Follow this tag to curate your own personalized Activity Stream and email alerts.
If Michigan isn’t the first place that comes to mind when considering [the Modern era] — unlike, say, Germany or France in the 1920s — it should be. The presence of Ford in the city and Booth in the country was enough to make Michigan ground zero for the Modernist experiment [...] making the state home to perhaps the most diverse and best-preserved collection of early Modernist experiments in the world. — The New York Times
A look at Michigan's history in the Modernist movement and the story it tells for our future. M.H. Miller traces three main convergences in the state: Henry Ford's first Model T factory, the Cranbrook school's presence, and numerous influential architects most notably Albert Kahn and Minoru... View full entry
The firm of famed Detroit architect Minoru Yamasaki is returning to the city, seven years after it was forced to close.
The Seattle-born architect lived in Detroit from 1945 until his death in 1986. He launched his own firm in 1950, which survived him until 2009 when it closed due to financial problems.
Yamasaki’s most famed work is the World Trade Center twin towers, although he contributed many buildings to the Detroit skyline, including the One Woodward office tower.
— Michigan Radio
"I think we’re really interested in that kind of momentum that Detroit has now," Robert Szantner, a long-time employee of Minoru Yamasaki's original firm until it closed, told the Detroit Free Press. Szantner had bought the intellectual property, including the name, out of receivership in... View full entry
I must ask myself if we want to design buildings for people to fit some preconceived idea of a glass world. Is this really the future of cities?" – Minoru Yamasaki — businessinsider.com
While the critical response to the new 1WTC has been, at best, one of resigned acceptance, the original Twin Towers didn't receive much fanfare either when they first opened in 1973. Ada Louise Huxtable, then architecture critic for The New York Times, wasn't much of a fan of Minoru Yamasaki's... View full entry
