The architect's house that sits in its own pond

There is a room in Alden Dow’s house where the floor is roughly a foot and a half below the surface of the pond outside, so that when you sit at the drafting table the water is at eye level and ducks paddle past your window. He called it the submerged garden, and it tells you almost everything about the man: a chemical-company heir who would rather watch the pond from inside it than look down on it.

Alden was Herbert Dow’s son. He apprenticed with Frank Lloyd Wright at Taliesin in 1933, then came home to Midland and spent the rest of his life proving he had his own ideas. Through the mid-1930s he built this rambling home and studio on Post Street out of his own one-foot-square concrete “unit blocks,” low copper-roofed wings stepping down a man-made stream, the whole thing knit so tightly into the landscape that you lose track of where the building stops and the garden starts.

The result got noticed. The home and studio became a National Historic Landmark in 1989, and over the years it has been called one of the most beautiful modern houses in the country in the same breath as Wright’s Fallingwater. Michigan named Dow the state’s first Architect Laureate in 1983, an honor it has handed out exactly once.

Step outside and you see his fingerprints all over town — schools, churches, the library, a hundred-plus buildings carry his curving, light-filled stamp. But the house on Post Street is where the thinking happened, and you can tour it: walk the unit-block terraces, cross the stepping stones, and sit for a minute in that sunken room while the pond does its slow business on the other side of the glass.