Design: Our Bauhaus

The influence of Cranbrook

Until a decade or so ago, what was considered good modern design in America was not American at all. It was the International Style, promulgated mostly by Weimar Germany’s Bauhaus: sleek, austere functionalism that lent an impersonal, industrialized finish to everything from skyscrapers to fountain pens. Increasingly, however, we are realizing that the design that has most consistently appealed to us all along—buildings like Eero Saarinen’s main terminal at Dulles International Airport, furnishings like the Eames lounge chair—had its genesis not in Weimar but in a relatively little-known school of art and design in the wooded hills of Michigan, 20 miles north of Detroit.

The Cranbrook Academy of Art, in Bloomfield Hills, is, in fact, our equivalent of the Bauhaus, and it has had an equally profound influence on our contemporary design. The Bauhaus search for a machine-age aesthetic was revolutionary, a radical break with the past. The Cranbrook approach was evolutionary. Its artists and craftsmen created new designs not with dogmas or preconceived notions but by enthusiastic, almost playful experimentation with traditional craftsmanship and styles.

That experimentation is traced in an excellent and comprehensive exhibition, “Design in America: The Cranbrook Vision 1925-1950,” which opened two weeks ago at New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. The show was organized by R. Craig Miller of the Metropolitan and Davira S. Taragin of the Detroit Institute of Arts, where it opened last December. As is made clear in the scholarly catalogue, Cranbrook is no ordinary art school. There has never been a formal curriculum or method in this graduate school for some 150 students. Instead, each department, such as sculpture, painting, ceramics or weaving and textile design, is headed by an accomplished artist who does his or her work while guiding and sharing the creative tension with students. The exhibition shows, in some 240 objects, models, drawings and photographs, the best of what this creative tension has produced.

Cranbrook’s first great achievement was the 350-acre campus itself, which includes four schools, an institute of science and a museum. The complex was founded by Detroit Newspaper Magnate George Gough Booth and his wife Ellen Scripps Booth, both philanthropists and aesthetes under the spell of the arts and crafts movement that was launched in England in the 1880s, inspired by the work of the designer-poet William Morris. They enlisted a kindred spirit—Eliel Saarinen, then Finland’s leading architect—to serve as Cranbrook’s designer, president and guiding force. Saarinen’s stately, romantic brick buildings, with their web of walkways, courts, terraces, stairs and walls, all highlighted with sculptures and other objects by the outstanding artists Saarinen attracted to Cranbrook, probably represent this century’s most successful integration of architecture, landscape design and works of art. Every brick, shrub, fountain, gate and ornament contributes to the delight of the whole.

As a number of photos and drawings in the exhibition demonstrate, the Saarinen architectural vision soon left its mark on other parts of the U.S. as well. With his architect son Eero, Saarinen collaborated on such buildings as the innovative Crow Island School (with Perkins, Wheeler and Will) in Winnetka, Ill., and the calm, lofty First Christian Church in Columbus, Ind. Eero’s work eventually eclipsed his father’s. His eerily mysterious M.I.T. Chapel at Cambridge, Mass., is not only one of his own but also one of 20th century architecture’s greatest triumphs. After Eliel’s death in 1950 at the age of 76, the academy’s influence spread through the work of Eero and a number of students and associates who became some of the country’s leading planners and architects, among them Edmund Bacon, Carl Feiss, Harry Weese, Cesar Pelli, Kevin Roche, Ralph Rapson, Gunnar Birkerts and E. Charles Bassett.

Nowhere has it been more true than at Cranbrook that “architecture is the mother of the arts,” as architects are fond of saying. Among the works created under the academy’s aegis: the sculpture of Carl Milles, Tony Rosenthal, Harry Bertoia and others; the rugs and wall hangings of Eliel Saarinen’s wife Loja, his daughter Pipsan and Marianne Strengell; and the furniture and furnishings of Charles and Ray Eames, Bertoia and Eero Saarinen. Says Met Curator Miller: “Cranbrook’s artists all conceived their work in an architectural context and believed in the totality of design from the largest to the smallest detail.”

This totality can only be hinted at in a museum exhibition, so the spotlights are on individual achievements: the sensuousness of Milles’ bronze model for Europa and the Bull (depicting Europa as a perplexed Lolita, although she is grown up in the full-scale sculpture); the bold, glazed vases of Maija Grotell; the assertive, colorful fabric designs of Strengell. Most prominent in the show is the best-known achievement of Cranbrook: the furniture and interior design by the Saarinens, the Eameses, Bertoia, Florence Schust Knoll and others. One exhibit replicates a typical mid-century office. Designed by Florence Knoll, it combines the work of Cranbrook creators into a smart, elegant interior, as representative of our time as the Victorian parlor was of its own. Like so much else from Cranbrook, the interiors evince a belief in the joy of design without the restraints of dogma, Weltanschauung, polemics, fad or fashion. At the same time, they live up to Founder Saarinen’s credo that “the first thing and the most important one is to develop an adequate design to express our contemporary life.” —By Wolf Von Eckardt