: The 20-foot (6-metre) gallery table was merely one edge of a 140-foot (43-metre) table which broke free from the gallery confines. Outside the gallery, the table changed character, folding to adapt to the closed street’s topography and create places for people of all faiths to sit and play.

Marked by the Cranbrook Architecture Studio As a university-based architecture educator, I maintain both pedagogical and architectural practices. They include being a maker at different scales of time and space, and an architect who seeks to engage people in reflection on the built environment and its meanings. Marked by my Cranbrook education and the spaces it opened for me – paying attention to site, action and record – these practices inform one another. I have learned that exploring the ongoing cycles of place, events and impacts is a way to shift how people understand, experience and imagine places. Ephemeral public art, design and performances echo beyond their moment. Thus they are particularly suited for sites and communities in transition – sparking conversations and actions. Co-produced work prompts speculation about what is possible. Embracing the dimension of time in the built environment, challenging the idea of permanence, and expanding the boundaries of architecture in specific situations can influence decisions, surface lost histories or invite people to reimagine place. The Cranbrook Architecture studio shaped my interdisciplinary spatial practice and pedagogy, granting me the courage to imagine and open spaces of representation, enquiry and rehearsal – and it continues to inspire me to act and to ask: What if, why not, and what’s next? 1 Notes 1. Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, tr William Weaver, Harcourt Brace & Company (San Diego, New York and London), 1974, p 89 (originally published in Italian in 1972). 2. Ronit Eisenbach, ‘The Map and the Madeleine’, in Dimensions: Process(es) – A Problematization of Method and Moment in Architecture, College of Architecture and Urban Planning, University of Michigan (Ann Arbor, MI), 1993, p 13. 3. Ronit Eisenbach, ‘Placing Space: Architecture, Action, Dimension’, Journal of Architecture Education, 61 (4), May 2008, p 80. 4. Ruth Morrow, Peter Mutschler and Timothy Waddell, ‘Spaces of Rehearsal: Theorizing Socio-Spatial Practices in a Post Conflict Context’, Architectural Research Quarterly, 24 (2), 2020, pp 183–203. 5. Ibid. Text © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: pp 78–81, 83–4, 86(t) © Ronit Eisenbach / StudioRED; p 85 Photograph: Jacqueline Croussilat F. copyright 2006 all rights reserved; p 86(b) Photo Zachary Handler; p 87(t) Photo Ohad Meyuhas; p 87(b) Photo Hamody Gannam

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Peter Lynch

METHODS OF INSPIRATION

A PEDAGOGICAL APPROACH BASED ON SINGULARITY

Scott Saikley, Design proposal for a Cathedral, Master of Architecture thesis project, Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, 2002 Irregular vertical cylinders, pinched at their centres, are gathered together in an undulating plan to enclose perimeter chapels and a central gathering space. Light enters through gaps between the cylinders.

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A good architecture department facilitates students to find their own, personal architectural lexicon and ways and methods of seeing the world and creating within it. Peter Lynch, former Architect-in-Residence/ Head of Department at Cranbrook, describes the acts of creative midwifery that allowed him to inspire students and achieve successful architectures with them. Equally, a student working on similar architectural problems as their teacher can be a pedagogic resource for all concerned.

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Since its opening in 1932, the architecture programme at Cranbrook Academy of Art has put forward a counterproposal for US architecture education. Eliel Saarinen, Cranbrook’s co-founder and Architect-inResidence until 1950, envisioned it as a critical response to the École des BeauxArts’ pedagogical model, which dominated US architecture education throughout the 1920s and 1930s. At the École (and at US schools that adopted its approach) students were required to emulate a given form language and follow conventions of type and programme. At the start of each assignment an esquisse set the design concept (the parti) which the student could not alter afterwards. Each project was developed and conveyed exclusively through graphic means. At Cranbrook, Saarinen proposed that students should work with a single teacher, the Architect-in-Residence, in a manner analogous to the atelier/patron structure of the Beaux-Arts, but that the design task, form language and design methodology should be determined by the student alone. Every student should arrive at Cranbrook with an urgently felt question, centred around their life experience, framed as a design brief. The Architect-inResidence should support the student in the completion of their chosen project, in accordance with the student’s sensibility. Fine art, handicraft and design practices should be integrated. The social and cultural reality of the US should remain constantly in focus. This pedagogical counterproposal, which combined aspects of the Arts and Crafts movement, the Beaux-Arts and National Romanticism, was radical but not ideological. Saarinen’s Legacy

Aspects of Saarinen’s pedagogical framework remain unchanged. Each student in the Cranbrook Architecture Department is challenged to identify an aspect of architecture that intrigues and concerns them; to shape a thesis in dialogue with the Architect-in-Residence;

As Architect-in-Residence, my focus was on each student’s discovery of their own breakthrough and to manifest their discoveries in a concrete way. Hands-on fabrication is emphasised. Work in the Academy’s other departments – fibre, metalsmithing, ceramics, print media, 2D design, 3D design, photography, painting, sculpture and, today, 4D design – exerts a strong influence on work in the Architecture Department. Something important has not been carried over from Saarinen’s time, however. During my tenure as Cranbrook Architect-in-Residence/Head of Department (1996–2005),1 most students could not, on arrival, articulate their driving questions and motivations, let alone frame them in a design brief. (Looking through old thesis projects, I wonder if it was actually possible for students to frame a convincing brief in Saarinen’s time.) The lack of clarity is understandable. Graduate education should help students uncover their inner driving force; it cannot presume clarity from the start. In addition, students’ doubts and questions often revolve around practice itself. Questions about architecture practice cannot be framed within normative practice. During my time at Cranbrook, most students rejected the design brief as a framework for enquiry. Facing this situation, the Architect-inResidence/Department Head has a riddle to solve. What kind of pedagogy, what Socratic midwifery, can help each student clarify their disciplinary concerns? How can the Architect-in-Residence draw everyone into discussion and sketch out a common ground while encouraging highly individual work? What agenda or shared interest characterises the department? A pluralist ethos is necessary but not sufficient. Like persons, all architecture schools must have a vivid identity, manifesting their values and character. Only a singular, non-ideological approach to architecture can uphold singular work – the Cranbrook Architecture Department’s central pedagogical aspiration since Saarinen’s time. ‘Singular’, in the Italian

philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s sense, means non-generic, exemplary and trueto-itself; it does not necessarily mean superlative, extraordinary or unique.2 Compared to the offerings at any university, the programme at Cranbrook is simple, even bare. There are limited institutional resources. Students in the Architecture Department were invited to participate in events and critiques in other departments: collaborations with Photography, Ceramics, and 2D Design were especially important during my time there. Nonetheless, the cast of Cranbrook characters is small: at that period it involved 10 departments with 15 students each. Students rely upon one another and their Artist- or Architect-in-Residence/ Head of Department, who is impresario, lecturer, critic and interlocutor. As Architect-in-Residence, my focus was on each student’s discovery of their own breakthrough. All incoming students were aware of the school’s direction under Daniel Libeskind (Architect-in-Residence 1978–85) and Dan Hoffman (Architectin-Residence 1986–96) and drawn to Cranbrook as a refuge from conventional professional practice. Each student sensed that there was an urgent matter within the orbit of architecture that needed to be clarified before they could engage the discipline in a meaningful way. Although most students could not articulate the aspiration, intuition or doubt that motivated them, this lack of clarity was usually a blessing in disguise. The students had courage – the courage of psychiatrist Carl Jung on the shore of Lake Bollingen in the early 1910s, building castles out of pebbles in order to rediscover his life’s thesis.3 At Cranbrook, every Artist- or Architect-in-Residence/Head of Department is both a teacher and a practitioner. The double role is reflected in the double title. As Artist- or Architectin-Residence one needs to exemplify a singular, unequivocal approach to one’s discipline. As Department Head one needs

a flexible outlook. The tension between these two attitudes is more apparent than real. To practise in a strong way, one needs inspiration and an inner driving force. To teach, one must understand how to encourage others to discover their own inspiration and motivation. This is done by force of example; through pedagogy, the craft of fashioning questions; and by introducing practices and sources of inspiration. The Role of Inspiration in the Design Process

In contrast to invention, which ‘comes from inside’, inspiration ‘comes from outside’. It is never logical, conceptual or ideological. It is one’s private matter, it cannot be justified and cannot be summoned. Nonetheless, it is possible to create situations where inspiration is more likely to emerge. During my Cranbrook tenure I encouraged students to cultivate various practices of inspiration. Some, like sketching, modelling, engaging in dialogue and taking pleasure in the working material of architecture, are common throughout architecture education. Others were specific to the physical and intellectual setting of Cranbrook, namely: applying studio practices from the fine and applied arts; shaping the studio workspace; making large-scale constructions; assembling or dismantling machinic assemblages; projecting (and disrupting) orders and patterns; noting striking errors, contradictions and dissonances; recognising the numinous everyday. At the start of the design process, inspiration can be drawn from seemingly anywhere. During my nine years at Cranbrook, introductory problems functioned as kindling. In the first quarter of each academic year these assignments framed a setting where diverse ideas and insights could arise. In the subsequent academic quarters, especially during the long winter months, inspiration served a different role. Countless problems

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and doubts arise as the work unfolds. There is no deductive method that can guide a project’s development from start to finish. At some point assumptions must be overturned: this only happens when one is confronted by something from outside. Seminars, guest lectures, symposia and study trips served this purpose. As students settled into their lives in Bloomfield Hills and other suburban towns around Cranbrook, an inescapable problem revealed itself: the racial and economic divide between Detroit’s northern suburbs and the city itself. Eight Mile Road, the city’s northern boundary, is one of the most drastic lines of segregation in the US. For Cranbrook Academy of Art this divide is an existential problem, made more acute by the institution’s history. George Booth, the Academy’s co-founder, was one of Detroit’s first industrialists to flee the city. In 1908 his family vacated their city estate and moved to ‘Bloomfield Hills, then a sparsely populated farming community some distance from the city’.4 Eliel Saarinen theorised the dissolution of the city and spoke of urban renewal in violently cathartic terms.5 While I was in post at Cranbrook, suburban development was densifying around the campus, eroding two of the Academy’s cherished notions: the campus as a hamlet within the countryside and the Architecture Department as a monastic retreat. Brazilian philosopher and activist Paulo Freire has called education the task of recognising society’s contradictions,6 and this task was becoming increasingly urgent for Cranbrook. In support of students who wished to face our collective reality, I sought out project contexts and collaborators within Detroit and worked on affordable housing developments in the city myself. Introductory Problems

During the first quarter of every academic year, I asked incoming and returning students to address a set of problems – questions I was exploring at the time

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in my own work. These problems were tectonic investigations and, at the same time, analogies to the architectural design process, which often passes through a ‘point of inflection’, when the designer’s mode of reasoning and thinking changes radically. The introductory problems challenged students to imagine processes that subverted themselves. Many were focused on building systems that escape simple repetition and periodicity. Many students developed and refracted themes from these introductory problems in their subsequent thesis work.

The introductory problems challenged students to imagine processes that subverted themselves Peter Lynch, Collapsible Dome, peristyle at the Cranbrook Academy of Art and Art Museum, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, 2003 Dome structure made of wooden slats and sliding connectors, all identical. The logic of aggregation determines the dome’s shape.

Todd Grant, Living Room for the Repressed Acrobat, Master of Architecture thesis project, Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, 2000 1:75 ceramic model. Lightweight space-filling elements, each the size of a giant body, can be repositioned to enclose space and create a framework for climbing and resting.

Mary Kim, Four Odradek Towers, Master of Architecture thesis project, Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, 2002 A set of intertwined towers made of wooden struts with a triangular cross-section and a compound mitre at each end. The unit proposes its own logic of assembly.

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Each problem, question, and seminar has the potential to play a key role in the arc of a student’s education Seminars, Guest Lectures and Symposia

Sheng-Feng Lin, City Writing, Master of Architecture thesis project, Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, 2001

In the third quarter of every year I organised and led seminars on themes from literary theory, philosophy and sociology. Subjects included the limits of artificial intelligence, nihilism, postmodernism, dialogicality, reflexive modernity/risk society, critique of development and the writings of Ivan Illich. Throughout each academic year I organised lectures on architecture history and practice, as well as workshops with practitioners in related disciplines. Visitors included architects Renzo Vallebuona, Gabriel Ruiz Cabrero, Eduardo Souto de Moura, Blanca Lleó Fernández, Carsten Juel-Christiansen and Kyna Leski. Historians included Aihiko Minamoto and Robert Jan van Pelt. Artists included butoh dancer Tetsuro Fukuhara and sculptors Meg Webster and Peter Fend. On occasion I organised Academywide symposia on themes within the humanities. Guests included film director Godfrey Reggio, literary historians Olga Meerson and Hugh Kenner, sci-fi writer Bruce Sterling, and social entrepreneur Claire Robinson. Contexts and Collaborators Within Detroit

The city of Detroit is the background reality of Cranbrook Academy of Art. Over the years I spent there, architecture students were recognising to an everincreasing degree that their studio work needed to address the social and economic forces shaping this part of the world: suburbanisation, segregation, racism, post-industrial development. In order to facilitate students’ work in the city, with and for Detroit’s residents, I proposed, in collaboration with local teachers and administrators, that interested Cranbrook students could help make a teaching garden at Bunche Elementary School on Detroit’s East Side. Another project framework, perhaps the most important of my tenure, was with an

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Design proposal for a public garden at the Taipei Guest House, conceived of as flows of force.

Jonsara Ruth, Space Between Suit, Master of Architecture studio, Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, 1998 above: A spandex cloth stretched between two industrial overalls makes interpersonal space tangible.

Thomas Kong, Folded Screen, Master of Architecture thesis project, Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, 1998 right: This small construction of shellacked paper is one of Kong’s meditations on the Chinese landscape tradition. It evokes, at the same time, a porous ‘scholar’s rock’ and the geometric fretwork screens in a Chinese garden.

elderly Black community organiser in Detroit, Lee Burns, who worked for decades to establish an intergenerational Black community near the old Packard automobile plant. He invited Cranbrook’s (mostly white and Asian) students to visit and offered them the use of his land and vacant structures for sculptural and architectural installations. Burns’s strongest teaching was silent: he gave students the space and time to recognise their role in the social and environmental changes most urgently needed. The wisest Cranbrook students recognised that a ‘gift-economy’ ethic underlay Burns’s generosity and offered him help with his own ongoing projects. Their solidarity made our collective interdependence visible. Almost all schools of architecture assign introductory design problems, offer guest lectures, organise study trips and collaborations and emphasise

student-defined thesis work. At this level Cranbrook’s architecture programme is typical. What distinguishes Cranbrook is molecular. Because the programme is small and concentrated, each problem, question, seminar, fellow student, guest critic, lecturer and collaborator has the potential to play a key role in the arc of a student’s two-year education. The Architect-in-Residence tries to shape this aggregate into a constellation by introducing certain questions, readings, lectures, situations … Every element put forward becomes salient and constitutive. In this manner the values and character of the department as a whole are set forth. The programme affirms the singularity of each student, every line of thought and every work of architecture. In so doing, it continues to offer a radical and non-ideological counterproposal to normative architecture education. 1

Notes 1. See Peter Lynch, ‘Peter Lynch’, in Michael Chadwick (ed), 2 Back to School: Architectural Education, September/October (no 5), 2004, pp 53–7. 2. Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, tr Michael Hardt, University of Minnesota Press (Minneapolis, MN), 1993, passim. 3. See CG Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Vintage Books (New York), 1989, pp 209, 212–13. 4. Mark Coir, ‘Cranbrook: A Brief History’, Cranbrook Educational Community (Bloomfield Hills, Michigan), 2006: https:// www.cranbrookartmuseum.org/wp-content/ uploads/2016/05/Cranbrook-History.pdf. 5. Eliel Saarinen, The City: Its Growth, Its Decay, Its Future, Reinhold Publishing Corp (New York), 1943, p 147. 6. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Continuum (New York), 1970, pp 95–6.

Lois Weinthal, Wing Chair Unfolded, Master of Architecture thesis project, Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, 1998 Instead of using the operations of projective geometry – rotation, folding, flattening – to draw rooms and objects, Weinthal applied them to the construction of rooms and objects themselves, materialising the imaginary operations of the architect. In this chair, textile wings are connective tissue between plans and elevations.

Text © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: pp 88–9 © Scott Saikley; pp 92–3(t) Photo Tim Thayer; pp 92–3(b) © Todd Grant; p 93(r) © Mary Kim; p 94(t) © Shen-Feng Lin; p 94(c) © Jonsara Ruth; p 94(b) © Thomas Kong; p 95 © Lois Weinthal

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THE INTERIOR WITHIN HAND’S REACH

Michelle Xu, Orthographic mapping of plaster cast forms, Design Dynamics II, School of Interior Design, The Creative School, Toronto Metropolitan University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, 2022 The void of a plasticine form reflecting the palm of a hand organises a sequence of orthographic views. Secondary to the voids, three cut lines made with a bandsaw give linear texture to an internal layer of poché, in contrast to uncut surfaces on the exterior.

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Lois Weinthal

TACTILE PROXIMITY

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One of the fundamental skills of an architect is the ability to create void from mass. Another is the choreography of the changing relationship between bodies, objects and materiality, creating visual and haptic sensations. Lois Weinthal explores and teaches these particular architectural phenomena. Here she takes us on a journey illustrated by the recent work of her students at Toronto Metropolitan University.

Lois Weinthal, Wing Chair, Master of Architecture thesis project, Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, 1998 opposite: A corner detail of Wing Chair unhinges to reveal a faceted canvas wing.

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If architecture can be seen as a shell, then the Cranbrook Architecture Department pries it open and invites enquiry into its many facets. Within these facets are layers that surround the body – from textiles to objects to walls – a collection that gives shape to interiors. The materialisation of these layers, such as clothing and upholstery, overlap and nest within one another, making their proximity close enough to pinch. The study of proxemics gauges distances of personal and public spheres from the body, and provides the base for the notion of tactile proximity, where the body is a gauge of interior surfaces within hand’s reach of architectural surfaces that gradually become out-of-reach. Flexible materials within hand’s reach can be altered through techniques spanning apparel construction to upholstery; and, as materials scale up in thickness and durability, the idea of pinching layers together – such as clothing to the interior envelope – requires a change in fabrication techniques and experimentation in details. Suggesting these layers can inform one another is where theoretical questions emerge in the space of interiors, and guide the writing of design exercises for the study of interior design. The Cranbrook Architecture Department provides lessons into these investigations as the studio space is conducive to exploring the multifaceted interior with a record of works that extend from the contained drawing board into a full-scale drawing room. Pinching the Interior

The theoretical pinch that draws architecture closer to the body suggests the need for spatial and material elasticity to loosen architectural conventions. Doing so presents opportunities to integrate knowledge from tangent disciplines. Thesis projects from the Cranbrook Architecture Department provide examples of works that integrate multidisciplinary knowledge into traditional architectural conventions. In Monica Wyatt’s thesis project Planning the Body (1992–3), liquid latex rubber with gauze was used to cast a simulacrum of the body, and when removed, score lines with tailor precision transformed the cast into an unfolded plan of the body. The outcome revealed connections between map-making and apparel construction. This layer occupies a space between body and clothing, and breaks from historical architectural representations of the body, suggesting that past examples were insufficient. In Jeanine Centuori’s thesis project Flattened Room (1991), the intimacy of the interior and the possessions within were encased in latex and then unfolded into a map following rules of orthographic drawing. The adjacency of interior elements within hand’s reach are mapped to one another, as if pinching them together, reinforcing interior surfaces with tactile proximity. The architectural shell is left behind as the interior comes to the foreground, marking a point of departure for shaping architecture from the inside out. The hindrance of conventional materials was exchanged for unconventional materials to support the pursuit of thesis questions. The outcomes produced full-scale drawings guided by orthographic projection, leaving conventional scaled drawings to be read as fiction in the absence of this knowledge. Orthographic projection provides multifaceted views which, when brought together, assemble into a developed form. A similar action can be found with a dart in apparel construction that inherently uses a pinch to transition a textile surface from flat to developed. The previous examples showed how loosening

architectural conventions could propose alternative approaches to design, which informed my own thesis project, titled Wing Chair (1998). The action of a dart provided flexibility to fold and unfold a chair between flat orthographic views into a developed surface. An increase in detailing transformed the dart into a structural wing, while simultaneously conveying instruction and notation. Works in the Cranbrook Architecture Department often prompt more questions than answers, imparting an ongoing pursuit. As an alumna, one form of pursuit has been developing these questions into design exercises for students in the study of interiors, where scale and materials are experienced within hand’s reach. These design exercises are written as bookends to an undergraduate interior design curriculum, where introductory studies in the first year examine scale, poché, casting and orthographic drawing, and conclude in the final year with advanced studies that bridge theory to making. Casting Hollows and Solids

Thesis research at Cranbrook Academy of Art includes time spent in the aisles of the Art Academy Library. In a search to frame ideas about interiority, a book by Rudolf Arnheim titled The Dynamics of Architectural Form (1977) was one that came to the foreground and provided reminders about the foundations of interiority. Section titles in the book include ‘Solids and Hollows’, ‘Inside and Outside’, ‘Concavity and Convexity’, ‘Interiors Interrelated’ and ‘Looking from Both Sides’. As these titles suggest, interiors can be

understood in contrast to the exterior. Arnheim expands upon ideas of interiority, making them explicit while elsewhere they are often only implied. This reminder to be explicit when speaking about interiors acts as a starting point for a sequence of first-year interior design exercises where emphasis is placed on poché as a complement to the interior. Guiding this focus is a section of the Tao Te Ching, a Chinese text fundamental to Taoism, referenced by Arnheim: ‘We turn clay to make a vessel; But it is on the space where there is nothing that the usefulness of the vessel depends.’1 Similar to the vessel, ‘the space where there is nothing’ in an architectural shell is where the usefulness of architecture depends – the interior. The first-year design problem begins with casting voids using plaster, a common material that lines the interior. One cast uses breath to inflate balloons, and the second uses the hand to shape plasticine. Each is cast separately in an orthogonal formwork small enough to be held in two hands. Once the formwork is released and the plaster set, students look for significant features on the surface of each cast where the inside forms peek to the outside, revealing pinch points between inside and outside. These observations determine three cut lines along the x, y and z axes to reveal the interior. After removing the balloon and plasticine, the surfaces of the plaster forms are scanned to produce a map using principles of orthographic projection. Poché is rendered flat and the usefulness of the interior comes to the foreground as light and shadow reveal depth to the interior.

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Joelle Poitras, Orthographic mapping of plaster cast forms, Design Dynamics II, School of Interior Design, The Creative School, Toronto Metropolitan University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, 2020 Convex interiors reveal gradations of light and shadow giving depth to orthographic views framed by poché. The sequence of cut lines produces multiple oculi between inside and outside.

Kamila Said Mohd Daud, Plaster cast with section cuts, Design Dynamics II, School of Interior Design, The Creative School, Toronto Metropolitan University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, 2022 Plasticine shaped by the hand is cast in plaster, and when cut along x, y and z axes, the contrast of materials and mirrored cut planes visually reconnects the interior.

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Nina (Xinjian) Li, Plaster cast with section cuts, Design Dynamics II, School of Interior Design, The Creative School, Toronto Metropolitan University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, 2022 In this first-year interior design plaster cast exercise, cut lines reveal the shape of interior spaces while simultaneously interrupting and connecting them.

In the concluding year of study, poché at the scale of body and interior are used as an opportunity to pinch the pocket in clothing to the pocket of a wall. Characteristics of poché in the context of clothing and walls overlap to bring architectural surfaces that fall out of reach of the body into reach of the interior. The studies begin with casts of the body using plaster gauze to reveal one side that mimics the body with precision, and the other side with layers that build up into a generalisation, much like clothing is a generalisation of the body. Referring back to Monica Wyatt’s thesis work, casts produced are just a few millimetres thick, filling the void between skin and the drape of cloth. This latent space guides the next steps where tactile proximity from body to clothing is extended between clothing and interior envelope. The pinch from clothing to interior envelope is guided by a sequence of exercises that integrate materials and techniques from adjacent disciplines. Studies of the casts reveal how the shape of the body changes, such as areas that taper, widen or curve. These changes are used to develop a technique to alter a shirt to the same area of the body. Apparel and upholstery construction provide techniques with emphasis on developing a system rather than producing a fashion style. The body is then removed from the garment and the alteration methodology is translated into a castable formwork for plaster. The intent is not for the plaster cast to look like the shirt, but to become an iteration that stems from the system developed in the shirt alteration. The need to replace conventional materials and approaches as found in the works of Centuori and Wyatt are lessons that contribute to this phase of the design problem. Rather than accepting gypsum wallboard as a default for the interior envelope, apparel construction gives shape to fabric formwork, drawing the interior envelope closer to the body. In these examples, pleats and smocking play intermediary roles in shaping formwork. This transition captures the potential to shape textiles from the body to the scale of wall poché. Taken one step further, apertures are integrated into the formwork to reveal pinches between inside and outside, recalling the first-year casting exercises where voids on the inside peek to the outside.

Apparel and upholstery construction provide techniques with emphasis on developing a system rather than producing a fashion style 101

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Anika Choi, Smocking material studies, Design Studio VIII, School of Interior Design, The Creative School, Toronto Metropolitan University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, 2014 A smocking pattern allows clothing to expand and contract to fit the body. When applied to a sample of textiles, material changes spanning flexible to rigid offer variations of tactile proximity.

This design exercise takes soft materials at the scale of the body to give shape to the interior envelope, which in turn, impresses a pattern upon the architectural shell. Design begins from the inside out, with castings that reference clothing details made rigid at the scale of plaster walls. As the interior envelope is drawn to the body, the forms are not quite body, not quite interior, but pinched somewhere in-between. Drawn to the Interior

Danielle Zandueta, Plaster cast formed with textile smocking formwork, Design Seminar I, School of Interior Design, The Creative School, Toronto Metropolitan University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, 2018 Opposite left: A smocking pattern increases in complexity, from textile on the body to formwork for plaster. The smocking formwork results in pillow-like surfaces when cast in plaster. Pinched fabric inherent in the smocking technique creates apertures in the final cast.

Louell Palparan, Plaster cast formed with pleated formwork, Design Seminar I, School of Interior Design, The Creative School, Toronto Metropolitan University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, 2017 Opposite right: Pleated accordion folds give shape to formwork, where peaks are scored to produce apertures. The inherent flexibility of pleating allows the formwork to responds to the flow of plaster until rendered static.

Translating experiences from the Cranbrook Architecture Department into studies for interior design curricula is one path of many to emerge from the studio experience. These interior design exercises from introduction to concluding years of study connect materiality with theoretical questions that increase in complexity. Full-scale studies introduce students to working with materials inherent to the interior, while negotiating their weight and assembly, which invites supporting hands among students. This carries on a tradition of collaboration in the Cranbrook Architecture Department. These interior-focused assignments highlight qualities that are within hand’s reach and seek to draw architecture inwards rather than inherit default surfaces out-of-reach. They reveal the complexity of giving shape to layers and materials closest to the body that are constantly shifting and adjusting, unlike the static materials of an architectural shell. These outcomes seek to act as a starting point to elicit questions from students for an ongoing pursuit of the interior. 1 Notes 1. Rudolf Arnheim, The Dynamics of Architectural Form: Based on the 1975 Mary Duke Biddle Lectures at the Cooper Union, University of California Press (Berkeley, CA), 1977, p 94. Text © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: pp 96–7 © Michelle Xu; pp 99, 100(b), 101, 102(bl&r) Photos Lois Weinthal; p 100(t) © Joelle Poitras; pp 102–3(t) © Anika Choi

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Jesse Reiser

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Jesse Reiser, Mnemonic Objects Taxonomy, Master of Architecture studio, Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, 1984 A partial taxonomy of mnemonic objects crafted out of bronze using jewellery-making techniques while a student at Cranbrook. The charismatic forms draw from the legacy of John Hejduk and Marcel Duchamp.

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Jesse Reiser reflects on the unexpected re-emergence of craft within the disciplinary body of architecture: from Buck’s Rock Work Camp in Connecticut during the summers of the 1970s, to Cranbrook Academy of Art, to the ongoing work of Reiser + Umemoto, the New York-based practice he co-founded.

Richard Thomas at work in his studio, Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, 29 December 1959 The head of the Metalsmithing Department at Cranbrook for almost four decades (1948–84), Richard Thomas would prove to be an important influence whose patient metalworking instruction would technically motivate much of Reiser + Umemoto’s early work.

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Within Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s influential 1986 text Nomadology: The War Machine, the fundamental characteristics (as defined by 14th-century Islamic scholar Ibn Khaldun) of any nomadic body (corps) of individuals working collectively are ‘families or lineages PLUS esprit de corps’.1 The authors go on to explain that within Khaldun’s specific nomadic definition of lineage, ‘the family is a band vector instead of a fundamental cell’ that allows for the genealogy and its requisite knowledge to be ‘transferred from one family to another according to the aptitude of a given family at a given time’.2 Upon rereading this passage, I was struck by the startling resemblance that the nomadic body (corps) bears to my own definition of the discipline of architecture. The disciplinary body of architecture is one made up of a multiplicity of continuous projects adopted or abandoned by a series of committed individuals over the course of years and across great distances, united not by blood but by a common set of shared ideals and a strong, if invisible, sense of esprit de corps. My understanding of the discipline as ‘lineages PLUS esprit de corps’ was not automatic, but rather a direct result of the process itself of learning how to design – an education that began at childhood and carried through into my time at Cranbrook. GEMEINSCHAFT My first introduction to Cranbrook, its unique pedagogy and persistent lineage of talented designers, came by way of the Buck’s Rock Work Camp in the idyllic woods of New Milford, Connecticut, during the summer of 1971. Initiated in 1943, the camp’s founders were the European émigré educators Ernst and Ilse Bulova, who were acolytes of physician and educator Maria Montessori who pioneered the concept of ‘self-directed practical play’ for early childhood development. Owing much to influence of the ‘Montessori Method’, Buck’s Rock Camp (‘Work’ was unfortunately removed from its name after the Bulovas passed away) was – and to a large extent still is – a utopic socialist experiment in adolescent self-determination through the dynamic of creative work. The camp as I knew it was a loose constellation of ‘shops’, run by experts in their respective disciplines, that allowed campers to experiment in a wide array of arts, crafts, performance, writing, farming and construction projects according to their own inclinations. There was no prescribed daily programme – only that you not be idle, that you must work. Construction and especially the performing arts are inherently interdisciplinary, and indeed many of the theatrical productions were so serious and complex that at one time or another they called upon the talents of practically every shop in the camp. Importantly though, the contributions were distinct from one another; their collective success was because everyone stayed within their own disciplines. More about this later. It was in the Buck’s Rock silver shop that I was introduced to the joys and challenges of metalsmithing – and allied crafts (including gunsmithing) – by Wayne Felgar who himself was a Cranbrook alumnus,

having studied under Richard Thomas, head of the Academy’s Metalsmithing Department from 1948 to 1984. Although I was not cognisant of it at the time, in hindsight it is clear that the success of institutions like Cranbrook and Buck’s Rock lies in the way in which they foster individual creative explorations (craft) through the intimate mechanisms of mentorship, but without being divorced from society, elective affinities and the dynamics of the group – in a word, Gemeinschaft. At Buck’s Rock it was a deliberate project by the Bulovas to orchestrate an organic Gemeinschaft every summer.

THE EXPLORATORY ETHOS Although universally practised (in some form) by those that find success in the design disciplines, craft is a difficult topic to teach. The phrase ‘material exploration’ is a more useful term in that it breaks craft down into an operation that can be rehearsed by students without a need, or even expectation, for them to follow strict guidelines. In many ways the phrase begs for some transgression of the norm in order for it to rise to the level of exploration. For myself, that fruitful transgression came in the form of microcrystalline sculpting wax, often called ‘Victory Brown’ wax, a material that had been relegated to a dusty garage by the time I reached Cranbrook as a postgraduate student in the autumn of 1981. The curious chocolatebrown wax had at one time been the premiere medium for modelling sculpture in preparation for lost-wax bronze casting. The Swedish artist Carl Milles, who was Artist-inResidence, Sculpture at Cranbrook from 1931 to 1951, had used the material extensively during his tenure in teaching and in his own monumental figural bronzes which are key features of the Cranbrook campus. In 1980 a sculptor in the Architecture Department, Marc Loftus – whom Daniel Libeskind recruited after he came in second to Maya Lin (then a student of Architecture at Yale) in the Vietnam War Memorial Competition for the National Mall in Washington, DC – discovered a large cache of Milles’s wax in a garage on campus. Nobody in the Sculpture Department was even remotely interested in the stuff, as the then-prevailing material of choice was steel for large-scale welded sculpture. Marc was quite familiar with its traditional use in modelling figures, as his competition entry involved lost-wax casting of thousands of bronze army men. (Alas, Maya Lin’s abstract entry prevailed.) Marc instructed me on casting and working the material and I was a ready learner. In its unalloyed state, microcrystalline wax is malleable bordering on the amorphous, particularly in the warm months of the year – good for sculptural modelling but not much else.

Jesse Reiser, Walls of the Second Theater, Master of Architecture thesis project, Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, 1984 above: Close-up image of a mass of contorted bodies from Reiser’s thesis project while at Cranbrook. Formed in microcrystalline wax, it was subsequently cast in bronze as a triptych depicting a lively performance of bodies and objects in space.

Carl Milles’s studio, Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, c 1940 left: The studio with several sculptures at various stages of completion. In the foreground is a large expressive face modelled in microcrystalline wax.

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The real breakthrough materially was when I experimented with tempering microcrystalline with paraffin. This yielded material that when combined in the right proportions possessed both rigidity and plasticity; cast in sheets it is the perfect material to work planarly but also could hold precise compound curves. Moreover it could be cut easily and precisely with an X-Acto knife and welded with adept use of a soldering iron. Architectural models in wax could be made quickly, way faster than conventional cardboard or chipboard, and they could also be changed and remade quickly, which is crucial in design. After all, who would be inclined to change a model they spent hours over? And how inclined would they be to explore a change that would take hours more yet have an uncertain outcome? It could be a good change, but more likely it will be bad; such is the way in design. Wax modelling obviated this dilemma – or at least the increase in production speed removed most of the psychological impediments to exploration. Wax’s association with metalworking, along with its relative abundance, piqued my interest and I immersed myself in the defunct material, even going so far as to use it exclusively in my thesis project: Walls of the Second Theater (1983). At the time, wax was only understood at scale, as a phenomenal object; I saw it quite differently, as a representational medium, not unlike paper or clay:

Reiser + Umemoto, Kaohsiung Port Terminal, Kaohsiung, Taiwan, 2022 A construction photo of the nearly complete Kaohsiung Port Terminal in the southern Taiwanese city of Kaohsiung. The iconic tri-lobe form has been an ongoing formal project for Reiser + Umemoto, spanning decades of research and refinement.

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Reiser + Umemoto, Tri-lobe study model for Taipei Music Center competition, 2009 Early wax tri-lobe study model for the performance hall of the Taipei Music Center competition. The initial tri-lobe design would eventually transform into a larger single-space theatre due to music industry input.

Daniel Libeskind, Drawings from the ‘Chamberworks' series, Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, 1983 A composition of three drawn works from Libeskind’s influential 'Chamberworks' series series completed during his tenure at Cranbrook. Libeskind would draw on the formal inventions of these drawings for much of his later career.

something whose human-directed formal qualities could be translated both in terms of material behaviour and scale. In short, a wax maquette could serve directly as the model for architecture similar to the way in which a plan or section drawing might. My intuition about wax would only be later validated by the introduction in the 1990s of another (at the time) novel tool: computer-aided 3D modelling software. Interestingly enough, the way microcrystalline wax behaves physically has an uncanny resonance with non-uniform rational B-spline (NURBS) modelling techniques. Both entail the construction of surfaces (developable or topological) bound by curves which are then joined along discrete edges to construct nonprimitive ‘solid’ geometries that are in fact more akin to hollow shells. Wax shells/surfaces, like their digital cousins, can be easily cut and joined without much deformation, mimicking the seamless combinatory environment of software like Rhino. More than a momentary epiphany, the union of analogue and digital methods would become vital to the way in which Reiser + Umemoto operates at both a formal and technical level. Paradoxically, as the scale of projects increased to the urban and infrastructural with the Taipei Music Center and Kaohsiung Port Terminal (both 2022) in Taiwan, myself and the office have returned again and again to the productive dialogue between physical and digital making. The massive undulating tri-lobed body of Kaohsiung owes its formal dynamism as much to the gentle nuances of the singular human hand working with wax as it does to the distributed forces of modern technology to manifest complexity at a truly monumental scale. The unlikely union of analogue and digital methods – which was available to all at the time of the digital turn – was not widely adopted, due to a set of misplaced dogmas rooted in the ideologies of both history and technology. Those that might now be called ‘digital’ harboured a pervasive superstition about the inherent irrationality of physical making which lacks the rule-based rigours of the precise software environments that had come to stand for objective truth at the time, and for many still does. At the other end of the spectrum, those that would champion traditional manifestations of craft as the laboured output of expert (highly paid) craftspeople rejected the adoption of new tools out of a profitable sense of nostalgia which nominates the bespoke as an object of exclusive desire for the rich and powerful. At the heart of both dogmas is a persistent appeal to logic – either as computer algorithm or historical allegory – as the basis of design decisions, leading the work down predicable formal pathways. Through a material dialogue between wax and software I was able to explore the limits of logic and find new life between ordering systems. Craft, when elevated to the level of spirit, cannot be a set of concrete techniques or even well-tested methods: it must be an exploratory ethos that logically embraces the ‘anexact yet rigorous’ nature of novel forms of making, to quote German philosopher Edmund Husserl’s praise of vague forms within his seminal essay ‘The Origin of Geometry’ (1936).3

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THE SECRET REASON OF UNREASON My interest in the reasons of the irrational in design was deeply influenced by Daniel Libeskind, who was my mentor at Cranbrook. While at the Academy, Libeskind would split his time evenly between his drawing practice done in private, and informal semi-public discussions on design and philosophy. I vividly remember him citing the Classical Greek philosopher Heraclitus’s much-quoted observation that ‘the most beautiful arrangement is a pile of things poured out at random’. At the heart of both the Heraclitus quote and Libeskind’s developing design philosophy was the secret reason of unreason, which animates the world. At the time I understood unreason as merely a critique of instrumental reason, in reaction to the Modernist project. It would only be later with the rise of computation that I would come to fully understand the importance of unreason’s implicit corollary that logical systems, no matter how complex or totalising, harbour within them their own unique absurdities. As my friend and colleague Stan Allen once so eloquently put it (in reference to Gregory Bateson’s Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972)), what truly matters is the ‘difference that makes a difference’ – a characteristic often missing from computational work. Endless variation – which might have been abstractly appealing in pre-digital times – is proven through the unexpected dullness of the parametric to be just another oppressive form of sameness.

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Reiser + Umemoto, Engendering Plate, 1988 above: The Engendering Plate was constructed through the intentionally haphazard paper-mâché layering of cuttings from the Yellow Pages phone book and various newspapers, sanded down to reveal a field of word fragments.

Reiser + Umemoto, Engendering Plate overlaid with sigils, 1988 below: An image of the reconstructed Engendering Plate with an overlay of ‘signature’ lines diagramming out the ‘resident’ sigils latent in the Engendering Plate word matrix.

Reiser + Umemoto, Book of Sigils, 1988 An elaborate series of hundreds of unique plates cataloguing the process of extracting signature forms from the ‘resident’ field of text created during the process of making the Engendering Plate. The book includes both ‘views’ – square subdivisions of the text field – and ‘signatures’ – the new linear marks derived from found language.

Interestingly enough, my dissatisfaction with rulebased complexity began before the digital and was tied as well to the deep influence of Libeskind on my early modes of working. The hermetic output of Libeskind’s drawing practice is most perfectly exemplified by his ‘Chamberworks’ series (1983) – highly detailed abstract line drawings that explored in precise graphic terms the formal relationships between architecture and music. In their obsessive complexity wrought out of hours of careful hand drawing, the ‘Chamberworks’ inspired my own dive into the depths of hermeticism in the form of the Book of Sigils, completed in 1988 – not long after my graduation from Cranbrook. Part of a series of textual projects inspired by the Jewish mystical tradition of the Kabbalah and exploring the formal relationships between architecture and language, the sigils were pulled from an early collage piece titled Engendering Plate (1988) which laminated and erased newsprint into a field of partial text. Working intensely and often in isolation, I carefully recomposed salient pieces of ‘resident’ language from the mass of the plate. The process was very labour-intensive and, as I would discover, almost endless, resulting in 561 sigils which when recombined generated a field of hieroglyphs not at all graphically dissimilar to the ‘Chamberworks’. Although for Libeskind the ‘Chamberworks’ would prove to be a powerful formal reserve which he could draw from for almost 35 years, the Book of Sigils (and the textual projects more broadly) were ultimately a fantastically complex detour for our own practice. Paralleling the end of Communism in Europe, my foray into Jewish identity by way of hermetic micro-graphics would end with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and social and political impetus towards postwar identity building. The short life of the textual projects stands in contrast to other sustained formal obsessions such as the tri-lobe morphology, which first began in the pre-digital era with the

1994 competition for Cardiff Bay Opera House in Wales, continued through a series of programmatically dissimilar projects and was ultimately fully realised decades later in the mature form of the Kaohsiung Port Terminal. In this evolution the morphology developed out of optical and acoustical concerns of the opera house typology, and we found that the same concerns could be applied to the port terminal by literally reversing the optical and circulatory vectors from the inward focus of the theatre to the outward-facing flows of a ship terminal. A sustained project in architecture is a composite of aesthetic interests, formal models and compositional principles which have their own ontologies and durations. Some design vectors have brief half-lives; our work with language is measured in years; other lines of enquiry – like our decades-long engagement with microcrystalline wax – live on into the present. What is important is the ongoing individuation of the project which often predates and may outlive its author. Creative institutions like Cranbrook foster intimate relationships between unique voices that condense and redirect cultural energies crucial to sustaining the spirit of the discipline. 1 Notes 1. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Nomadology: The War Machine, tr Brian Massumi, Semiotext(e) (New York), 1986, p 24. 2. Ibid. 3. Cited in ibid, p 25. 4. Mentioned in conversation with Stan Allen around 1997.

Text © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: pp 104–5, 107(t) © Jesse Reiser; p 106 Courtesy of Cranbrook Archives, Cranbrook Center for Collections and Research. Photo Harvey Croze (AA2895-45); p 107(b) Courtesy of Cranbrook Archives, Cranbrook Center for Collections and Research. Photo Harvey Croze (COM3286-1); pp 108(t), 108–9(b), 110–11 © RUR Architecture; p 109(t) © Studio Daniel Libeskind / Daniel Libeskind

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Peggy Deamer

F-O-R-I-N-G A-C-Eliel Saarinen, Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, 1929 A brick barrel vault at the entrance to the Maija Grotell Courtyard at Cranbrook Academy of Art.

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--MTHE SUBJECT IN THE OBJECT

--T-IO-N

John Hejduk, Cooper Union Foundation Building renovation, New York City, 1975 Hejduk’s renovation of the 1859 landmark building emphasised pure forms, the round elevator shown here contrasting with a square elevator on the other side of the open-space lobby.

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In an autobiographical article,  Professor Emerita of Yale University’s School of Architecture Peggy Deamer records her experiences at architecture school and the epiphany moments that shifted her perception of the profession. This prompted her to question architects’ love of creating ‘perfect’ form and dwelling in the purely ocular-centric and the cult of the lone genius.

Eliel Saarinen (design) / Studio Loja Saarinen (weaving), Cranbrook Map Tapestry, 1935 The plan of Cranbrook Academy integrates art, architecture and design and includes residences, studios and workshops.

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Cranbrook and the Cooper Union are bound together in my architectural thoughts: the same dedication to craft, exploration, boundary-pushing and the individuality of expression. The same commitment to depth of investigation; the same ethos, as Charles Eames said about Cranbrook, of ‘getting the best to the most for the least’.1 And there are common lessons offered by Eliel Saarinen’s Cranbrook campus (1926–49) and by John Hejduk’s renovation of the Foundation Building of Cooper Union (1975) to their students: use of materials that are both specific and abstract; the priority of spatial gathering; the mixing of spaces to think with those to make; the gathering of artists of different disciplines. At Cranbrook, the spatial lessons happened along the campus plan. At Cooper they happened in the connection between the exterior city context and the interior promenade. I also have an affinity for those Cooper alumni Daniel Libeskind and Dan Hoffman, who headed the Cranbrook Architecture Department at different times (1978–85 and 1986–96 respectively) and to Tod Williams, my teacher at Cooper in 1974–5, who, along with Billie Tsien, designed the Cranbrook Natatorium (1999). But I am unlike others in this cohort because I have become a critic of our profession, and much of that critique is on the overemphasis on aesthetics in our discipline – aesthetics that are at the centre of a Cooper/Cranbrook education. This article, then, is an explanation of why there is no contradiction between the love of architectural form, as taught at Cranbrook and Cooper, and its critique. It is a personal story, but it is also a note to other architects to rethink an identity based purely on design excellence and a profession trivialised by that singular identification. BArch and the Concept In our first studio at Cooper Union (1973–4), the year-long nine-square grid project, the purely formal assignments – place full-height or partial or punctured walls into the pre-determined grid – had to be motivated by a concept. The concept clearly had nothing to do with programme (there was none); it had to do with formal relations set in motion by the placement of those objects – periphery versus centre, layering, the implicit oblique, partiality or full opacity, solid versus void, etc. These lessons were as philosophical as they were visual. What was the essence of a partial panel? To figure it out, panels were stared at and thought about for a week. The exercises taught us that a ‘good’ concept was original, not in the sense that it came without precedents, but in the sense that it was yours; it identified what you thought mattered in space-making. I so remember a studio mate whose approach to placing full panels in his grid was using an abundance of panels, few on the orthogonal and many outside the grid, while the rest of us discreetly placed the fewest possible panels to make our spatial point. He was praised, as were others of the minimal sort. The lesson was: go for it; go for the concept. Personal conviction trumped formal propriety. At the same time, over the course of a year, we learned that the link between concept and form is wildly complex.

John Hejduk, Cooper Union Foundation Building renovation, New York City, 1975 The exterior in this axonometric sketch does not show design input: the renovation did not affect the exterior of the landmarked building. But its skittery drawing technique was typical of Hejduk’s personal, animated style. Also visible, as if outside the building, are the round and square forms of the interior elevators.

John Hejduk, Nine-square grid base layout, New York, 1954–63 Hejduk, with Robert Slutzky and Lee Hirsche and in conversation with Colin Rowe, devised the nine-square grid project when teaching at the University of Texas School of Architecture between 1954 and 1956. He then brought it to Cooper Union. Shown in this annotated concept sketch, it was the post-and-beam layout into which students inserted objects, such as panels, stairs and cubes.

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Forms are blunt while the concept – always about a spatial experience – might be subtle and/or not singular. Forms don’t speak, but a concept does. Forms are what they are but the concept received by the viewer may not be the one intended by the designer. The lesson in other words was less a commitment to form than to what form pointed to, and what it pointed to was determined by us, the making subject. PhD and the Subject My PhD at Princeton University School of Architecture in New Jersey (1982–88) was the antithesis of my education at Cooper where I got little history or theory. I skipped going into an MArch programme because I knew I’d spend all my time in studio, and that wasn’t the point. Yet, I wanted to study formalism; the complexity of relations set into motion by form-and-concept still grabbed. But the writings of the traditional early 20th-century AngloSaxon formalists – Herbert Read, Clive Bell, Roger Fry – were so dull: composition, balance of colour and size, figure-ground, ambiguity – all from outside the formconcept paradigm or the maker-object-viewer exchange. In counter-distinction to this trend were the Russian Formalists with their notion of defamiliarisation. If the goal of form-making is to make the reader/viewer (they were largely literary critics, but their ideas spread to visual artists like Vladimir Tatlin) connect with an entity or a concept anew – be it a word or an image or a window – the artist should denaturalise the object by ‘roughening’ it, making it awkward. And the key to this was exposing the artist’s act of manipulation upon it. The object and the artist get illuminated together. Also in counter-distinction to the traditional British formalists was the work of Adrian Stokes (1902–1972) – a British art critic largely disparaged by his UK colleagues for his eccentric, psychoanalytic, anti-Modernist views – on whom I eventually wrote my dissertation. Stokes had been analysed by the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein and he saw his work as the application of Kleinian theory to art and architecture analysis. He believed that the way artists organise objects corresponds to the way their inner objects are positioned in the psyche. For Stokes, formalism is equated with the position that an artist/architect takes vis-à-vis the object, and that position could be characterised as either depressive or schizophrenic. The depressive position meant that the artist, when engaged with an object (normally for him stone), or a wall or window, or paint in a painting, would meet its matter half-way. The position was depressing because there was no purity of power in that meeting, neither subject nor object ‘won’. Formally, this position was exemplified by a blurring of background and foreground, by avoiding ‘composition’ determined by a frame, by attention to implied versus depicted depth. The goal was to collapse the viewer’s vision onto the surface of the object, thereby revealing conceptual versus represented depth. The schizophrenic position was the opposite. It indicated a separation between subject and

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Peggy Deamer, Nine-Square Grid Project: Inside/Outside, First-Year Studio, Cooper Union, New York City, 1974 As the final first-year project, students were, for the first time in a year, given the freedom to take away as much of the grid as desired and insert what was necessary for their concept. This project explored spatial ambiguity and the fact that the 16th-century Italian architect Andrea Palladio’s villas were a basis for gridding as an organisational concept.

object, a forcing of artistic will onto the object. Its formal attributes were frames separating image from context, sculptural forms that were ‘moulded’ and not ‘carved’, of façades that were too plastic/sculptural. For much of his life, Stokes believed that only the depressive position was psychoanalytically ‘healthy’ and that only ‘good’ depressive art would serve the viewer’s and thereby society’s mental wellbeing. Later in life, he came to see this assessment of depressive as ‘good’ and schizophrenic as ‘bad’ as itself schizophrenic, and claimed that there were positive attributes to both. But the larger point for me was not the assessment of these positions; it was that form was an aspect of the subject more than it was of the object, and that what the subject made had implications for its reception in society. It was an eccentric reiteration of lessons from Cooper and Russian Formalism, but a reiteration nonetheless. The maker was foregrounded in the object and as such, both had obligations to those experiencing the object.

The larger point for me was not the assessment of these positions; it was that form was an aspect of the subject more than it was of the object, and that what the subject made had implications for its reception in society

Teaching and Production/Consumption At my PhD dissertation defence, K Michael Hayes, famous in US architectural circles for his Marxist approach to architectural aesthetics, asked about the politics implicit in the work of Stokes, and I was shaken; it wasn’t about politics. But I was also embarrassed. How could there not be a political dimension, since Stokes explicitly positioned himself ‘against’ the 19th-century critic John Ruskin, who unambiguously linked art to social morals? And how could I forget that the plunge into psychoanalysis exposed me to the work of Jacques Lacan and Félix Guattari, both Marxist psychoanalysts? Hence, one of the early seminars I taught at Barnard College in 1989, ‘Form and Society’ – besides including readings by Ruskin, the Marxist leader of the English Arts and Crafts movement William Morris, the craftsman-oriented Deutscher Werkbund, and others examining the fate of the artisan in industrial production – contained a final session on ‘Form and Politics’. The research for this session introduced me to the writings of the Frankfurt School (1929–present, but forced to leave their German home at the Goethe University in Frankfurt in 1933 with the rise of Nazism). Two of its principal thinkers, Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin, for the first time analysed not just capitalist production but capitalist consumption – that is, the inability of the masses to receive art outside the context of capitalist cultural cooption. Cultural production and consumption, and the political economy in which they functioned, were now terms that I associated with the maker (production) and the receiver (consumption), and as such, I understood the maker– object–receiver ‘communication’ to be not just subjectively unsteady but culturally problematic. On top of this was the revelation of reading the first volume of Edward R Ford’s Details of Modern Architecture (1990).2 In the introduction to the book, Ford points out that the 19th-century architect with a social conscience cared about the worker/builder, whereas the 20th-century socially minded architect cared about the user. In other words, the

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Architecture Lobby members protesting outside the American Institute of Architects (AIA) National Convention, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 2016 Not allowed in the convention hall itself, Architecture Lobby members protested by reading the Lobby’s manifesto which critiqued the AIA’s indifference to the precarity of architectural workers.

Ben Cook, NP 6330, Master of Architecture studio, Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, 2019 This sculpture examined information exchange through constraints of form and image – standard print formatting, 3D bitmapping, toner transfer, recursive xeroxing, etc – to build a spatial surface map in and of the copy machine as a tool and body.

Ben Cook and Zofia Pietrowicz, Step 1–3, Master of Architecture studio, Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, 2019 This collaborative installation positioned recontextualised objects from a workshop with body architect and sci-fi artist Lucy McRae into their own system and logic around a narrative of gestation, surface, sequence, factory and form.

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Ryan David, comfy room or how to make a room comfortable, Master of Architecture studio, Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, 2022 opposite: The artist assisted participants in using whatever means necessary to make the room more comfortable for them.

19th-century architect was attuned to the maker/producer while the 20th-century one was attuned to the user/ consumer. I began to think about the architect’s obligation to the worker as well as the very obvious fact that the maker in architectural production was, yes, complicated: architects and contractors competed for that identity. The Profession and Activism In my architectural practice (Deamer + Phillips 1986–2003; Deamer Studio 2003–present) – a small office focusing on high-end residential projects – I was always struck by how illogical it was that we architects couldn’t consult contractors to jointly solve the construction of a formal detail. Weren’t we both trying our best to produce a quality object? But the wackiness of mutual distrust instead of collaboration didn’t hit home until I attended the first ‘Who Builds Your Architecture?’ (WBYA?) conference (2012) where the organisers, working with the non-governmental organisation Human Rights Watch, tried to get architects building in the United Arab Emirates to comment on the illegal contracting of construction labour for their projects. No architect with a job in the Emirates showed up. How could that be? Perhaps it was because we had no legal obligation to care for them – the owner has one contract with the architect and another with the builder – or perhaps because we didn’t identify with them as people. It was embarrassing, and it made me realise that this could only be because we architects don’t identify as workers. The profession tells us we design; we don’t work. The implications of what was clearly an ideological obfuscation came crashing down: our profession’s unaddressed horrible labour practices; our supposed exceptionalism that only garners the disdain of developers and the public; our clinging to a class identity that our income can barely support; our irrelevance in addressing any of our social or environmental problems because as ‘aestheticians’ we don’t dirty our hands with systems of power and finance. Awareness of our professionally structured plight warranted exposure. Activism was required.

Form and the Architecture Lobby The Architecture Lobby – formed in 2013 by myself and numerous others who recognised the systemic frustration and precarity of architects, and advocating for the value of architectural labour in the profession and the public – can be seen as the culmination of an ever-expanding view of that original maker/object/viewer trio, where each element and their relationships get more elaborate, less stable and more politicised. Beginning as a group of 20 or so individuals located mainly in New York City but expanding to include 22 chapters in cities throughout the US (as well as chapters in London, UK and Melbourne, Australia), the Lobby now has 360 members condemning the systemic roots of architectural ineffectuality in the age of neoliberalism. While this activist work of mine is seemingly detached from the formal concerns explored at Cooper Union, it is really the same initial lesson of looking deeply at the phenomenon of form and recognising its embeddedness in a network of exchanges. In that network, the material conditions of production are central, and central to them is the producing subject, whose ‘creative’ positioning cannot be divorced from the material conditions in which the making is done. When I consider Cranbrook’s focus on ‘the act of making work’, I am struck by how precisely it points away from the made object and towards the making subject, how much that ethos foregrounds our agency and from there, the responsibilities that come with agency. My mind turns again to an experience at Cooper that I think is exactly what Cranbrook’s ‘eyes wide open’ education also imparts. In John Hejduk’s ‘Cut Out’ class taught in 1975, we were asked to build maquettes spatialising a painting by Matisse. When placing a coloured plane in a maquette, it occurred to me that the Color-aid paper we all used was, well, paper, with its colour spread on one side and not on the other. It couldn’t pretend to merely ‘represent’ the colours in the painting without, in the maquette, being its two-sided self. In just the same way, architect makers can’t disappear into their design; they have to consider their breathing, eating, excited, anxious selves. And from there, recognise when the conditions in which they live are not supportive or empowering. In the world of Cranbrook, formal intelligence breeds critique, and from there, one might want to choose protest and activism. 1 Notes 1. Quoted in Lisa Marie Hart, ‘The Chair that Eames Built’, Palm Springs Life, 25 May 2016: https://www.palmspringslife.com/chair-that-eames-built/. 2. Edward R Ford, The Details of Modern Architecture, vol 1, MIT Press (Boston, MA), 1990.

Text © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: p 112 © Gretchin Wilkins; p 113 Photograph by Judith Turner. Courtesy of The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture Archive of The Cooper Union; p 114 © Cranbrook Art Museum, photo RH Hensleigh and Tim Thayer (CAM1935_7); p 115 John Hejduk fonds. Canadian Centre for Architecture; pp 116–17 Courtesy of The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture Archive of The Cooper Union; p 118(t) © The Architects Lobby; p 118cl&cr) © Ben Cook; p 119 © Ryan David

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Gretchen Wilkins

Ryan David, brick vest and skirt, Master of Architecture studio, Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, 2021 Silicone casts of brick patterns from the interior surfaces of the Cranbrook Architecture Department building were later designed into wearable garments.

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An Anatomy of Practice-based Pedagogy

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Current Architectin-Residence/Head of Department at Cranbrook and GuestEditor of this 1, Gretchen Wilkins describes contemporary Cranbrook and some of the Architecture Department’s recent student work and preoccupations. Experimental zeal manifests itself everywhere as students search for their design-selves through explorations into space, material and the city.

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Looking back at Cranbrook’s architecture programme through different moments reveals how present and essential making has been to its core pedagogy. There are several historical and practical reasons for this: for example, Cranbrook’s early alignment with the Arts and Crafts movement and experiential learning; the programme being embedded in an art academy with a wide variety of material workshops and collaborative possibilities; and the physical environment of the department itself being conducive to large-scale experimentation and fabrication. But the emphasis on materialising ideas, and in particular on initiating project-based work in this way, has pedagogical consequences deeper than the technical skills or material outcomes it produces, both of which are significant. Making also embeds a quality of perpetual self-propulsion into the work, and by extension into the practices that emerge from the process. The work itself generates questions that provoke new ideas, deeper reflection or further collaboration, in itself also an engine to sustain experimental approaches to practice outside the unscripted and permissive environment of the Cranbrook Academy. Making is only half of this equation, however. The other important factor in the process is the latitude afforded by Cranbrook’s non-curricular and individually structured model of studio practice as pedagogy. The lack of a brief at the start produces an initial crisis or void that is filled with experimental making. Making is the initial prompt. It acts as an immediate and exploratory way to materialise ideas and work tangibly and spatially, not in response to an external agenda but to intrinsic qualities and positions established through the work itself. The work continues to provide these prompts, which are recognised and further cultivated by the students through moments of critical reflection embedded in the pedagogical process (critiques, conversations, exhibitions). The prompts might be material, programmatic or reflecting broader questions about the built environment and how architecture operates within it. The variety of trajectories for future practices afforded by this process, including building design, fabrication, interiors, community exchange, performance and teaching, continue a deep investment in research as an integral and generative component of practice, whatever form it may take. Investment in open-ended making as a pedagogical framework is an investment in cultivating architectural practices that continue to teach and learn throughout alumni careers. Inquisitive and rigorous aspects of research are embedded into professional pursuits in an integrated and ongoing way. Research is not a separate process, or a preface to design – it is an internal engine within design that both propels the work while advancing the agendas, values and curiosities driving the practice. Self-initiating work through making combines the unlimited potential of ideas and imagination with the immediacy and grounded realities of material experiments. Regardless of the direction a student’s practice takes after graduation from Cranbrook, this generative combination remains applicable, and allows that practice to continually re-examine and reinvest in its core ambitions through each subsequent project.

Following the Work The focus on making also reorients conventional approaches to architectural teaching. Traditionally this process begins from a design brief and proceeds through iterative studies that are communicated through various forms of representation. Readings or case studies help to illuminate the brief, and the final project serves as an interpretation of it. At Cranbrook, in lieu of a shared and predetermined project around which to organise a curriculum, the academic content of the department flows from the work being produced. An example of this is work by alumnus Ryan David, who staged a series of projects around questions of architectural sequencing and authorship. Rather than starting with a design, representing it and then producing it, inviting public engagement at the end, he started with improvisational, collaborative and public performances that resulted in spatial constructions and documents to describe them. His final thesis project, how to make a house a home, was a 90-minute performance with collaborators Lisa LaMarre and Rachael Harbert in the Cranbrook Art Museum resulting in a full-scale improvisational and live construction. Documentation for this work could not be instructions for the future material deployment of the design by others (construction documents) or projections of its speculative potential (renderings), but were reflections after-the-fact on the intersection across material, spatial and social implications of an idea enacted in real time, and were the only durable record of this work. In another example, brick

vest and skirt, a series of silicone wall castings became a collection of wearables, using an existing space as a generator of a material technique and then producing a project as an outcome of that material research. As individual studio work begins to raise deeper or collective questions in the Architecture Department, opportunities for programming emerge. These might include reading groups, field trips, exhibitions or invitations to visiting artists for lectures or workshops. As part of the dialogue on authorship, collaboration and sequencing in architectural practice, Professor Peggy Deamer was invited to discuss architectural labour, Cranbrook Architecture alumnus Farid Rakun of the Jakarta-based artists’ collective raungrupa their curation of documenta 15 (2022), and Cranbrook Print Media alumna Marnie Briggs with colleague Coco their work as part of the Art Workers’ Inquiry. Additional visitors to the programme reflect other conversations emerging through the work of the students, including artist and professor Mitchell Squire, Professor Beatriz Colomina, architect Mabel O Wilson, architect and Cranbrook alumnus Frank Fantauzzi, artist Tyree Guyton, architect Wonne Ickx, writer Geoff Manaugh and architect Sandy Attia. The improvisational pedagogical structure allows the content of the programme to be adaptable to the practices emerging from the student work. And as each of the 10 other master’s programmes in the Academy are doing the same, discussions in the Architecture Department can be contextualised within broader fields and adjacent forms of creative work.

Ryan David with Lisa LaMarre and Rachael Harbert,  how to make a house a home, Master of Architecture studio, Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, 2022 The piece was the result of a collaborative 90-minute performance to design and construct a ‘home’ at the Cranbrook Art Museum, as part of the Graduate Degree Exhibition. The work was an experiment in improvisational design and collaborative authorship.

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Exhibitions and Workshops Another extension of the work into collective, departmentwide discourse is through self-initiated group exhibitions. In 2021 the Architecture Department curated a show in the campus’s Forum Gallery which asked students for a piece of text and accompanying work that might ‘reorient’ architectural practice to address perceived limitations of the ‘status quo’. Themes included locally inflected and culturally responsive art and design work, recentring experiential processes, and interdisciplinary collaboration. Though not new ideas, these were new prompts to instigate new work and then reflect on its implications for future practice. In 2022 the alumni show ‘Latitude’ considered the overlaps between architecture, art and design. It included the work of architecture graduates and alumni from other departments who elected in the Architecture Department while they were students in the Academy. Held at a 100-year-old former bank lobby in Detroit designed by architect Albert Kahn, the exhibition asked for work that interacted with the space in some specific way. The mix of disciplines, approaches and scales highlighted both the adjacencies and divergences across architectural and artbased practice. Here again, the value was not only in the show itself, but in the questions, discussions and potential collaborations it prompted afterwards. The work always has a double or even triple value: what it produces in real time, what it provokes for ongoing research, and what it contributes to the collective discourse of the department.

Mark Wise and Yi Shi, Harry Ghost Chair and untitled work, ‘Latitude’ alumni exhibition, First National Building, Detroit, Michigan, 2022 ‘Latitude’ was an exhibition of alumni work from the Cranbrook Architecture programme and students who elected in Architecture. Held in the First National Building (1922) by Albert Kahn, it was part of the Detroit Month of Design.

Jessy Slim, Chickpea Landscapes, ‘Latitude’ alumni exhibition, First National Building, Detroit, Michigan, 2022 left: The Chickpea Landscapes series examines chickpeas as both a product emblematic of a place, and a highly commoditised and politicised ingredient. This sculptural piece uses chickpeas to extrapolate notions of home and migratory narratives, highlighting fragility and resilience in parallel with Lebanon’s political landscape.

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Workshops offer another platform to interactively expand ideas in the studio or provide a temporary detour from them, either a mirror or a retreat depending on what may be helpful at the time. In 2021, for example, the department curated workshops with sci-fi artist and body architect Lucy McRae, and architects Perry Kulper and Nat Chard. These invitations were prompted by questions emerging in the department around architectural drawing and the relative lack of representational work. Drawings and other forms of visual production, be they digital or physical, two- or three-dimensional, tend to focus more on immediate qualities or provocations inherent to the work itself rather than acting in reference to something else (scaled drawings of designs). These workshops explored the agency of drawing in both immediate and speculative ways, using experimental construction, drawing and photography to explore their generative potential for design and project-based studio practice. Ciarran McQuiston, Paper Column, ‘Latitude’ alumni exhibition, First National Building, Detroit, Michigan 2022 The handmade paper was wrapped over a 12-inch-square and 8-foot-tall steel frame, lit from the interior with LED lights. McQuiston elected in Architecture and is a 2020 graduate of the Print Media Department at Cranbrook Academy of Art.

Daniel Smith, Tiles, Master of Architecture studio, Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, 2019 In this exploration into surface, material and texture through methods of meditative repetition, the 12 x 12 inch (30 x 30 centimetre) plaster tiles were created by taking the silicone negative mould of a coiled plasticine object marked on 377 occasions with the right pointer finger. This silicone negative became the site of material translation as more than 100 tiles were created.

Jing-Ying Su, Translucent Surface, Master of Architecture studio, Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, 2021 above: In this study of the space between line and surface, a three-dimensional surface was made by overlapping two-dimensional net patterns made from individual strands of copper wire.

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Elizabeth Ewing, Neutral B1, ‘Latitude’ alumni exhibition, First National Building, Detroit, Michigan, 2022 Ewing’s painting series explores the relationship between two- and three-dimensional spaces through planes, patterns, abstraction and colour.

Mark Wise, Diamond Column, Master of Architecture studio, Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, 2019 right: The piece is an outcome of repeated tests of CNC milling to produce threedimensional profiles of square-sectioned wooden pieces. Thirty-six pieces of 2 x 2 poplar are combined to produce a single column, which featured in the 2019 Graduate Degree Exhibition held in the Cranbrook Art Museum.

Wade Meadors, Boxed-In, Master of Architecture studio, Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, 2021 far right: Inspired by the potential of new pop-up streetscapes during the Covid-19 pandemic, the project consists of three boxes sized at 7 x 6.5 x 4 feet with three programmes inspired by Cranbrook student life: Social, Study and Exhibit. The programmes are functions that typically take place indoors and are at the core of student culture and daily life, but could not due to the pandemic. By moving these components outdoors to a welltrafficked public space, they once again became social and interactive.

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Creative Harvest The two-year Architecture programme includes a thesis document and exhibition at the Cranbrook Art Museum, a group show that involves all graduating students. Campus architect Eliel Saarinen, also the first Director of the Academy and first Head of the Architecture Department, referred to this event as a ‘creative harvest’, and expressed his amazement that such a wide diversity of students with ‘full freedom to express themselves in accordance with their inner ego and artistic conscience … gradually come into being a certain form-feeling which is characteristic of, what I may call: The Spirit of Cranbrook’.1 This quote touches on a broader quality of the educational experience at Cranbrook, namely the everyday oscillation between intensive, individually motivated studio practice and collective or collaborative work. The Graduate Degree Exhibition is both – collective in its all-inclusive academic content across 11 departments, and individual in the artefacts produced and exhibited by each student. As an artefact, their final work is also a fragment, a slice of their ideas and practice rather than a comprehensive demonstration of their knowledge or progress. And yet that comprehensive experience is inherently embedded in any final work, as every piece leading up to it offered

something of a prompt. The corresponding written document reflects on their connections, digressions and thought processes along the way. Some examples of formative work at different stages include alumnus Daniel Smith, who arrived at Cranbrook interested in relationships between architecture, ceramics and poetry. He began with a series of plaster tiles that use ceramic techniques of coiling and casting, leading to further studies in replication and hand patterning of architectural components. Alumna Jing-Ying Su’s work created installations to capture spatial ephemera through equally ephemeral materials, such as wire, string, air, light and water. Her graduate thesis piece produced these effects in a landscape installation on the campus grounds. Alumni Mark Wise and Wade Meadors experimented with CNC-fabricated construction: Wise’s Diamond Column is a lattice-like structure that filters light through its thickness, and Meadors produced a series of outdoor rooms in response to the limitations of indoor spaces during the pandemic. Alumni Elizabeth Ewing and Jessy Slim explored the spatial potential of two- and three-dimensional surfaces, through painting in Ewing’s practice and for Slim through experimentations with plant-based materials – creating a series of translucent constructions out of chickpeas, gauze and rope.

Making in Detroit Cranbrook’s emphasis on experimental acts of making runs deeper than its own historical or pedagogical interests. Situated about 20 miles (30 kilometres) north of downtown Detroit, the campus is connected to a much larger history of making and manufacturing in the region. The Architecture Department has connected with Detroit in different ways at different periods, most notably through the work of former Department Heads Dan Hoffman (1986–96) and Peter Lynch (1996–2005). While Detroit has sustained decades of disinvestment and depopulation since the mid-20th century, the city today feels palpably re-energised and is tacking in new directions. Changes in making and manufacturing are part of this re-emergence, for example through major investments in electronic vehicles that promise to dramatically impact urban mobility, density and collective life in the city in dramatic and positive ways. The architectural questions emerging in the ongoing transformation of Detroit will be the focus of sustained research through the Architecture Department’s Project Office, launching in 2023. This space offers a platform for ongoing, project-based research about Detroit, framing speculative questions around essential issues for the future of the city in collaboration with local practices and organisations. It is also a resource to curate live projects, partnerships and public conversations about future directions for Detroit’s urban spaces, infrastructures, landscapes and housing. As Detroit has witnessed, experimenting with how we make things also makes – or unmakes – the world around us. Today that world has reached a profoundly precarious tipping point and so our material experiments need to ask profoundly different questions. These questions do not discriminate between educational institutions or professional offices. In fact, they need to come from both. Academic design studios can tackle ambitious questions in experimental and visionary ways, while professional offices can engage them ‘on the ground,’ if through more modest or limited resources. The Project Office endeavours to act as a bridge, connecting practices of teaching, research and making with urbanism across academic and professional pursuits. These types of academic–professional bridges, of which there are many throughout architecture schools, feel like a highly potent ‘third space’ for architectural practice, where combined resources can be leveraged towards exponentially deeper and more complex societal questions. They may also be a way in which education can more deeply impact and expand our definition of architectural work. 1 Notes 1. Eliel Saarinen, ‘The Story of Cranbrook’, unpublished manuscript, 1950, p 86: Saarinen Family Papers (1990-08), Box 8, Folder 6, Cranbrook Archives, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan.

Text © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: pp 120–21 Work and photo courtesy of the artist; model Kiwi Nguyen; p 123 Photo Diana Noh; p 124(tr) Work by Mark Wise and Yi Shi. Photo by Clare Gatto; p 124(bl) © Jessy Slim; pp 124–5(b) © Jing-Ying Su; p 125(tl) Photo PD Rearick; p 125(br) © Daniel Smith; p 126(tl) © Elizabeth Ewing; p 126(br) © Mark Wise; pp 126–7(b) Photo by Manda Moran

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A Word from 1 Editor Neil Spiller

Adept and Apprentices Ben Nicholson at Cranbrook

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There are beautiful moments in architectural and art history where the world tilts on its own axis and something shifts, the cannon is expanded – a glorious perturbation after which nothing is totally the same again. There are too many examples across creative disciplines to list; and any list that might be produced is often conditioned by the viewer/reader’s personal preoccupations. Nonetheless, they are vital for the growth of the possibilities of artistic exploration. However, three examples are indisputably deserving of recognition with respect to the notion of the 20th century’s ‘legacy of latitude’: firstly, the Bauhaus in Weimar/Dessau, Germany (1919–33); secondly, Black Mountain College in North Carolina (1933–57); and finally Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan, founded in 1904 and still very much active. For the discipline of architecture, as taught at Cranbrook, 1978 was a landmark year. It saw the arrival of Daniel Libeskind as Architect-in-Residence, the department’s single tutor and academic. Libeskind was an alumnus of the Cooper Union in New York and was taught by its mercurial Dean, John Hejduk. He entered that Manhattan institution in 1965, became professionally qualified in 1970 and went on to acquire a postgraduate degree in History and Theory of Architecture from the University of Essex in Colchester, UK, in 1972.

Halcyon Days One of Libeskind’s students, in 1978, was Ben Nicholson – an Englishman, born in Lincolnshire yet having lived mainly in the US. Nicholson is a highly original architect with his own ways of doing things, very much conditioned by his experiences of being taught by the enigmatic Libeskind at Cranbrook. Asked what pathways took him to Cranbrook, Nicholson replies: ‘After completing a project with Danny Libeskind at the AA [Architectural Association], I went to Cooper Union for a year, learned a lot, and cried every day at 2 pm, but the pedagogy was so tightly controlled. Danny bailed me and my tears out and invited me up to Cranbrook the following year.’ When Nicholson arrived, the department was small and quickly became highly socially and intellectually bonded, producing extraordinary, imaginative and provocative work. ‘The 12 students plumbed the depths of Surrealism, Mannerism, Piranesi supplemented by reading Maldoror1 and, reluctantly, the Phenomenologists. Libeskind was our only tutor, there were no electives, but he invited the likes of Aldo Rossi, John Hejduk and Dalibor Vesely for a week at a time.’ The emphasis was about being aware of creative cultures, their histories and the possibilities of interdisciplinary synthesis into new forms while lacking in the modern tyranny of ‘Quality Assurance’ and form filling. ‘If you wanted to practice in the other Cranbrook disciplines, you simply walked over to that department, chatted to its head, and started work. It was an otherworldly education, devoid of bureaucracy – and we got fed three square meals a day that helped mop up the copious amounts of beer we drank.’ Cranbrook proved to be a crucible of epiphany experiences for the young Nicholson and for many of his student colleagues, yet also for their tutor.

Ben Nicholson, Grunewald House, Master of Architecture studio, Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, 1981–2 In these studies, elements of the house are laid out, almost like on a dissecting table, beautifully and carefully handrendered and watercoloured with delicate, scented washes.

For the discipline of architecture, as taught at Cranbrook, 1978 was a landmark year. It saw the arrival of Daniel Libeskind as Architect-in-Residence, the department’s single tutor and academic 129

The Sorcerer’s Apprentice(s) The first inkling that the world was changing on its axis was as Nicolson started to study at Cranbrook and Libeskind was concocting the suite of drawings known as the ‘Micromegas’: ‘Libeskind’s Micromegas from 1979 are drawings that defied gravity, constantly morphed, or had any sort of datum line.’ The title of the suite of drawings was a homage to the French philosopher Voltaire. The drawings seem to inhabit the past and the future, speculating yet archaeologically recording simultaneously. The philosophical status of these drawings, and indeed the notion of the architectural drawing itself when liberated from the mundanities of being a builder’s instruction document, is a fecund area of design research that continues to provide ground for architectural experimentation – an interstitial arena between art and architecture. Although the ‘Micromegas’ were exquisitely drawn. There was also an emphasis on making and the process of making. Nicholson reminisces about the hands-on culture: ‘Some of us were lucky enough to spend months building wood, brass, or plexi models of that state of mind. It was an impossible assignment, but the old tricks of shadows, wedges and perceptual sleights of hand made for a pretty good simulacrum. Cranbrook was the unofficial finishing school for Cooper, so most people knew how to make stuff, and invent new techniques when necessary.’

The philosophical status of these drawings, and indeed the notion of the architectural drawing itself when liberated from the mundanities of being a builder’s instruction document, is a fecund area of design research that continues to provide ground for architectural experimentation Daniel Libeskind, Micromegas: Maldoror’s Equation, 1979 Whilst largely abstract, a few clues to Libeskind’s inspirations are left for us to decipher within this cacophony of finely executed lines, boundaries and prisms. In this drawing, is it an umbrella that we can see within – a reference to the Comte de Lautréamont’s definition, in his 1889 work Maldoror, of beauty as the chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella?

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Daniel Libeskind, Micromegas: The Garden, 1979 Libeskind’s highly complex ‘Micromegas’ series of drawings oscillate between architecture, notation and vectors. In flouting every architectural representational protocol, they make us unsure whether we are looking at a plan, section, perspective, or all three simultaneously.

Libeskind’s teaching methods were also unconventional. Hal Laessig, also a student at the time, remembers: ‘Everything was by implication, by story, and you had to figure out what the hell he meant. One time … he came into the studio he spoke for three days straight. I mean, he’d talk all day, then go home at night, and come back and pick up right where he’d left off.’2 When these three conceptual threads are woven together, Libeskind built an intellectual and strangely practical pedagogic environment for students to experiment within. They produced some spectacular architectural work that was imbued with narrative and a certain bravado. One of Nicholson’s contributions to this atmosphere of exploration was the Grunewald House (1981–2). The project’s beginning was fraught with frustration: ‘I had spent a summer meticulously copying a panel from the Isenheim altarpiece with Derwent crayons but was too spooked to draw the figure of Christ. I had gotten too close to the subject, and it left a lacuna. The Grunewald House filled that lacuna, with a surreal transfiguration of a building that rose up out of itself.’ It was inspired by researching an amalgam of writers such as Edgar Allen Poe and Charles Baudelaire, painters such as René Magritte and Edvard Munch and philosophers such as Martin Heidegger. A house was thus designed that no longer responded to the age-old notions that have become debatable in modern times, but rather evokes dormant desire and is a response to an urban world teetering on the brink. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. Like all of Nicholson’s works then and now, it is stunningly drawn. Nicholson recounts where the style of the drawings came from and their construction: ‘The Rapidograph 000 drawings were tinted with perfumed Rose Madder wash, probably in imitation of the Industrial Revolution drawings I saw at my dad’s 1830s Dickensian factory that made hay tedders and pig de-hairers.’ Many lifelong bonds were formed and nurtured around the ‘heat’ of the Cranbrook studio. Colleagues such as Jesse Reiser, Don Bates, Bahram Shirdel, Joe Wong and Raoul Bunschoten were pivotal to the young Nicholson. Detroit cars, cruel cold snowy weather and of course the ambiance of Cranbrook – architect Eliel Saarinen’s buildings, sculptor Carl Milles’s fountains and the furniture inspired by designers Charles and

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Ray Eames – were also important. Equally, off-campus activities sustained intellectual inquisitiveness. ‘We would pile into huge 1970s Detroit Chryslers and drive 1,500 miles [sic] to NY to see an exhibition and be back the next day sort-of-thing. All this contributed to an exhilarating intellectual climate that made and sustained itself. It was like being at the Skunk Works, breaking new ground in every direction, without the slightest interest in what any other American schools were up to. Harvard? Meh. Yale? Meh. Columbia: kind-of Meh. Sci-Arc was too far away at that time. This exhilaration was met by insane and often dangerous extra-extracurricular activities involving speed, explosives, food and much laughter,’ Nicholson remarks.

Ben Nicholson, Grunewald House, Master of Architecture studio, Cranbrook Art Academy, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, 1981–2 left: This model photograph shows the house’s north elevation and illustrates Nicholson’s model-making ability and also Cranbrook’s preoccupation with materiality and hands-on artistry. Here the Grunewald House is conjured into three dimensions by its author’s dexterous hand. below: Each piece of the house is examined in minute detail, rotated and explored in their many aspects and orientations, each element a sentence in the house’s overall composition.

‘It was like being at the Skunk Works, breaking new ground in every direction, without the slightest interest in what any other American schools were up to’

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The Afterlife As Nicholson and his contemporaries graduated from Cranbrook, Libeskind was gearing up to another set of audacious drawings testing the patience of traditional architects and their dogma. The set of drawings called ‘Chamberworks’ were created in 1983. Even more abstract than the ‘Micromegas’, they were like musical scores and a search for the genetics of architecture expressed purely for itself: line, boundary, ground and figure and aspect – 14 of the drawings have a landscape aspect and 14 have a portrait aspect. The collected work is subtitled ‘Architectural Meditations on Themes from Heraclitus’ and this gives us a few clues on how to read it. First, Heraclitus only has one fragment work that we know of; secondly, he was concerned – as the later alchemists were – with the reconciliation of opposites (in this case white and black, space and boundary, vertical and horizontal). And finally he was interested in a divine impermanence. These are all architectural tactics as junction and intensity. Nicholson remarks about some of his post-Cranbrook experiences, particularly as an architectural tutor, as he emerged into the heady light of architectural culture of the early 1980s: ‘A lot of us taught after leaving Cranbrook, and we certainly blew up the pedagogies in the schools we went to. We obliterated the Postmodernism curricula we were assigned to teach and unwittingly evangelised “Pre”-Deconstruction, a word that was not even invented at the time. Students did entirely new kinds of work, about which no one really knew the outcome of, except that it felt right.’ But his most important takeaway from Libeskind’s Cranbrook was about the personal discipline that being a good architect takes and the dedication required to create the polemic works that Nicholson has made a career out of: ‘Bullshitting does not substitute for sustained hard work and that there will always be someone more talented than yourself. Conceptually, we were encouraged to go as far as we dared into the unknown, that lonely place where flinching is not an option. Our teacher and our colleagues ensured we did not get too close to the “white heat”.’ When asked if he has anything else to say, he simply responds: ‘Thank you, Danny & Nina Libeskind. 50 years ago, you changed my life forever’ – a legacy of latitude. 1 This article is based on an email interview with Ben Nicholson in September 2022. Notes 1. Comte de Lautréamont, ‘The Songs of Maldoror’ (1888–9), in Maldoror and the Complete Works of the Comte de Lautréamont, tr Alexis Lykiard, Exact Change (Cambridge, MA), 1994, p 193. 2. Greg Allen quoting Hal Laessig, ‘On the Making of the Lost Biennale Machines of Daniel Libeskind’, 20 September 2010: https://greg.org/archive/2010/09/20/onthe-making-of-the-lost-biennale-machines-of-daniel-libeskind.html.

Daniel Libeskind, Chamberworks: Architectural Meditations on Themes from Heraclitus, V 04, 1983 In his ‘Chamberworks’ suite of drawings, Libeskind pushed the envelope of what might be considered architecture even further. The drawings are constellations of lines of various thickness, vectors and potentialities, each plate determined by different aspect ratios for compositional purposes.

Text © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: pp 128, 132 Collection of Ben Nicholson; pp 130–01, 133 © Studio Libeskind / Daniel Libeskind

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CRANBROOK ARCHITECTURE: A LEGACY OF LATITUDE

Kevin Adkisson is curator for Cranbrook Center for Collections and Research, preserving the campus architecture and sharing its story. He received his MArch from the Winterthur Program in American Material Culture and his BArch from Yale University. He previously worked as a researcher at Robert AM Stern Architects and as a designer at Kent Bloomer Studio. Emily Baker is an inventor, fabricator, architect and educator. Her work investigates choreographies of construction augmented by emerging technologies, hand capacities and delight. Full-scale constructed experimentation informs her creative practice, research and teaching, centring on selfstructuring material systems. She is the recipient of the AISC Early Career Faculty Award and ACSA Design Build Award. Her work is in the permanent collection of the Cranbrook Art Museum. She holds degrees in architecture from the University of Arkansas and Cranbrook Academy of Art, and teaches studios, structures and fabrication at the University of Arkansas. She previously taught at the American University of Sharjah and Tulane University. Peggy Deamer is Professor Emerita of Yale University’s School of Architecture and principal of Deamer, Studio. She is a founding member of the Architecture Lobby, a group advocating for the value of architectural labour. She is the editor of Architecture and Capitalism: 1845 to the Present (Routledge, 2013)

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and The Architect as Worker: Immaterial Labor, the Creative Class, and the Politics of Design (Bloomsbury, 2015), and author of Architecture and Labor (Routledge, 2020). Her theory work explores the relationship between subjectivity, design and labour. She is the recipient of the Architectural Record 2018 Women in Architecture Activist Award and the 2021 John Q Hejduk Award. Pia Ednie-Brown is a Professor of Architecture at the University of Newcastle. She is a writer, designer, researcher and educator. Her creative research practice, onomatopoeia, works with diverse media to explore ways of unsettling anthropocentrism. She co-edited the 2 issue The Innovation Imperative: Architectures of Vitality (Jan/Feb 2013), and the book Plastic Green: Designing for Environmental Transformation (RMIT Publishing, 2009). Her research and creative works have been published and exhibited in diverse contexts. Ronit Eisenbach is a 1993 graduate of the Cranbrook Architecture Department. She has since expanded her pedagogy and practice at StudioRED to sites and communities around the world. Her approach is interdisciplinary, partnering with colleagues and communities to create site-based ephemeral works that participate in, shape and confront change. She is co-author of Installations by Architects: Experiments in Building and Design (Princeton Architectural Press, 2009). Upon graduation she joined the University of Detroit Mercy faculty (1993–2002). She is

Professor of Architecture, founding curator of the Kibel Gallery, and directs the Creative Placemaking Collaborative and minor at the University of Maryland. Dan Hoffman was educated at the Cooper Union under John Hejduk, Robert Slutzky and Raimund Abraham. After graduating he worked for Edward Larabee Barnes in New York, and taught at the University of Detroit and Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. From 1986 to 1996 he was Architect-inResidence/Head of Department at the Cranbrook Academy of Art and served as Cranbrook Campus Architect from 1996 to 2001. A founding principal of Studio Ma in Phoenix, Arizona, he was active in the firm from 2003 to 2017. He is currently Professor of Practice at the Design School, Arizona State University. Yu-Chih Hsiao received a MArch degree from the Cranbrook Academy of Art. He is an artist, designer, educator and curator. His practice focuses on the concept of the ‘Megaweave’, emphasising cultural diversity, maximising resources, waste-to-food recycling, interdisciplinary projects, and do-ityourself urbanism. His work takes the form of art projects, non-profit workshops, architectural design, exhibition curation, teaching and social media management. He is an Assistant Professor and former Chair of Architecture at Shih Chien University, Taipei. Peter Lynch was Architect-inResidence/Head of Department at Cranbrook Academy of Art from 1996 to 2005. He is researcher and former guest professor at the KTH

CONTRIBUTORS

School of Architecture, Stockholm. His Stockholm practice Building Culture PLC is focused on new methods of timber construction and applied research in the fields of architecture, landscape and urban design. He graduated from Cooper Union in 1984, and opened Peter Lynch Architect PLLC in New York in 1991. He has also taught at Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD), Columbia University, Rhode Island School of Design, the City College of New York, Parsons School of Design, Dalhousie University and Penn State University. William E Massie is an Associate Professor at the University of Kentucky. From 2005 to 2017 he held the position of Architect-inResidence/Head of Department at Cranbrook Academy of Art. Prior to this he was a tenured Professor of Architecture at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York. He received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Architectural Studies from Parsons School of Design, New York. He subsequently received a MArch from Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture. Upon graduation he worked for Robertson + McAnulty Architects and James Stewart Polshek and Partners. Hani Rashid is a practising architect and co-founder, with Lise Anne Couture, of New Yorkbased Asymptote Architecture. Significant projects include the Yas Marina and Hotel in Abu Dhabi (2011), ARC Multimedia Museum in Daegu, South Korea (2017) and the ING Bank HQ in Ghent, Belgium (2020). He has been a professor at the Royal Danish Academy,

Princeton University, ETH Zürich, Harvard GSD, and Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP), where he co-founded the school’s Advanced Digital Design Program in 1998. He is the director of the Studio 3 graduate design studio at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. Jesse Reiser is a registered architect in New York and a principal of RUR Architecture DPC. He received his BArch from Cooper Union, and completed his MArch at the Cranbrook Academy of Art. He was a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome in 1985, and trained in the offices of John Hejduk and Aldo Rossi prior to forming the practice Reiser + Umemoto with Nanako Umemoto. He is a Professor of Architecture at Princeton University, and has previously taught at various schools and lectured widely at cultural and educational institutions throughout the US, Europe and Asia. Neil Spiller is Editor of 2, and was previously Hawksmoor Chair of Architecture and Landscape and Deputy Pro Vice Chancellor at the University of Greenwich in London. Prior to this he was Vice Dean at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London (UCL). He has made an international reputation as an architect, designer, artist, teacher, writer and polemicist. He is the founding director of the Advanced Virtual and Technological Architecture Research (AVATAR) group, which continues to push the boundaries of architectural design and discourse in the face of the impact

of 21st-century technologies. Its current preoccupations include augmented and mixed realities and other metamorphic technologies. Lois Weinthal is a Professor in the School of Interior Design at Toronto Metropolitan University. Her research, practice and teaching investigate the relationships between architecture, interiors, clothing and objects, where these topics explored in theory seminars are put into practice in the design studio. She is editor of Toward a New Interior: An Anthology of Interior Design Theory (Princeton Architectural Press, 2011), and co-editor of Digital Fabrication in Interior Design: Body, Object, Enclosure (Routledge, 2021). She studied architecture at Cranbrook Academy of Art and the Rhode Island School of Design, and holds honorary visiting professor positions at the Glasgow School of Art and Middlesex University London. Tod Williams, with Billie Tsien, co-founded their New York architecture studio in 1986. He attended Cranbrook School for Boys and Brookside School, and serves as a trustee of the Cranbrook Educational Community and the American Academy of Rome where he is also a Fellow. He received an MFA and Master of Architecture from Princeton University, New Jersey, and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Rome. He maintains an active academic career and lectures worldwide. As an educator and practitioner, he is committed to making a better world through architecture.

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Edited by Neil Spiller

Guest-edited by Owen Hopkins

Penumbra, from the Latin paene (almost) and umbra (shadow), can be defined as an intermediate zone of transition between light and shadow. Penumbra is therefore that space, both physical and imaginary, where everything is possible: it is the place of the uncanny, where presence and/or absence can produce wonder or horror. This 2 positions the presence of this archetype in the contemporary world of architecture, investigating the ways it permeates different expressive forms – from critical theory to architectural drawing, from design and planning to photography. The contributors illustrate and discuss how penumbra has shaped their creativity and modified their approach to the design process. As a physical phenomenon, penumbra has supra-historical and global connotations; nonetheless, different cultures elaborate its symbolism in different ways. Its wide semantic spectrum powerfully inspires creative forms that hover between fullness and emptiness, presence and absence, past and future. The critical perspectives in this issue offer a wide analysis of penumbra’s expressive potential and the key to an indepth understanding of this elusive layer of reality.

The link between architecture and art and the sublimity it can create has a history that stretches back millennia. From cave paintings to the stained glass and saintly icons in churches and cathedrals, to the geometric and calligraphic treatments of mosques and contemporary artists channelling architecture and vice versa, and so much else. This 2 is about the contemporary interactions between living artists and architects, and the artistic practices, such as poetry and abstractions, that architects adopt to develop ideas for their projects. The issue features artists, architects, curators, musicians, poets and designer craftspeople, illustrating the current rich mix of architectonic constructions, interventions and set pieces that range from musical performance to exhibition designs, glass works and digital 3D scanning. It lays out the wide spectrum and beauty of these sublime correspondences, with contributions from architects about their own artistic practices, and creative works viewed through the eyes of architectural commentators. An explosion of colour, form and creative tactics for making multifaceted work that above all is architectural, it offers a cornucopia of possibilities.

Multispace exists at the intersection of the physical and digital, and in the blurring of their previously clear dividing lines. It is not a single space, but a hybrid space where, in effect, we occupy multiple spaces simultaneously. We enter it on a Zoom call, when we are in our office and in a meeting with 20 people; when we are cycling down a country lane whilst racing against thousands of others who also use the Strava app; when we are watching a TV show whilst live tweeting; or, perhaps most literally, when wandering around the local park looking for Pokémon that only appear on a smartphone screen. A fundamental question of this 2 is why the phenomena that multispace describes are of concern to architects. The answer is that multispace points to a situation that is at root an architectural one. Offering both a collective and highly personalised experience, static and dynamically customisable, and above all at the same time public and private, multispace lies at the centre of a set of tensions, concerns and preoccupations at the core of our conception of architecture as theory and practice. It is the messy space between, with rough and uneven edges that are constantly shifting.

Contributors: Matthias Bärmann, Silvia Benedito, Filippo Bricolo, Edwin Carels, Javier Corvalán, Dris Kettani, Stephen Kite, Giancarlo Mazzanti, Akira Mizuta Lippit, Susanna Pisciella, Renato Rizzi, Paul O Robinson, and Antonella Soldaini.

Contributors: Peter Baldwin, Kathy Battista, Nic Clear, Mathew Emmett, Paul Finch, Paul Greenhalgh, Hamed Khosravi, Eva Menuhin, Felix Robbins, and Simon Withers.

Contributors: Aleksandra Belitskaja, Alice Bucknell, Mollie Claypool, Jesse Damiani, Wendy Fok, Andrew Kovacs, Lara Lesmes and Fredrik Hellberg, Holly Nielsen, Giacomo Pala, Paula Strunden, and Francesca Torello and Joshua Bard.

Guest-edited by Agostino De Rosa, Alessio Bortot and Francesco Bergamo

Featured architects and artists: Alexander Savvich Brodsky, Neri&Hu studio, Quay Brothers, Ursula Schulz-Dornburg, and Marco Tirelli.

Featured architects and artists: a-project, Captivate, Brian Clarke, Andy Goldsworthy, Barbara Hepworth, Danny Lane, Ben Johnson, Brendan Neiland, Ian Ritchie, and Zoe Zenghelis.

Featured architects: iheartblob, Mamou-Mani, Space Popular, and Liam Young.

Guest-edited by Gretchen Wilkins

CONTRIBUTORS

Kevin Adkisson Emily Baker Peggy Deamer Pia Ednie-Brown Ronit Eisenbach Dan Hoffman Yu-Chih Hsiao Peter Lynch William E Massie Hani Rashid Jesse Reiser Lois Weinthal Tod Williams

FEATURED ARCHITECTS

Asymptote Architecture Building Culture PLA Reiser + Umemoto (RUR) Studio Libeskind Tod Williams Billie Tsien

ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN

May/June 2023

The renowned Cranbrook Academy of Art near Detroit, Michigan, has been described as the epicentre of American Modernism. When it opened in 1932 it combined a stunning Eliel Saarinendesigned campus with a radically open educational philosophy to attract and produce some of the most influential artists, designers and architects in US history, including Charles and Ray Eames, Fumihiko Maki, Florence Knoll and Edmund Bacon. Often compared to other experimental schools such as the Bauhaus, Black Mountain College and Taliesin, Cranbrook’s sustained purpose has been advancing a wide, interdisciplinary latitude and selfdirected design research to expand and diversify its approaches to architectural practice. There is a deep and persistent idea that open and experimental acts of making should define pedagogy, and by extension that education should shape practice, not the other way around. Cranbrook’s rigorous defiance of dogma and loose grip on the disciplines enables an educational model that combines the practices of art, design, making and urbanism. In this issue, alumni, faculty and scholars reflect on Cranbrook’s model in light of contemporary and challenging questions in architectural education, practice and the profession.

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