Portrait of Neil McEachern, photo by Vasco Roma

“There are many, many really cool things about the house,” said Neil McEachern, retired Detroit public school principal, who has lived in Lafayette Park for 20 years. He is describing life at Lafayette Park, and how the residents there have turned this modern blank slate housing into their much-loved homes. “Lafayette Park was built on land that once was a densely settled, working-class, African-American neighborhood called Black Bottom. Classified as a ’slum’ by the city of Detroit in the 1940s, Black Bottom was razed and left vacant until the mid-1950s, when a citizens’ group led by labor activist Walther Reuther succeeded in attracting Chicago developer Herbert Greenwald to the project. Greenwald brought in Mies van der Rohe to serve as architect, and Mies in turn brought his colleagues urban planner Ludwig Hilberseimer and landscape architect Alfred Caldwell on board. Hilberseimer’s plan for the area called for rerouting or blocking off some of the streets to create a superblock, on which would be built housing, a large park, an elementary school, playgrounds and space for retail. By the early 1960s many elements of this plan had been completed,” notes the introduction to the recently released Metropolis Book, Thanks for the view, Mr. Mies: Lafayette Park Detroit, edited by Danielle Aubert, Lana Cavar, and Natasha Chandani. There are hundreds of stories that create the human texture of this special place. Here, excerpted from the book, is the story of one long time resident, Neil Mceachern.

We have been trying to get a sense of how this neighborhood came about and what was here before. It’s unusual to have an urban renewal project like this, where a large area of land in the middle of a city was cleared and an entirely new neighborhood was established. I always like to recognize the people who came before us in this area of Detroit now known as Lafayette Park. Before 1701 it was the home of the Huron, Ottowa and Potawatomi Indians. Then, after the arrival of Cadillac, this land east of the fort was divided into ribbon farms — narrow strips that started at the river and continued far inland. [1] Many of the streets still retain the names of those early farm families: Rivard, Chene, St. Aubin, Joseph Campau and so on. Then, as the city expanded, the farms were broken up and the area became home to many German families. Many of the old German churches still line the Gratiot corridor — Trinity Lutheran, St. John’s/St. Luke’s, St. Joseph’s, for example. Many of the side streets along Gratiot have German names because they were built out during this period. Then we get to post–World War II and the beginnings of what is Lafayette Park. Generally, “urban renewal” in this country meant tearing down big areas where poor people lived and building new housing. That’s basically what happened here. Black Bottom was home to a large part of Detroit’s black community at the time and also to the city’s emerging Syrian community. It was a very poor area. Mostly it was rentals — little wood houses. It was torn down as part of a plan to keep middle-class people living in downtown Detroit.

Was this area always considered part of downtown Detroit? By the time Lafayette Park was built it was on the edge of downtown. If you stand outside when there aren’t any leaves on the trees you can see the big buildings of downtown. You can see the Renaissance Center from my living room. We’re within walking distance of the Central Business District.

So was this on the west edge of Black Bottom? I don’t really know that Black Bottom had an actual defined boundary. Hastings Street was where the Chrysler Freeway is now, and that was the commercial street where the bars and restaurants and barbershops and stores were.

Top, a nighttime view of artwork hanging inside Neil McEachern’s unit, photo by Vasco Roma; above, a wall with prints at his house, photo by Daniel Aubert

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Phaidon Carrying Case

The largest book I own is the 20^th Century World Architecture: The Phaidon Atlas.  It’s 13.5 by 22 inches. Amazon indicates that its shipping weight is 18.2 pounds. The cardboard carrying case with handles helps. So yes, that’s a lot of architecture. “The most outstanding works of architecture built between 1900 ad 1999” means 757 buildings to the publisher, though some of your favorite buildings may be missing. But you get the distinct sense that if Phaidon had produced a more comprehensive volume the world may have run out of paper.  Those on offer are, of course, excellent.

Any comment about the selections is simply going to layer my cherry picking on top of that of the “expert industry panel with input from over 150 specialist advisors from every geographic region” that determined the book’s contents. So before getting to that part of the orchard, an overview. One interesting conceit is that all of the buildings in the book are still extant (find your Imperial Hotel in some other book) and even accompanied by coordinates of longitude and latitude, which might be practically useful if you happen to have a GPS and a native porter for carrying the book.

The buildings within are organized by regional groupings whose representation plays out around the way that these things normally do: about half of them are European, although more-frequently-unnoticed architectural continents aren’t quite glossed over. There are 72 pages on South America and 52 in Africa. The atlas doesn’t stop at that. Each subsection includes a breakdown of projects by local as opposed to foreign architects, which largely displays the ebbing of European global design hegemony. Additional early charts illustrate the movements of architects: There’s of course an influx to the US and the UK in the 1930s and 40s, but otherwise a riot of lines of intriguing origin and destination.

It’s difficult to detect a curatorial bias in terms of styles or years. Europe’s strongest decade was the 1930s. North America and Africa boast the largest relative number of buildings from the 1950s and 1960s.  Asia shows the greatest comparative strength in the 1980s. Aalto, Breuer, Le Corbusier, Mendelsohn, Van Der Rohe, and Wright lead the pack in individual selections represented; no surprise there.  Some entries stretch beyond the linear “building”. New Delhi and Brasilia are represented along with a few master plans that seem worthy of recognition even if their constituent structures had varied designers, such as Potsdamner Platz in Berlin or EUR in Rome.  It’s difficult to argue with these grand inclusions on any categorical ground.

Bank of Guatamela

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Mies Van Der Rohe’s 860-880 North Lake Shore Drive, Chicago (c/o Wayne Andrews/Esto)

The subtitle of Matthew Gordon Lasner’s High Life: Condo Living in the Suburban Century might suggest a story of determined residential heterodoxy. Could this book be about the rare, defiantly urban souls opting for the sleek new high-rise as the rest of the old neighborhood packs up for the suburbs? Indeed, for a time that was true, but the real story is nowhere near as simple, and a good deal more interesting.

Co-operative housing’s (we don’t get to the actual term “condominium” for a while yet) pattern of growth roughly paralleled that of the schedule one controlled substance; pioneered by the rich, it soon caught on among the urban poor, and finally grew ubiquitous across income scales. It was considerably unusual for some time in the U.S., to be found mainly in pockets around New York and a preserve of the Edith Wharton-like gentry, and later of politically minded, often Jewish working classes. But long before the time, say, American Psycho came along to emblazon the cultural image of the condo, co-ops of some sort or another were just as likely to be found in Miami or in the San Fernando Valley as on the Upper East Side, and just as likely to be occupied by retirees or families as by necrophiliac yuppies.

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Stripes: Design Between the Lines
By Linda O’Keefe
The Monacelli Press, 224 pages, $50.00
Image courtesy of The Monacelli Press

Stripes, with their smooth and clean flow, may be the most straightforward of all decorative markings. Yet, for all their simplicity, stripes continuously create drama, both aesthetically and in societal terms.

Dramatically illustrated with photographs of the fashion, art, architecture, and furnishings that stripes have adorned over the centuries, Linda O’Keefe’s book tells a story that began thousands of years ago in ancient caves. The social context of stripes can be found as far back as biblical times when Matthew speaks of the privileged children of great men who “oft had their garments striped with divers colors.” Since then the markings have never ceased to cause controversy.

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The Book of Books: 500 Years of Graphic Innovation
Edited by Mathieu Lommen
Thames & Hudson, 464 pages, $65.00
Image courtesy of Thames & Hudson

Matthieu Lommen, curator at the Special Collections department of the Amsterdam University Library has compiled an excellent collection of books, illustrating more than 500 years of Western book design. Starting with Nicolas Jenson’s 1471 edition of Lorenzo Valla’s Elegantiae Linguae Latinae the collection ends with Irma Boom’s 2010 James, Jennifer, Georgina are the Butlers—-a 1,198-page sculptural book that traces the history of one family.

The Book of Books is a massive survey, weighing in at 6½ pounds, and is rich with examples. Short essays are devoted to such topics as the invention and spread of printing, nineteenth-century graphic techniques, the avant-garde and New Typography, and design in the Postmodern era. References to the great printers and engravers of the past—Aldus Manutius, Albert Durer, and Christoffel Plantin—are all included as well as to the designers of modern times (with shout outs to avant-guardians like El Lissitzky, Jan Tschichold, and Stefan Sagmeister).

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I have two kids, ages almost 6 and 3, and while they love reading books, I enjoy reading their books as much, if not more, than they do. I love the nostalgia and silliness of Dr. Seuss and Roald Dahl and the clever stories and terms that Mo Willems churns.

The way my kids respond to books has shown me the power within their pages. One book can spark a new interest that lasts days, months – even years. One book can lead to the insistence that we read tens more on the same topic.

So naturally, I try to select books on topics that are also interesting to me (after all, I’m equally invested in reading these). This prompted an unofficial research project on children’s books about the built environment. With the exception of the immense stock of books about construction, trucks, trains, and planes, there are relatively few stories about the professions and interests of the designers and planners or about the shape and functions of cities, buildings, communities, neighborhoods, and parks themselves.

However disappointed I was by the brevity of my list, books like Iggy Peck, Architect by Andrea Beaty and The Little House by Virginia Burton have been inducted into our nightly favorites. (You can find my assuredly incomplete list of children’s books on landscape, architecture, planning and otherwise urban-related topics at the end of this post.)

A story about a talented little boy who builds architecture out of everything from chalk to dirty diapers

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Last week on ABC’s Nightline, Bill Weir, the host of the segment “This Could Be Big,” waved our October issue on national television. The segment was on QR codes, and our cover had a big one on it. Weir’s question was, “Will this get bigger, or will it end up on the dust heap of technology?”

Our technology issue was all about how digital tools are shaking up the design profession, from architects learning code to using software for participatory design. Putting a QR code on each of those stories was a no-brainer—they add a multimedia layer of information to the page.  But the QR code on our cover was really the masterstroke—it’s a portal to Metropolis’s first digital cover.  When our art director Dungjai Pungauthaikan called the designer Peter Alfano to create the content that lies beneath that huge pixelated box, she said “Peter, this is the cover you’ve been waiting for.” We will say no more, except that once you’ve watched Weir’s segment below, we suggest you get hold of our October issue, and use a smartphone on it. (Or click here)

The “boxes of squiggly lines” are not quite as easy as they are made out to be, as our art department discovered in implementing them. They had to take into account various video formats, incompatible web browsers, and different smartphones. But they stuck it out. Because until Weir’s fancy trick with the champagne bottle becomes generally available, the QR code is very far from the dust heap—it is still our easiest link from the printed word to the digital world.

Read our technology issue here, including the story about QR codes integrated into clothing.

The final July/August cover (left) and an alternate version featuring the Four Seasons

For this month’s cover it was New York vs. Alabama, suits vs. students. Both directions were valid. Each had a pedigree backed by a design legend—Philip Johnson at the Four Seasons, Samuel Mockbee at Auburn University’s Rural Studio. The deciding factor? There were other magazines that could feature the Four Seasons, but only Metropolis could take the Rural Studio’s $20,000 house and put it on the cover. I wonder how many dinners on 52nd Street $20K buys.

The final June cover (left) and an alternate version. Illustration: Aesthetic Apparatus

“It took the editors around here a couple of tries to get used to saying their name without giggling,” says Metropolis’s creative director, Criswell Lappin, of Aesthetic Apparatus, the Minneapolis-based firm that illustrated this month’s cover. “By then we had found one of their concepts particularly com­pel­ling: the idea that the future of green building (in this case, the new headquarters of the U.S. Green Building Council, in Washington, D.C.) would involve utiliz­ing existing structures. We just needed to deter­mine whe­ther it should be type- or image-driven. After Michael Byzewski put in a tad more quality time, we went with this image—a generic-looking concrete structure—but not before pumping up the type a bit.”

For our May cover we approached Brian Collins to create a conceptual illustration for the winning Next Generation project. He and his talented team—John Fullbrook III, Timothy Goodman, and Jason Nuttal—passed along a handful of smart directions, but the pinwheel/pylon juxtaposition really piqued our interest. That concept turned out to be the one John felt the strongest about as well, and he was excited about developing it further. The final cover—fun, bold, and hopeful—clearly reflects our winner’s idea. And be on the loookout for pinwheels; they’re likely to pop up in the oddest places…

Left: an alternate version of the May cover; click to view a larger image.