Modernistic Idyll in a Deteriorating City

Detroit’s urban decline has been compared with the aftermath of an atomic bomb that had been released over the centre of the city, except it is as if the devastation of its explosion would have taken place in slow motion over decades. The former industrial metropolis is now a devastated and bankrupt city: at the very centre there are great numbers of vacant lots and abandoned buildings, the local public transport system is ailing, and the monumental train station meanwhile stands alone, decaying amidst an inner-city wasteland.

But not all of Detroit is a dreary place. No. There is an enclave within all this misery. The area is called Lafayette Park, and it was designed by ex-Bauhaus director Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Ludwig Hilberseimer, an urban planner who was Mies’ former colleague in Dessau. Alfred Caldwell, who, like Hilberseimer, had worked with Mies in the 1950s at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) in Chicago, was responsible for the landscape design. In Lafayette Park, modernism – nowadays demonised by many critics and viewed as having failed – seems like a functioning idyll in the middle of a deteriorating city.

Beginning in 1956, the 31.7-hectare site was built directly alongside downtown Detroit by the project developer Herbert Greenwald, who had already worked with Mies to construct the Lake Shore Drive Apartments in Chicago. The plans by the modernist dream team of Mies, Hilberseimer and Caldwell were never fully realised – Greenwald died in 1959 in a plane crash and other project developers subsequently took over.

From Mies’ low-rise townhouses, the views extend out into a park landscape because individually designed yards, as seen everywhere else in the city, are not found here. Mies defines the aesthetic, also through the lack of other influences – except for lawns, trees and solitary hedges. Even the cars are hidden in sunken parking lots that remove them from view. Lafayette Park thus represents the pure aesthetics of planning – making it the exact opposite of the participatory planning models which are currently in fashion. And that is exactly what the residents seem to appreciate. At the same time, however, Lafayette Park is also the alternative to a chaotic, apostrophised city, which Hilberseimer wanted to transform into the “New City” by means of rational planning. Such planned cities, too, are commonly regarded today as anti-urban.

What has emerged in Lafayette Park is a kind of suburban idyll, which at least offers the image of a “harmonious relationship between people, nature and technology” as conceived by Hilberseimer. Admittedly with a dependence on cars, without which no one can leave this island of the blessed, due to the lack of local public transport.

Text: Ronald Berg