Download our Logo
Vol. 26:3 ISSN 0160-8460 September 1998
The Documenting Michigan Architecture Project
by Tawny Ryan Nelb
Michigan has a tremendous diversity of terrain, livelihoods, and lifestyles. That diversity is reflected in the state's architectural heritage. Through the entire course of Michigan's history, from the days dominated by native Americans, through its settlement by Europeans, to the present-day mix of heavy industry and productive farms, our architecture reflects our work, our play, and the development of the state.
Point Iroquois Lighthouse. Photograph courtesy of the Michigan State Historic Preservation Office.
We have architecture reflecting the once thriving lumbering industry, including magnificent mansions built by lumber barons. The architecture of transportation and navigation aids, which were critical to the development of Michigan, given that the state is surrounded by Lakes Superior, Huron, and Michigan, is represented by the lighthouses that were built to avert shipwrecks and by the Life Saving Stations that provided assistance to mariners when disasters did in fact take place.
Mining for both copper and iron prompted the development of the beautiful but wild Upper Peninsula. Mining towns grew up around this work, and numerous architectural remnants of this once flourishing industry still remain. Many areas in Michigan, especially those along the lakes and rivers, were developed as the result of land sales campaigns by the railway interests. Religious groups bought large parcels of land on which they constructed retreats, a practice which spread to individual summer vacationers from Chicago and downstate areas. As a result, such areas contain many fabulous examples of resort architecture.
The automobile industry created its own architecture for its factories and research and development facilities. Automobile barons also hired well-known architects to create great mansions that celebrated their success, although those same structures also performed a more prosaic task as secure homes in which to raise families.
While many hundreds of farmers leave the land every year across America, agriculture is still an important part of Michigan life. Fields of sugar beets, cucumbers, corn, and soybeans, not to mention fruit orchards, cover the state outside our major metropolitan areas.
Although there has a been an active movement to preserve architectural and engineering structures themselves throughout the United States and Michigan for the past 20 years, little has been done (except in a few pockets) to actively seek out and preserve the records that document the built and natural environment. In 1994, the Michigan State Historical Records Advisory Board, under the direction of Sandra Clark, undertook a planning project aimed at ensuring the documentation of Michigan's architectural heritage.
The project's goals were the statewide assessment of architectural records practices and holdings, the formulation of guidelines with which to appraise the records, and the development of educational materials to facilitate discussion of the need to preserve architectural records, as well as the convocation of meetings at which such discussions could take place. The NHPRC provided a grant of $12,900 for this project, with most of the funds being used for consultant fees and travel. Archivists, coordinators, surveyors, and college and university professors also put much time and effort into the endeavor.
The Documenting Michigan Architecture Project first set up an advisory board to build a collaborative relationship among repositories in the state, to identify appraisal strategies for state repositories, and to select a group of significant design firms or structures whose records should be preserved. Repositories were surveyed for their collection policies on architectural records, and lectures were given to all ten of the American Institute of Architects-Michigan Regional Chapters about the project and about what measures their members could take to preserve architectural records in their firms.
Graduate students from Eastern Michigan University's Historic Preservation Program, under the direction of Professor Ted Ligibel, developed a survey model for design firms and tested it within a region of the state. For many of the EMU students, this was their first exposure to such records, and they realized for the first time what impact documents can have on historic preservation efforts. The exercise also put them into "real life situations" in which access to records was sometimes difficult to achieve. In the end, the students all became ambassadors for the preservation of architectural records.
Workshop taught at Giffels Association, an architectural firm in Detroit. Photograph courtesy of Tawny Ryan Nelb.
Workshops on preservation and management of architectural records were held in five locations (Detroit, Kalamazoo, Marquette, Lansing, and Mackinac Island), with a total of 66 archivists and records care givers in attendance. At the close of the project, the Michigan Committee for the Preservation of Architectural Records (Mich COPAR) was formed to implement some of the recom-mendations that emerged from the project.
Every fall, EMU students conduct a new survey of design firms under Mich COPAR sponsorship. The students learn about the architectural design process, the types of records created during each phase of the process, and the preservation problems that affect these specialized materials. The design firm survey has become an integral part of course work for Professor Ligibel's students. The completed surveys are housed in the EMU archives, and will be mounted on a Web page in the future. Mich COPAR continues to meet twice a year to share resources among colleagues and to help find homes for orphan records. State institutions are now much more aware of the value of these records for research, and they have begun to accession new architectural collections.
(Tawny Ryan Nelb, who served as the director of the Documenting Michigan Architecture Project, runs an archival consulting firm based in Midland, Michigan.)
