The building Alden Dow designed to make art and science argue

Alden Dow had a theory that the best ideas come from disciplines bumping into each other, and in Midland he got to build it. The Center for the Arts, which he designed and which opened at the end of 1970, deliberately crams a science museum, art galleries, art studios, a concert hall, and a couple of theaters into one big complex — so a kid wandering in for a planetarium-style science gallery might collide with a string quartet rehearsing down the hall. That collision was the whole point.

The building is enormous and unmistakably his: about 200,000 square feet of brick and sweeping interior space, anchored by a 1,500-seat auditorium, with a 400-seat Little Theatre and a small lecture-recital hall tucked alongside. Inside is the Alden B. Dow Museum of Science and Art, including a hands-on science gallery he called the Hall of Ideas — a name that tells you exactly what he was after. He once wrote that he wanted a place where the arts could “grow and experiment” without the fear of failure that kills creativity.

It exists because of family money and a lot of neighbors. The Herbert H. and Grace A. Dow Foundation led the multimillion-dollar campaign, Alden and Vada Dow pitched in, and more than 3,000 individual donors filled out the rest before the doors opened with a Christmas symphony concert in December 1970.

So this is the third great Alden Dow thing in one town — after his sunken Home and Studio and the buildings scattered across Midland, here’s the place he built for everybody else to use. Catch a show in the big hall, then walk twenty steps into a science exhibit, and you’re doing precisely what the architect drew it up to make you do.