Courtesy of Cranbrook Archives, Cranbrook Center for Collections and Research.Īlthough this is a very small collection, the diversity of content is rewarding for its ability to convey snapshots of his life in individual and unique items. More simply, the brickwork of Cranbrook is a visual delight. This combination of beauty and utility was key to the Arts and Crafts Movement, and to the form-following-function ethos of Saarinen’s modernism. He achieved a special blend of true engineering and true artistry. Saarinen did use concrete vaults and floor slabs, as well as steel trusses, but he connected these to brick load bearing walls and stone columns.Īdding to the unusual fact that Cranbrook’s brick walls and brick vaults are structural, the beauty of Saarinen’s brickwork stands out. While many of Saarinen’s contemporaries were dealing with so-called ‘dishonest’ forms of architecture (steel and concrete frames clad in traditional styles rooted in masonry construction), Saarinen avoided the problem of ‘dishonesty’ by building modern buildings traditionally. Photograph by Kevin Adkisson, Courtesy Cranbrook Center. True stone and brick construction was integral to our founding ethos, and to Saarinen’s designs.ĭetail of brickwork on the dormitories of Cranbrook School for Boys (Cranbrook Campus, Cranbrook Kingswood Upper School). The structure and the appearance of the architecture were one in the same.īut at Cranbrook, with its deep roots in the Arts and Crafts Movement, Saarinen went the other direction. In International Style modern architecture, then, architects simply did away with brick walls and stone columns-materials used in construction for millennia-in favor of concrete, glass, and steel. This habit of facadism (a focus on the material appearance without regard to the structural reality) was abhorrent to devotees of modernism. Regardless of a building’s style, by the early 20 th century most of our country’s institutional buildings were constructed of modern materials and wrapped in traditional ones. Solid brick walls and true stone columns are more expensive and more limiting to the designer (you can build taller, wider, and cheaper in steel and concrete). In the 1920s and 1930s (and straight through to today), it was much cheaper to build a wall of concrete block or wood and then cover it in a façade of brick, or to design a reinforced concrete column and then wrap it in thin stone veneer. Photograph by Daniel Smith CAA Architecture 2021. Bricks and Mankato Kasota stone pilasters at Cranbrook Art Museum.
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