Cranbrook: a newspaperman's farm that became an art school

In 1904 George Gough Booth, who ran The Detroit News, bought a worn-out farm in the hills above Bloomfield and named it Cranbrook, after the English village his family came from. He could have built a quiet estate and stopped there. Instead he spent the next three decades turning the place into one of the strangest and finest campuses in America — a school, an art academy, a science museum, and a church, all stitched into the same rolling acreage.

The man who gave it its look was Eliel Saarinen, a Finnish architect Booth met when Saarinen was teaching Booth’s son at the University of Michigan. Saarinen designed building after building here between 1926 and 1943, and then stayed on as president of the art academy. The brickwork, the courtyards, the fountains, the way a path bends so a tower comes into view at just the right moment — that’s all his hand. It is not a copy of anything European; it’s its own thing, and architects still make pilgrimages to walk it.

What came out of those studios is the surprising part. The Cranbrook Academy of Art trained a generation that reshaped how the country lived: Charles and Ray Eames met here, Florence Knoll trained here, and Eliel’s son Eero went on to design the Gateway Arch in St. Louis. For a quiet art school behind the hedges of an Oakland County suburb, that’s a long reach.

Today Cranbrook is a National Historic Landmark, the rare designation reserved for places of national importance. The grounds hold the schools, the Academy of Art and its museum, the Institute of Science, and Cranbrook House and Gardens, the Booths’ own home. Walk the gardens on a summer evening and you can still feel the thing Booth was after — a working place where art got made, not just admired.