Shaping the Heart of Detroit:
The Saarinen Family’s Plans for the Waterfront
June 2-September 23, 2001

In celebration of Detroit's tricentennial, Cranbrook Art Museum presents this exhibition focusing on the critical role played by Cranbrook architect Eliel Saarinen, his son Eero and son-in-law J. Robert Swanson in the development of Detroit’s water-front Civic Center. Shaping the Heart of Detroit traces the Saarinens' long involvement in the site's conceptual design and feature extensive drawings, renderings, photographs and site planning documents drawn from the city's archives, Cranbrook’s own holdings and numerous other sources. Most of these items have never before been exhibited.

Eliel Saarinen first suggested grouping city offices and a Memorial Hall at the foot of Woodward Avenue in 1924. In the early 1940s, city planners invited the firm of Saarinen, Swanson and Saarinen to revisit the project. Over the next several years, the men worked out the familiar plan organizing public buildings around a landscaped plaza fronting the river. The final scheme, developed the Saarinens in 1947, suggested the actual forms and location of most of the buildings subsequently built by other architects. This was the only project the Saarinens worked on in Detroit, this was also the last major planning effort undertaken by Eliel, who died in 1950.

Shaping the Heart of Detroit is sponsored, in part, by Joseph and Susan Nathan.