Surveys Mies van der Rohe's Lafayette Park in Detroit, Michigan, showing how its residents live with and experience the architecture
The authors work together on Placement, a transient and site-specific project about the interaction of people and places.
The second edition of a unique book on Lafayette Park illustrates
what’s different and what’s the same about the Mies van der
Rohe–designed neighborhood.
*Curbed*
Exceptionally informed and informative, this impressive and newly
updated study is a seminal work of outstanding scholarship and
unreservedly recommended for personal, professional, community, and
academic library American Architecture & Urban Development history
collections and supplemental studies reading lists.
*Midwest Book Review*
...a fine-grained publication that celebrates Lafayette Park's
residents and daily life there. That book conveys a sense of a
complex, diverse ecology: from college students and retirees to
herons, pheasants, and possums.
*Public Books*
This inspiring 288-page volume from Metropolis books captures the
convivial atmosphere the authors found at Detroit's Lafayette Park,
a housing developement designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe that
encompasses 32 hectares of towers, townhouses and parks. I visited
the area 15 years ago, the book took me right back to its quiet
streets, green spaces and distinctive glass and steel design. The
three editors (also the book's graphic designers) bring Layfayette
to life, primarily through interviews with residents and
photographs of them in their apartments. The images provide an
intruiging glimpse of how personal style rarely conforms to strict
Modernism.
*Azure*
Thanks to a master plan by architect Mies van der Rohe, urban
planner Ludwig Hilbersheimer, landscape architect Alfred Caldwell
and the spirit of its residents, the neighborhood turned out to be
one of the most successful communities in Detroit.
Or, as essayist Marsha Music, who lives in one of the 183
town-houses of Lafayette Park, puts it: The peace here may be a
reward, bequeathed through the ages, for having the commitment and
audacity to maintain an integrated community in one of the most
segregated cities in the United States. God is certainly in these
details, as Mies might say.
It's the prime achievement of "Thanks for the View, Mr. Mies" to
show those details in all their significance, and to show them in a
very clever and never all too earnest way. See glossy photos of
bathroom doorknobs and mail slots, learn more about early community
newsletters, whistle with the neighborhood bagpiper.
In two words: Be amazed.
*The Detroit News*
In their new book, "Thanks for the View, Mr. Mies," which is due
out at the end of the month (Metropolis Books, $29.95), the editors
Danielle Aubert, Lana Cavar and Natasha Chandani, graphic designers
all, offer a portrait of Lafayette Park very different from the
classic Mies monograph.
Contents include interviews with residents of Lafayette Park's
towers and town houses; archival materials from the complex's
history; an account of nine days spent trying to climate-control a
corner apartment; and essays on Mies in Detroit, the Lafayette Park
landscape, bird-watching and a record of bird-strike deaths (birds
and plate glass don't mix).
At-home portraits of residents by Corine Vermeulen show Mies's
architecture as a strong frame for personal expression. Some homes
look like shrines to 1958, while others reflect the lived-in décor
of decades. Jacqueline Neal, an interior designer and 12-year
resident of the Pavilion, the smallest of the complex's three
towers, spoke last month about living and accessorizing with
Mies.
*The New York Times, Home Section*
"Thanks for the View, Mr. Mies" explores how Modernist architecture
improves lives in the Lafayette Park section of Detroit, which has
the world's largest concentration of Mies van der Rohe buildings.
(It's also one of the most racially integrated neighborhoods in
what might well be America's most segregated city.)
*T: The New York Times Style Magazine*
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