Ann Arbor Observed: Selections from Then and Now

Alden Dow’s Ann Arbor

Alden Dow’s Ann Arbor Inspired by a trip to Japan when he was a teenager, the Dow Chemical heir spurned the family business to devote his life to architecture. From city hall to the U-M’s administration building, he put a quirky modernist stamp on the city. Judy Dow Rumelhart was walking down Fifth Avenue one day recently when it started to rain. Looking around for shelter, she spotted the Ann Arbor District Library, a building originally designed by her uncle, Alden Dow. “And I thought how lovely it is,” Rumelhart says. “The library is one of my favorites.” “The library and city hall are two of the ugliest buildings in Ann Arbor, and ISR [the U-M Institute for Social Research] is right up there,” says library board member Ed Surovell, expressing a dissenting opinion on the library and two other Dow designs. “They do not have the kind of imposing presence of a public building that creates civic pride.” Alden Dow (1904–83) is an unlikely figure to provoke such controversy . Though Frank Lloyd Wright once called him his “spiritual son,” Dow had none of the older architect’s egotism or self-promotion. Shy and studious, Dow had to be encouraged to take on major public commissions by his devoted wife, Vada. He got much of his work through family connections; his father, Herbert, was the founder of Dow Chemical. Alden Dow’s entrée to Ann Arbor was through his sister Margaret and her husband, U-M physician Harry Towsley. His first residential commission, in 1932, was the Towsley home in Ann Arbor Hills. Over the next thirty-six years, Dow designed seventeen more Ann Arbor buildings ; in the 1960s, his work was so highly regarded that both the city of Ann Arbor and the U-M hired him to design their administrative centers : the Larcom Municipal Building (1961) and the Fleming Administration Building (1964). Like Frank Lloyd Wright, with whom he studied, Dow sought to integrate his buildings into their environment. His motto was “Gardens never begin, and houses never end.” Especially in his residential projects, he was capable of blending building and landscape brilliantly. 245 The going was tougher when the commission was a civic building downtown. He sometimes attempted to domesticate these urban settings by specifying massive upper-story planters, but in Ann Arbor, most of these have long since been abandoned as impractical. Despite the common elements he sometimes used, Dow was no assembly-line architect. His Ann Arbor buildings have evoked comparisons as diverse as “a Mondrian painting” (the Fleming Building) and “a chest of drawers” (city hall). But especially in recent years, those characterizations have not always been flattering. Shortly after taking office, former U-M president Lee Bollinger announced that he wanted to move his office out of the Fleming Building, which he called “fortresslike.” (Its slit windows, arched entryway, and looming overhangs do give the Fleming Building a defensive look, but the popular belief that Dow designed it to shut out student protesters is unfounded—the plans were completed well before the campus demonstrations of the 1960s turned violent.) Others have since risen to the building’s defense, including Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, the celebrated “postmodern” architects whom Bollinger retained to develop a new master plan for the university. But Bollinger’s comments are a sure sign of Dow’s declining stature in the city he did so much to shape. Alden Dow was born in Midland in 1904, the fifth of Grace and Herbert Dow’s seven children. His parents had assumed that he would go into the family business, but they also encouraged his creativity by exposing him to art, historic buildings, and gardens. When he was a teenager, the whole family took a trip to Japan. “They went in a big ship and stayed for three or four months,” relates his niece Judy Dow Rumelhart . The trip exposed Dow to two of his greatest influences as an architect : the exacting simplicity of Japanese design and the striking modernism of Frank Lloyd Wright, whose newly completed Imperial Hotel the family admired. Dow spent three years at the U-M studying mechanical engineering but then begged his parents to let him switch careers. He transferred to Columbia’s School of Architecture, and in 1930, while he was still a student , his father got him his first commission: a clubhouse for the Midland Country Club. Upon graduation, Dow joined a Saginaw firm...