Portrait of Neil McEachern, photo by Vasco Roma
“There are many, many really cool things about the house,” said Neil McEachern, retired Detroit public school principal, who has lived in Lafayette Park for 20 years. He is describing life at Lafayette Park, and how the residents there have turned this modern blank slate housing into their much-loved homes. “Lafayette Park was built on land that once was a densely settled, working-class, African-American neighborhood called Black Bottom. Classified as a ’slum’ by the city of Detroit in the 1940s, Black Bottom was razed and left vacant until the mid-1950s, when a citizens’ group led by labor activist Walther Reuther succeeded in attracting Chicago developer Herbert Greenwald to the project. Greenwald brought in Mies van der Rohe to serve as architect, and Mies in turn brought his colleagues urban planner Ludwig Hilberseimer and landscape architect Alfred Caldwell on board. Hilberseimer’s plan for the area called for rerouting or blocking off some of the streets to create a superblock, on which would be built housing, a large park, an elementary school, playgrounds and space for retail. By the early 1960s many elements of this plan had been completed,” notes the introduction to the recently released Metropolis Book, Thanks for the view, Mr. Mies: Lafayette Park Detroit, edited by Danielle Aubert, Lana Cavar, and Natasha Chandani. There are hundreds of stories that create the human texture of this special place. Here, excerpted from the book, is the story of one long time resident, Neil Mceachern.
We have been trying to get a sense of how this neighborhood came about and what was here before. It’s unusual to have an urban renewal project like this, where a large area of land in the middle of a city was cleared and an entirely new neighborhood was established. I always like to recognize the people who came before us in this area of Detroit now known as Lafayette Park. Before 1701 it was the home of the Huron, Ottowa and Potawatomi Indians. Then, after the arrival of Cadillac, this land east of the fort was divided into ribbon farms — narrow strips that started at the river and continued far inland. [1] Many of the streets still retain the names of those early farm families: Rivard, Chene, St. Aubin, Joseph Campau and so on. Then, as the city expanded, the farms were broken up and the area became home to many German families. Many of the old German churches still line the Gratiot corridor — Trinity Lutheran, St. John’s/St. Luke’s, St. Joseph’s, for example. Many of the side streets along Gratiot have German names because they were built out during this period. Then we get to post–World War II and the beginnings of what is Lafayette Park. Generally, “urban renewal” in this country meant tearing down big areas where poor people lived and building new housing. That’s basically what happened here. Black Bottom was home to a large part of Detroit’s black community at the time and also to the city’s emerging Syrian community. It was a very poor area. Mostly it was rentals — little wood houses. It was torn down as part of a plan to keep middle-class people living in downtown Detroit.
Was this area always considered part of downtown Detroit? By the time Lafayette Park was built it was on the edge of downtown. If you stand outside when there aren’t any leaves on the trees you can see the big buildings of downtown. You can see the Renaissance Center from my living room. We’re within walking distance of the Central Business District.
So was this on the west edge of Black Bottom? I don’t really know that Black Bottom had an actual defined boundary. Hastings Street was where the Chrysler Freeway is now, and that was the commercial street where the bars and restaurants and barbershops and stores were. 
Top, a nighttime view of artwork hanging inside Neil McEachern’s unit, photo by Vasco Roma; above, a wall with prints at his house, photo by Daniel Aubert
I picked up the phone one morning and heard a man say in Hungarian, “Korab Boldizsar vagyok,” I’m Balthazar Korab. He needn’t have followed up by adding, “I’m a photographer.” I had known that for some time. As a young design magazine editor I was drawn to his crisp, moody, beautifully framed black and white images of the built environment, including the best of modernism. But I did not know, until that morning, that we shared a homeland and were both shaped by the cold war.
His story, like mine, began in Hungary. He came to the US in 1955. I arrived here in 1956. We were both refugees from post-WWII Eastern Europe. He left Hungary in 1949 when the Iron Curtain closed around the Soviet Union’s newly claimed satellites. Eight years later my parents whisked my sister and me out of Hungary, when Soviet tanks rolled into Budapest and crushed the revolution.
After I heard Korab’s voice and I learned of our shared beginnings, I redoubled my interest in his work. His color photos taught me to appreciate the modernist innovators who built a small mid-western town, long before I visited there (Columbus, Indiana: An American Landmark, 1989). Then I found out that his intense images of Eero Saarinen’s work also revealed the story of the architect’s design process. In 1955 when he arrived in Michigan, Korab was hired by Saarinen to document the design development on buildings that were destined to gain iconic status. It’s not hard to make the connection between the initial fame and historic legacy of buildings like Dulles Airport in Virginia and the photographer’s eye.
To understand how landscape architecture can address our society’s rising security concerns, we naturally turned to the eminent architect Laurie Olin in our November issue. His Philadelphia- and Los Angeles-based studio has long engaged with the thorny task of designing the public realm, from New York’s Bryant Park, to the grounds of the Washington Monument. I met with Olin in his sun-drenched office overlooking Independence Hall in the heart of historic Philadelphia. Some of our long conversation about designing for security was published in the article “The Trouble with Washington.” The conversation continues below:
Avinash Rajagopal: How did designers get left out of the conversation on security?
Laurie Olin: Why do designers get left out of so many conversations in our environment? It’s partly because people don’t realize what we can do and how we can help, and partly because people panicked.
A few years ago, after 9/11, when the federal government insisted on closing Chestnut street here in Philadelphia— basically paralyzing this end of our city with their notion of defending Independence Hall from some sort of attack—it took us three years to unwrap that, and to get the street open, and to get the barriers down. I personally had to go down to Washington to talk to two senators one day, to get them to reopen one of the main arteries of our city, which passes in front of Independence Hall.
Now the truth is that any teenager could figure out how to blow up Independence Hall if they wanted to. You could do it from any of these offices around here; it’d be so easy. Probably no one will. Even if they did, it is a building that, thanks to the American Building Survey, has been documented to death, and it could be rebuilt. If Dresden has been rebuilt after the fire bombing of WWII, surely we could rebuild this hall. It’s been rebuilt two or three times already, those aren’t the real towers anymore. It’s like those old shrines in Japan that are rebuilt every 25 years. They’re 800 years old, but they’re really only 25 years old. Yes, Independence Hall was built in 1759, but its been rebuilt many times since. There’s a lack of perspective on the part of the current administrators.
A sunken wall and bank were used as security measures in 17th and 18th-century parks in France and England. Some of these, like this one in Greenwich, near London, have been modified into embellishments. Image courtesy Laurie Olin.
As cathedrals were in the middle ages, museums are for today’s architects the grand opportunity for almost unlimited possibilities to create soaring, dramatic, sculptural design. So when the Archdiocese of Cologne decided to build a new museum to house its unique collection, it presented a rare opportunity to link the two architectural paradigms together.
Early Design Image from designboom
The Eisenhower Memorial competition and project have stirred a remarkable polemic, the center of which is not President Eisenhower or Washington, D.C. but Frank Gehry and the values he promulgates.
Current Design, i…
