Cranbrook Complexities - Cranbrook Educational Community

Architectural Review, The, May, 2001 by Annette Lecuyer

Adding to the Cranbrook campus is one of the most testing experiences for architects. Here, a building type often realized as dumb boxes is given integral relationship to landscape and becomes a new kind of public space.

The Cranbrook Educational Community, founded in the 1920s by newspaper magnate George Booth, was conceived as a utopian society set apart from the industrialized world. Located just a few miles from Highland Park and River Rouge, where Henry Ford's assembly lines were perfecting Taylorist principles of mass production, Cranbrook looked to the Arts and Crafts Movement for its inspiration. Based on the belief that the integration of craft into daily life yields moral as well as material benefits, Cranbrook was an educational and architectural experiment. Eliel Saarinen worked with Booth over a period of some 25 years both to shape the educational philosophy of Cranbrook and transform over 300 acres of farmland into one of the finest examples of integrated architecture and landscape design in North America.

Now surrounded by the suburbs of Detroit, Cranbrook still remains a world apart. Its utopian ethos is palpable at every turning but, even in this idealized community, the realities of growing enrolment and the need to modernize have to be addressed. As a consequence, during the past 10 years, Cranbrook has commissioned a series of new buildings. The Natatorium by Tod Williams Billie Tsien Associates is the most recent of these to be completed.

The initial instinct of both the architects and the client was to locate the new 'big box' athletic facilities away from the historic heart of the estate. However, after considering the problem, Williams and Tsien concluded that, to maintain the close relationship between mental and physical life that is central to Cranbrook's educational philosophy, academic and athletic facilities should remain closely integrated. The selected site, located just to the north of Saarinen's Boys' School, was a ragged and unkempt 'backyard' of the existing campus.

In the Cranbrook tradition, Williams and Tsien have designed the building to make space in the landscape rather than to call attention to itself as an object. In the predominantly pedestrian environment of the campus, client and architect agreed that parking should be removed from the forecourt of the building. In its place, a new elongated lawn -- designed by landscape architect Peter Osler in collaboration with Williams and Tsien -- is defined by existing buildings to the south and by a new garden wall to the north and west. The lawn and wall provide a western terminus to the axes previously established by Saarinen leading from Cranbrook House to the Lion Gate and Orpheus Fountain.

The Natatorium is discreetly tucked behind the single-storey wall. Placed at the edge of the lawn within the pine forest, the tall interior volume required by the pool is created by taking advantage of the slope down to the north. The new building is connected to the existing gymnasium and playing fields by a long, narrow arm of circulation concealed behind the wall that reaches out to the south. A stair and an extended ramp that folds back on itself descend to the changing rooms and pool as well as to an enclosed bridge to other athletic and academic buildings. A new exterior footpath in the ravine under the bridge leads to the lower playing fields. At the upper level, ramp and stair connect to an entrance from the lawn and to spectator seating above the pool. Sensitive to the nuances of Saarinen's planning principles on the estate, Williams and Tsien have placed this upper level entrance at the end of the lawn but off-axis. Instead of the idealized geometry of the right angle, the brick wall is folded to a softer, non-orthogonal profile, and the lead-coated copper entrance canopy is offset from the footpath along the side of the crisp, green lawn.

Empathy with the landscape is expressed not only through the extended architectural promenade that traverses the contours of the site, but also through the material character of the Natatorium. Instead of the light, sandy 'Cranbrook' brick of the historic buildings, a hard brick with a rough wire-cut surface has been used that ranges in dark tones from plum to rust. Its colour and texture merge with the tree trunks and the dried pine needles on the forest floor. In a Wrightian manner, the horizontality of the lawn and the density and compression of the garden wall are reinforced by the elongated proportion of Norman bricks with deeply raked bed joints and by the long shadows cast by projecting metal heads and stone sills of windows. Inset horizontal courses and panels of the same brick, partially glazed in variegated shades of pale blue or green, translate water, sky, leaves and the copper roofs of adjacent buildings into simple abstract planes of colour.

The picturesque, romantic orchestration of landscape is reinforced by the unfolding interior topography of the building that culminates at the lowest level with the still pool of water. Because the campus is punctuated by a series of natural and man-made lakes, streams and fountains, water plays an important sensate role in the psyche of the community. In place of the strident brightness that characterizes many sports facilities, the interior of the Natatorium is dark and earthy. The serene, cave-like space is defined by floors of smooth grey Italian stone and walls of ground faced concrete block with black aggregate and charcoal mortar. A thick dark blue ceiling, pulled away from the walls, seems to hover above the water. Benches, handrails and screens are of rich mahogany. The rational ordering systems of the building such as structure and services are suppressed in favour of surface and sensate experience.