Cranbrook Architecture

A Legacy of Latitude

Gretchen Wilkins

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2023
• ISBN:
  9781119834434
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: History of Architecture

Guest-edited by Gretchen Wilkins

The renowned Cranbrook Academy of Art near Detroit, Michigan, has been described as the epicentre of American Modernism. When it opened in 1932 it combined a stunning Eliel Saarinen-designed campus with a radically open educational philosophy to attract and produce some of the most influential artists, designers and architects in US history, including Charles and Ray Eames, Fumihiko Maki, Florence Knoll and Edmund Bacon. Often compared to other experimental schools such as the Bauhaus, Black Mountain College and Taliesin, Cranbrook's sustained purpose has been advancing a wide, interdisciplinary latitude and self-directed design research to expand and diversify its approaches to architectural practice. There is a deep and persistent idea that open and experimental acts of making should define pedagogy, and by extension that education should shape practice, not the other way around. Cranbrook's rigorous defiance of dogma and loose grip on the disciplines enables an educational model that combines the practices of art, design, making and urbanism. In this issue, alumni, faculty and scholars reflect on Cranbrook's model in light of contemporary and challenging questions in architectural education, practice and the profession.

Contributors: Kevin Adkisson, Emily Baker, Peggy Deamer, Pia Ednie-Brown, Ronit Eisenbach, Dan Hoffman, Yu-Chih Hsiao, Peter Lynch, Bill Massie, Hani Rashid, Jesse Reiser, Lois Weinthal, and Tod Williams.

Featured architects: Asymptote Architecture, Building Culture PLA, Reiser+Umemoto (RUR), Studio Libeskind, and Tod Williams Billie Tsien.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• About the Guest-Editor
• Introduction: Hive of Education Reflections on a Model of Architectural Education
• Evolution Over Revolution: Eliel Saarinen as Architect and Educator
• Provoking the Outliers: Trajectories for the Near Future Drawn from the Enigmatic Past
• ‘The Unmeasurable’: Lessons from Cranbrook
• Schooling Fishy Knowledge
• Postgraduate Architectural Education In Situ
• Unprompted: Open-ended Investigations in the Choreography of Construction
• Building A Dream: Fertile Ground for Social Good
• Unbuilding and the Recovery of Craft in Architecture: Cranbrook Department of Architecture 1986–1996
• An Architecture of Marks: Reading Histories and Writing Futures
• Methods of Inspiration: A Pedagogical Approach Based on Singularity
• The Interior Within Hand’s Reach: Tactile Proximity
• Arrows: The Long Lines of In uence in Architecture
• Forming Action: The Subject in the Object
• The Agency of Making: An Anatomy of Practice-based Pedagogy
• From Another Perspective: Adept and Apprentices Ben Nicholson at Cranbrook
• Contributors
• What is Architectural Design?
• ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN
• FORTHCOMING AD TITLES
• EULA