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AIA’s Committee on Design met in Detroit, Michigan, April
3-6, 2008, to consider the question: Does architecture share
important parallels with other forms of design, including
automotive, landscape, furniture, and crafts? After four days of
spirited debate, the question remained open and surprisingly
unsettled. There were no easy answers, no politically correct
attempt to gather all manner of design into one big happy family.
The visiting COD architects debated every point down to the
nub.
Certainly there was plenty of inspiration for debate. The visit to
Detroit included tours of two of the automotive world’s most
significant sites, the Ford Motor Co. Rouge plant in Dearborn and
the Eero Saarinen-designed General Motor Technical Center in
Warren. But even after seeing these “best of the best,”
many of the architects on the COD tour remained skeptical that
automotive design represented anything more than clever marketing
or packaging, or, as some said, drawing pretty lines, certainly
nothing as probing as good architecture.
Nor did a visit to the legendary Cranbrook campus in Bloomfield
Hills, Mich., turn up any obvious parallels between architecture
and the crafts that so enriched Cranbrook’s environment. Few,
if any, of the COD visitors acknowledged designing their own
furniture, ceramics, or other products that reached an aesthetic
height at the Eliel Saarinen-designed Cranbrook.
During a spirited wrap-up session on Sunday, April 6, at the Edsel
and Eleanor Ford Home in Grosse Pointe Shores, some of the visitors
suggested that younger architects were striving to achieve at least
a nodding acquaintance with other design fields in addition to
their own. But it seemed at least possible, as Lawrence
Technological University Dean of Architecture Glen LeRoy, FAIA,
said, that design today has become so compartmentalized, so
restricted by budget and other considerations, that architects
cannot see the parallels that exist with other design
fraternities.
For her part, COD’s national chair, Carol Rusche Bentel, FAIA,
was delighted with the level of disputation. “I think the idea
was that we’d challenge everyone to think about what
they’re learning,” she said toward the end of the trip.
“I think that’s the kind of thing we want to see, because
that’s when the learning starts to happen- when there’s a
little bit of controversial action going on.”
If no consensus was reached on the issues, everyone agreed that COD
could continue the conversation at its next meeting in
Copenhagen.
Thursday, April 3 — The Debate Begins
COD’s visit got off to a lively start with a visit to
Belle Isle, the large island park in the Detroit River that
received its initial design look from Frederick Law Olmsted. Dinner
at the historic Detroit Yacht Club (designed by George Mason in the
1920s) featured a presentation on the basics of automotive design
by Peter Horbury, Ford Motor Co.’s executive director of
design for the Americas. Horbury used some homey examples to
demonstrate the essential nature of all good design, contrasting a
man riding a horse (good proportion) versus a man riding a cow (not
so good proportion). But even after this initial delving into
design parallels, the objections flared. Some contended that
automotive design shared none of the restrictions placed on
architects but was a market-driven exercise in drawing pretty
pictures. Alan Cobb, FAIA, of the Albert Kahn family of companies
and local chair of COD, later said he couldn’t help thinking
that many of the visitors “didn't really get it, and probably
never would….Many did not understand, or their objection to
the American automobile industry is so fierce that they didn't want
to hear it.”
As throughout the weekend, the visiting architects probed the
practical differences in the two design forms. They noted that
architects typically design each building unique from any other (a
prototype every time, as some said), while automotive designers
must design something that will be produced hundreds of thousands
of times. The role of engineering in design also came under
scrutiny, with at least one visitor noting that engineering often
comes second in the process of architecture (after the design) but
first in automotive design (setting the technical boundaries that
designers must work within).
With this opening taste of the debate that continued in
conversations throughout COD’s visit, the trip got underway in
earnest Friday morning bright and early.
Friday, April 4 – The Auto Day
Ford Rouge Plant
The first stop was Ford’s historic but newly remade Rouge
plant in Dearborn, just outside Detroit. Designed by Albert Kahn
from 1917 to 1925, the Rouge won its place in history as Henry
Ford’s embodiment of efficient manufacturing. In more recent
years, Ford’s great-grandson, current company chairman Bill
Ford, Jr., led a massive renovation of the site that included
building one of the most environmentally friendly factories in the
world. (Many found it ironic that this most green of factories is
home to production of the F-150 pick-up truck, no gas-sipper). A
10-acre green roof, innovative rain-water recovery system, and
state-of-the-art lighting and ventilation systems represented the
“green” approaches to design here.
 There followed
a quick stop at the Wayne State University campus in downtown
Detroit so COD visitors could see Minoru Yamasaki’s McGregor
Memorial Conference Center, considered by many to be Yama’s
best building. The architects walked across to the newly reopened
Detroit Institute of Arts (remade by a Michael Graves design) to
the College for Creative Studies, where the debate on automotive
design flared anew. The school’s dean of design, Imre Molnar,
engagingly illustrated the way
E&E Ford
Sketch by Frederick Bentel,
FAIA
students become auto designers working with pencil, clay models,
computer-aided design, and sometimes even modifying production
vehicles to come up with something new. A question from the
audience illustrated how few of the visitors drive American-made
vehicles, and some Detroit-based architects took that as proof that
COD visitors were closed to the merits of automotive design, at
least to the U.S. variety represented by Detroit.
GM Technical Center
The next stop was GM’s Technical Center in Warren, where
visitors heard from Ed Welburn, GM’s chief of design, on the
merits of both Eero Saarinen’s pathbreaking (and still
beautiful) architecture for the center and how it continues to
inspire a sense of engineering excellence among GM designers. There
was a final stop hosted by Edward Francis, FAIA, at Lafayette Park
to visit the Mies van der Rohe-designed townhouses, one of the
post-World War II’s most successful and still graceful urban
renewal projects.
Despite the day’s panoply of automotive design, Mike Mense,
FAIA, was among those who remained unconvinced. “My impression
is that they’re really decorators,” he said of auto
designers. “It’s not really design like we in
architecture think about it, because [architecture] mixes
programmatic issues and aesthetic issues, whereas these guys are
just purely…it’s just all aesthetics... color and
trim.” Noting the huge design staffs at auto companies that
break down a problem into tiny parts, Mense continued,
“It’s like nobody really designs a car. It’s all
these little pieces, and that’s totally different, and so it
is so much more about marketing, so much more about
fashion.”
 Listening to
Mense’s comments, Charles E. Dagit, Jr., FAIA, agreed,
offering that automotive design “is really packaging.”
But perhaps the most scathing comment came during a tour of the
student automotive design studios at CCS, where sketches adorned
the walls of vehicles bearing obvious resemblances to those seen in
futuristic video games or Batman movies. One architect quipped,
“They all read the same comic books.”
Lincoln
Sketch by Frederick Bentel,
FAIA
Saturday, April 5 – The Cranbrook Day
Saturday began with a bus trip to Bloomfield Hills to visit the
Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Affleck House, now owned by Lawrence
Technological University. This was one of Wright’s later home
designs, built in 1941, and its out-thrust deck drew obvious
comparisons to Fallingwater. Some visitors later said this was the
highlight of the many stops on COD’s tour.
Cranbrook
Photo by Louis Pounders, FAIA
Then the buses took the COD visitors to Cranbrook a short distance
away. Walking tours visited all the classic Eliel Saarinen
buildings, including the Cranbrook School for boys, the Kingswood
School for girls, Saarinen House, and the Museum and Library, as
well as the newer buildings that Cranbrook added in a burst of
expansion in the 1990s. Highlights there included the Natatorium,
or swimming facility, by Tod Williams and Billie Tsien. Lunch
included a presentation by Betty Hase of Herman Miler Co., who
emphasized the company’s credo that good design is about the
people in a room, not the furniture.
The gate at Cranbrook
Sketch by Frederick Bentel,
FAIA
Certainly the case for design parallels was evident at Cranbrook as
nowhere else, with every element, from entire buildings to
individual components including light fixtures, furniture, rugs,
and artwork, contributing to the harmonious whole. “We’re
better when we actually cross disciplines,” LTU Dean LeRoy
said at Cranbrook. “Design is design, and no one discipline
can own that. To the degree that we learn from other disciplines, I
think it makes all of us better. To the degree that we collaborate
together among disciplines, it makes our projects
better.”
Ceiling at Cranbrook Library
Photo by Jim Lord II, AIA
The final road stop was the Kresge Foundation in nearby Troy, which
combined preserved 1850’s farm buildings with a sleek and
environmentally sensitive addition by Valerio Dewalt Train,
acclaimed by many as the best new building in Detroit in recent
years. Joe Valerio was on hand to lead the tours. A reception at
downtown’s famed Guardian Building, an Art Deco masterpiece of
the 1920s, followed, then dinner at the Renaissance Center.
Sunday, April 6 – The Wrap-Up
Sunday morning, COD spent an hour at the Marcel
Breuer-designed Grosse Pointe Central Library, recently saved from
the wrecking ball and now the subject of a thoughtful expansion by
Bob Miklos of designLAB, who was on hand. A tour followed of the
Edsel and Eleanor Ford House (probably the best of Detroit’s
many auto-baron mansions, designed by Albert Kahn). There, waiting
for the bus rides to hotel and airport, the visitors took up the
challenge to state what, if any, design parallels they had found
between their art and all the others illustrated during the visit.
As stated, no consensus was reached, but no one doubted that minds
had been opened and thoughts provoked.
Detroit, as it turned out, had been an ideal location to pose the
question of design parallels, offering not only the important
example of automotive design for comparison, but numerous historic
sites crafted by the likes of Wright, Eliel and Eero Saarinens,
Yamasaki, Albert Kahn, and many others. It was, one might say, an
elegant and profusely illustrated venue to debate the question of
design parallels.
John Gallagher writes about architecture and urban development
for the Detroit Free Press. He is co-author of the book AIA
Detroit: The American Institute of Architects Guide to Detroit
Architecture. He has contributed to Architectural Record and many
other publications.
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