EXCERPT

From the Introduction, by Charles Waldheim

In 1955 Ludwig Hilberseimer was commissioned to plan the “renewal” of one of Detroit’s deteriorating downtown neighborhoods. Hilberseimer’s plan applied the theoretical principles he had developed as an urban planner, architect, and educator to a federally underwritten project that would come to be known as Lafayette Park. His plan fundamentally reconceived the urban pattern for this portion of the “motor city” and orchestrated the contributions of a talented interdisciplinary design team assembled for the project. This team, composed of Mies van der Rohe, Alfred Caldwell, and developer Herbert Greenwald, produced a still vibrant mixed-income, mixed-race community of publicly subsidized housing in the midst of Detroit’s ongoing deterioration. In light of renewed critical interest in the superblock as a strategy of modernist urban planning, the ongoing demolition of modernist housing projects in the United States, and the popular acceptance of “new urbanist” models for the reconstruction of the city, Lafayette Park offers a unique counterpoint that recommends a thoughtful reconsideration of the presumed failures of modern architecture and urbanism.
The largest collection of Mies van der Rohe’s buildings, and Ludwig Hilberseimer’s most significant planning commission, Lafayette Park is also the most fully realized U.S. example of a superblock strategy for the decentralizing postwar city. Hilberseimer’s planning and Alfred Caldwell’s planting create a project foreshadowing contemporary interest in landscape urbanism: landscape conceived and designed as the primary ordering element for decentralized urbanism. In this work, landscape and transportation infrastructure replace architecture as the spatial and organizational means through which urban order is constructed. Mies’s architecture of high-rise apartment slabs, two-story townhouses, and ground-level courtyard houses, not insignificant in their own right, benefit from the context created by Hilberseimer’s planning, Caldwell’s landscape, and developer Herbert Greenwald’s social vision. This volume in the CASE series critically reexamines the history of this overlooked project of modern architecture, planning, and landscape, while evaluating the relevance it holds for the social and environmental problems facing the contemporary city.