Architecture Books – Week 5/2025
Let's take a trip to the Great Lakes State
This newsletter for the week of January 27 heads to Michigan, looking inside a new book by Peter Forguson, Contemporary Michigan: Iconic Houses at the Epicenter of Modernism. This is Forguson’s second book, so the archive book revisits his first one, Detroit Modern: 1935–1985, released in 2022. In between are the usual headlines and new releases. Happy reading!
Book of the Week:
Contemporary Michigan: Iconic Houses at the Epicenter of Modernism by Peter Forguson (Buy from Visual Profile Books / from Amazon / from Bookshop)
When I started contributing “ideabooks” to Houzz about a decade and a half ago, one of the first subjects I tackled was explaining the difference between modern architecture and contemporary architecture. For “Modern or Contemporary: What’s the Difference?,” I rummaged through the website’s many projects to find ten that I then defined as either modern or contemporary. Simply put, I approached modern in terms of simple, planar surfaces, expanses of glass, and other traits that were rooted in houses designed by Le Corbusier and his contemporaries in the 1920s and 30s, while I thought of contemporary as more indicative of 21st-century pluralism but still forward-looking and formally progressive.
I bring it up my Houzz article here, in the context of Peter Forguson’s second book, a follow-up to Detroit Modern: 1935-1985 from 2022, because it has these two terms in its title, Contemporary Michigan: Iconic Houses at the Epicenter of Modernism, and because, when I look at the house on the cover, neither contemporary nor modern springs to mind. The rear facade of the David Mark House, designed by Bloomfield Hills’ Young and Young Architects in 2014, comes across to me as more traditional than modern, perhaps a contemporary version of a Prairie Style house. I didn’t judge Contemporary Michigan on this cover, but I did have questions when I cracked open the book that Visual Profile Books sent me in the mail.
Some of those questions were addressed by the first of the more than seventy houses in Forguson’s sweeping chronological, 113-year survey: the David M. and Hattie Amberg House in Grand Rapids, attributed to Marion Mahoney and built in 1910. It very much resembles a Frank Lloyd Wright Prairie Style house, and originally it was credited solely to him, Forguson explains: Wright started the house in 1909, but when he left for Europe to publish his so-called Wasmuth portfolio, Mahoney assumed the role of chief designer and completed the house (with Herman Von Holst) one year later. Exterior and interior photographs by Jason Grube reveal a house of its time, with one step in the past and one in the future, the highlights being stained glass laylights in the vaulted living spaces. Forguson calls the Amberg House “the finest early example of Modernism in Michigan,” one he is “thrilled” to have at the beginning of his “tour of the evolution of Modernist residential architecture in the Great Lakes State.” Falling 236 pages — and 104 years — later, the David Mark House, alongside a few other fairly neo-traditional houses that fall toward the back of the book, works with the Amberg House to give Contemporary Michigan a pleasing symmetry and express how style is cyclical rather than linear.
The second house in the book, the Charles W. and Grace Bachman House in East Lansing, designed by Alden B. Dow, jumps ahead a couple decades, to 1936. One of three Dow houses in the book, it is in a regionally inflected International Style, with a flat roof, whitewashed “Unit Blocks” (a beveled cinder block patented by Dow), and a treehouse-like living room with large windows on three sides. His next house in the book, the George Greene House in Midland, was built one year later but is more aligned with Wright’s and Mahoney’s Prairie School houses. Curiously, its location in the book’s chronological order precedes the first of a half dozen Wright houses in the book, most of them Usonian. Forguson stated in a local news segment that, behind Illinois and Wisconsin, Michigan has the most houses designed by Wright, making those in his book are a smattering of roughly three-dozen. Five of the six were completed between 1939 and 1953, and in turn follow each other sequentially in the book. This placement allows readers to the see the similarities and differences in a very productive period of Wright’s long career. And given the contemporary nature of Grube’s photographs, as in the spread for the Harper House above, the stewardship of the houses by the original and subsequent owners comes to the fore.
In terms of photography, Jason Grube’s photos are in the majority, but credit is also give on the frontispiece to James Haefner, Balthazar Korab, “and others.” The others are sporadic and I’m guessing were used to include houses that Forguson and Grube could not gain access to, such as Richard Meier’s famous Douglas House (photos by Scott Frances) and Norman Carver Jr.’s Japan-inspired Rogers House (photos by its current owner, Tim Hills). Ditto Korab, whose photographs stand out from the rest because they were also contemporaneous with the completion of the houses but were often, like the 1963 Bachman House seen above, in black and white rather than color. That said, the Aaron and Bernice Gershenson House in Bloomfield Hills, designed by William Kessler in 1980, is one of the remarkable houses in the book, partly because of Korab’s relatively subdued color photos, but mainly because the house is one of the few examples of corporate, late-modern/postmodern architecture in the book. A few of Haefner’s photos document another standout: the Donald and Harriet Freeman House in East Grand Rapids, which was designed by Gunnar Birkerts in 1965 with a dramatic living space capped by a pyramidal roof that itself is capped by an inverted pyramid.
But, again, it’s Grube’s photos that are in the majority, which means a lot of house fronts fittingly presented with period cars on the street, in the driveway, or in the carport (see Good House above), as well as quite a few seemingly unnatural dusk shots where the interiors are as bright as the exteriors. All of the photographs combine with Forguson’s brief but informative texts (and occasional contributions by clients and others intimate with the houses) to make a strong argument for elevating Michigan’s stature in the realms of modern and contemporary residential architecture — however one defines those styles.
Books Released This Week:
(In the United States, a curated list)
Archigram: The Book by Peter Cook, Dennis Crompton (RIP) and David Greene (Buy from Circa Press / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “Edited and designed by Archigram member Dennis Crompton, this book catalogues Archigram’s activities over fourteen years, together with commentaries by the architects and critics writing then and now.” (This is a reduced-format paperback edition of the large-format hardcover released in 2018.)
Classical Architecture by James Stevens Curl (Buy from John Hudson Publishing / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “Classical architecture continues to be widely practised today, and this book describes and demonstrates the fundamental principles from its origins in Antiquity and continuous development during the Renaissance, the Baroque and Rococo phases, Neo-Classicism, and survival in various forms into the current century.”
Modern Architecture of Curaçao: The DoCoMoMo Movement, 1930-1960 by Michael Newton (Buy from LM Publishers / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “This book describes the twenty-five most important [modern] buildings […] on the island. [Newton] aims to give international exposure to modernist structures in Curaçao and increase local appreciation and awareness of this architectural style.”
Mills Transformed by Neil Horsley (Buy from John Hudson Publishing / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “With case studies drawn from extensive interviews with owners, developers and users of these buildings, the book celebrates the repurposing of industrial mill buildings in the North of England.”
Full disclosure: As an Amazon Associate, AbeBooks Affiliate, and Bookshop.org Affiliate, I earn commissions from qualifying purchases made via any relevant links above and below.
Book News:
“Hot off the press”: Winnipeg Places and Spaces, recently published by The Winnipeg Architecture Foundation, is “a comprehensive guidebook to the buildings and landscapes of the Manitoba capital.”
Mrinmayee Bhoot reviews Aaron Betsky's Don't Build, Rebuild: The Case for Imaginative Reuse at STIR World.
Michael Webb, the author of numerous architecture books, “reflects on the devastating 2025 Los Angeles fires and offers his personal account of the events of the last two weeks in California” at Wallpaper*.
From the Archives:
Back in September 2023 I reviewed Peter Forguson’s first book, Detroit Modern: 1935-1985, published by Visual Profile Books in November 2022, including it in the first of what ended up becoming three “Places in Time” blog posts. This is what I wrote:
In its geography and name, Detroit Modern sounds like a sequel to Michigan Modern: An Architectural Legacy, the 2018 book written by preservationist Brian D. Conway with photographs by James Haefner, also published by Visual Profile Books. But they are two different beasts, given that the earlier book was the product of the Michigan State Historic Preservation Office, which received a grant from the National Park Service for the project, while the nearly one-year-old Detroit Modern was written by Peter Forguson, a landscape designer and landscaping contractor who has worked on the grounds of some of the 70 houses collected in his book. Forguson's book, in turn, is a labor of love, one that draws attention to an overlooked geographical subset of mid-20th-century modern residential architecture, something Michigan Modern similarly did for a wider array of building typologies on a larger geographical scale.
The 70 houses spanning 50 years were designed by names both familiar and lesser known: from Eliel and Eero Saarinen, Minoru Yamasaki, Edward Durell Stone, and Gunnar Birkets among the former, to Irving Tobocman, Don Paul Young, Louis DesRosiers, and Robert L. Ziegelman in the latter. While those last four names, among numerous others in the book, are new to me, they may be fairly well-known names in the larger Detroit area (the book is more Grosse Pointe Farms and Bloomfield Hills that Detroit proper, it should be noted), given that they designed roughly 20 of the book's 70 houses. This book will no doubt appeal to locals interested in mid-20th-century houses, but it should also appeal to people living outside the Detroit area who like the same. It should be pointed out that although photographer Amy Claeys is billed as photographer, many of the houses feature photographs by others, including Haefner and occasional period photographs by the great Balthazar Korab. As such, the book doesn't have the visual consistency of Michigan Modern (it's also lacking in floor plans, valuable elements in any good book on residential architecture), but the book's ability to capture the high-quality architecture created in a place over a fairly long time period makes it a valuable document.
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