skyfan
12-22-2007, 04:56 PM
An interesting write up on Detroit's most overlooked 'historic' neighborhood.
The Biggest Mies Collection
His Lafayette Park
residential development
thrives in Detroit
By JULIA VITULLO-MARTIN
December 22, 2007
The Wall Street Journal
On the edge of downtown Detroit, just east of the Chrysler Freeway and not far from Detroit's still-troubled neighborhoods, lies Lafayette Park, one of the nation's most beautiful -- and most obscure -- residential developments. Composed of three sections -- a high-rise apartment building and 21 multiple-unit townhouses on the western border, 13 acres of landscaping down the center, and twin apartment towers on the east -- Lafayette Park holds the largest collection of buildings in the world designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.
http://s.wsj.net/public/resources/images/PT-AH254_mpmies_20071221161321.jpg
Called "oft-overlooked" by the Harvard Design School and "a little-known jewel of modern urbanism" by Detlef Mertins, a professor of architecture at the University of Pennsylvania, it should be renowned, both for its loveliness and for its ability to thrive through Detroit's dark times of riots, destruction and middle-class flight.
Lafayette Park is certainly one of Mies's finest and most surprising works. For while he incorporated many of his favorite themes -- exposed steel, glass curtains, small interior spaces -- the result is welcoming and serene rather than harsh.
"It's an amazing architectural oasis -- an intact, cohesive expanse of Miesian townhouses and towers in a magical setting, a sort of Modernist fantasy-land," says designer Joe Posch, a Lafayette Park resident and owner of Mezzanine, a high-end furniture store that sells the likes of Knoll, Moooi and Kosta.
For the first-time visitor, Lafayette Park has an almost Through-the-Looking-Glass quality. From the noisy, hardscrabble street one enters beneath a luxurious canopy of greenery into a mysteriously quiet scene of lush landscaping, walkways, roads, retaining walls, partially concealed houses, and towers rising out of the trees. It somehow feels like a lovely but futuristic New England town. Architect Bill Dickens, a resident since 1968, notes that the townhouses "are very much like colonial houses, divested of any fawning reminiscences." Mr. Posch says that a walk through Lafayette Park yields the same feeling as Boston's Back Bay or South End, a sense of community and closeness that comes from the buildings as well as the people.
Built in the late 1950s as one of the first urban renewal projects, Lafayette Park was the product of a brilliant team assembled by Chicago developer Herbert Greenwald, who had been chosen by Detroit's city government to demolish and build on the old neighborhood of Black Bottom. As the developer of 860-880 Lake Shore Drive, perhaps Mies's most famous towers, Greenwald had worked with Mies, whom he now brought to Detroit.
Mies in turn recruited planner Ludwig Hilberseimer and landscape architect Alfred Caldwell. Dozens of scholarly studies have been devoted to trying to sort out each man's singular contribution -- not easy in part because, while each oversaw other important projects, none ever did anything like this before or after.
Greenwald probably would have reassembled his team to work on future projects had he not died in a plane crash in 1959, before the Lafayette Park buildings were finished. Planner Alex Garvin, author of a popular planning textbook, believes Greenwald was the real genius, perhaps the only one who understood all the details. Wayne State Prof. Jerry Herron, a Lafayette Park resident, agrees, noting that without Greenwald's "single-minded dedication to urban redemption" the project would not exist.
The National Park Service, which listed Lafayette Park on the National Register of Historic Places in 1966, cites its classic elements of Miesian design: steel skeleton frames that make no attempt to hide the buildings' structure, aluminum and glass skins, and open interiors that create a feeling of spaciousness.
http://s.wsj.net/public/resources/images/PT-AH255_mpmies_20071221161319.jpg
With three high-rise apartment buildings and 21 multiple-unit townhouses, Lafayette Park holds the largest grouping of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe buildings.
Yet Mies's "classic elements" would be severe without Caldwell's landscaping and Hilberseimer's site plan. Prof. Mertins asks: "Even if we limit the question of authorship to pure design, how are we to attribute the subtle yet enormously effective manipulation of the ground plane around the cul-de-sacs? Who decided what the right difference in grade would be between the parking lot and the pedestrian walkway along the edge of the housing? How far from the buildings the path should run to provide privacy for units with floor-to-ceiling glass walls?"
Charles Waldheim, editor of "Case: Hilberseimer/Mies van der Rohe -- Lafayette Park, Detroit," notes that the Colonnade Project in Newark had both Greenwald and Mies, who tried to carry out many of the same ideas. But without Caldwell and Hilberseimer, the results were entirely dissimilar. Just the meter-length spatial separation between the automobile level and the residential level made all the difference in Lafayette Park, where cars are so discretely concealed they seem ethereal.
With their aluminum-and-glass skins, and interiors that open to the outdoors, the townhouses themselves are reminiscent of the elegant buildings on the campus of Mies's Illinois Institute of Technology on the South Side of Chicago. But IIT has little lush landscaping, so the effect is austere and far from lovely.
Or take Lafayette Park's use of the much-reviled superblock. The plan deliberately broke from Detroit's century-old street grid as well as from the scale of its single-family pattern of development. Instead, Hilberseimer set up very long blocks of pedestrian walks separated from traffic. Almost no one still advocates superblocks, which planners (led by Jane Jacobs) came to regard as destructive of the urban fabric. But here they work as intended, self-contained and aloof from the clamor of the city.
One well might ask whether Lafayette Park, rather than Mies's more celebrated developments, is in fact what the Modernists really intended. Indeed, Mr. Garvin remembers once lamenting that the Modernists had never actually implemented their City of Tomorrow -- their ideal of dense but serene housing in a garden setting. Then he saw Lafayette Park and concluded that he had found the real thing -- a project that faithfully carried out Modernist principles of simplicity, light and air, while providing housing so desirable it survived even as whole sections of Detroit burned.
Of course human beings have modified Lafayette Park over the years, most notably in the landscaping, which reflects the current owners' preference for flowers over shrubs. While urban renewal had flattened almost everything on the site, Caldwell retained many magnificent specimen trees and planted saplings, which are now mature. Jane Duggan, a resident working with her neighbors to try to restore the original landscape, sighs in speaking of the "endless fights about whether Impatiens should be of one color or variegated, whether every tree should be ringed with flowers, and whether we should return to what Caldwell had in mind -- irregular-shaped beds."
But this attention to detail, which can seem obsessive, is probably crucial both to Lafayette Park's beauty and to its survival. It is regarded as a work of art to be treasured and tended by its residents. Ms. Duggan says her townhouse would now sell for about $135,000 -- truly a bargain in the world of great art.
Ms. Vitullo-Martin is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119827404882045751.html?mod=googlenews_wsj
The Biggest Mies Collection
His Lafayette Park
residential development
thrives in Detroit
By JULIA VITULLO-MARTIN
December 22, 2007
The Wall Street Journal
On the edge of downtown Detroit, just east of the Chrysler Freeway and not far from Detroit's still-troubled neighborhoods, lies Lafayette Park, one of the nation's most beautiful -- and most obscure -- residential developments. Composed of three sections -- a high-rise apartment building and 21 multiple-unit townhouses on the western border, 13 acres of landscaping down the center, and twin apartment towers on the east -- Lafayette Park holds the largest collection of buildings in the world designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.
http://s.wsj.net/public/resources/images/PT-AH254_mpmies_20071221161321.jpg
Called "oft-overlooked" by the Harvard Design School and "a little-known jewel of modern urbanism" by Detlef Mertins, a professor of architecture at the University of Pennsylvania, it should be renowned, both for its loveliness and for its ability to thrive through Detroit's dark times of riots, destruction and middle-class flight.
Lafayette Park is certainly one of Mies's finest and most surprising works. For while he incorporated many of his favorite themes -- exposed steel, glass curtains, small interior spaces -- the result is welcoming and serene rather than harsh.
"It's an amazing architectural oasis -- an intact, cohesive expanse of Miesian townhouses and towers in a magical setting, a sort of Modernist fantasy-land," says designer Joe Posch, a Lafayette Park resident and owner of Mezzanine, a high-end furniture store that sells the likes of Knoll, Moooi and Kosta.
For the first-time visitor, Lafayette Park has an almost Through-the-Looking-Glass quality. From the noisy, hardscrabble street one enters beneath a luxurious canopy of greenery into a mysteriously quiet scene of lush landscaping, walkways, roads, retaining walls, partially concealed houses, and towers rising out of the trees. It somehow feels like a lovely but futuristic New England town. Architect Bill Dickens, a resident since 1968, notes that the townhouses "are very much like colonial houses, divested of any fawning reminiscences." Mr. Posch says that a walk through Lafayette Park yields the same feeling as Boston's Back Bay or South End, a sense of community and closeness that comes from the buildings as well as the people.
Built in the late 1950s as one of the first urban renewal projects, Lafayette Park was the product of a brilliant team assembled by Chicago developer Herbert Greenwald, who had been chosen by Detroit's city government to demolish and build on the old neighborhood of Black Bottom. As the developer of 860-880 Lake Shore Drive, perhaps Mies's most famous towers, Greenwald had worked with Mies, whom he now brought to Detroit.
Mies in turn recruited planner Ludwig Hilberseimer and landscape architect Alfred Caldwell. Dozens of scholarly studies have been devoted to trying to sort out each man's singular contribution -- not easy in part because, while each oversaw other important projects, none ever did anything like this before or after.
Greenwald probably would have reassembled his team to work on future projects had he not died in a plane crash in 1959, before the Lafayette Park buildings were finished. Planner Alex Garvin, author of a popular planning textbook, believes Greenwald was the real genius, perhaps the only one who understood all the details. Wayne State Prof. Jerry Herron, a Lafayette Park resident, agrees, noting that without Greenwald's "single-minded dedication to urban redemption" the project would not exist.
The National Park Service, which listed Lafayette Park on the National Register of Historic Places in 1966, cites its classic elements of Miesian design: steel skeleton frames that make no attempt to hide the buildings' structure, aluminum and glass skins, and open interiors that create a feeling of spaciousness.
http://s.wsj.net/public/resources/images/PT-AH255_mpmies_20071221161319.jpg
With three high-rise apartment buildings and 21 multiple-unit townhouses, Lafayette Park holds the largest grouping of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe buildings.
Yet Mies's "classic elements" would be severe without Caldwell's landscaping and Hilberseimer's site plan. Prof. Mertins asks: "Even if we limit the question of authorship to pure design, how are we to attribute the subtle yet enormously effective manipulation of the ground plane around the cul-de-sacs? Who decided what the right difference in grade would be between the parking lot and the pedestrian walkway along the edge of the housing? How far from the buildings the path should run to provide privacy for units with floor-to-ceiling glass walls?"
Charles Waldheim, editor of "Case: Hilberseimer/Mies van der Rohe -- Lafayette Park, Detroit," notes that the Colonnade Project in Newark had both Greenwald and Mies, who tried to carry out many of the same ideas. But without Caldwell and Hilberseimer, the results were entirely dissimilar. Just the meter-length spatial separation between the automobile level and the residential level made all the difference in Lafayette Park, where cars are so discretely concealed they seem ethereal.
With their aluminum-and-glass skins, and interiors that open to the outdoors, the townhouses themselves are reminiscent of the elegant buildings on the campus of Mies's Illinois Institute of Technology on the South Side of Chicago. But IIT has little lush landscaping, so the effect is austere and far from lovely.
Or take Lafayette Park's use of the much-reviled superblock. The plan deliberately broke from Detroit's century-old street grid as well as from the scale of its single-family pattern of development. Instead, Hilberseimer set up very long blocks of pedestrian walks separated from traffic. Almost no one still advocates superblocks, which planners (led by Jane Jacobs) came to regard as destructive of the urban fabric. But here they work as intended, self-contained and aloof from the clamor of the city.
One well might ask whether Lafayette Park, rather than Mies's more celebrated developments, is in fact what the Modernists really intended. Indeed, Mr. Garvin remembers once lamenting that the Modernists had never actually implemented their City of Tomorrow -- their ideal of dense but serene housing in a garden setting. Then he saw Lafayette Park and concluded that he had found the real thing -- a project that faithfully carried out Modernist principles of simplicity, light and air, while providing housing so desirable it survived even as whole sections of Detroit burned.
Of course human beings have modified Lafayette Park over the years, most notably in the landscaping, which reflects the current owners' preference for flowers over shrubs. While urban renewal had flattened almost everything on the site, Caldwell retained many magnificent specimen trees and planted saplings, which are now mature. Jane Duggan, a resident working with her neighbors to try to restore the original landscape, sighs in speaking of the "endless fights about whether Impatiens should be of one color or variegated, whether every tree should be ringed with flowers, and whether we should return to what Caldwell had in mind -- irregular-shaped beds."
But this attention to detail, which can seem obsessive, is probably crucial both to Lafayette Park's beauty and to its survival. It is regarded as a work of art to be treasured and tended by its residents. Ms. Duggan says her townhouse would now sell for about $135,000 -- truly a bargain in the world of great art.
Ms. Vitullo-Martin is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119827404882045751.html?mod=googlenews_wsj
