Mid-Michigan Modern: From Frank Lloyd Wright to Googie

How wonderful to have a book that puts Michigan forth. Now that a brilliant writer has put mid-Michigan forth in such wonderful words, photos and images, can we not find other authors to put the rest of Michigan up there with her beautiful work?

As a 13 year resident of mid-Michigan, this book has changed *everything* for me. I loved reading about the history and the architects behind some of the most beautiful houses in our area. In Mid-Michigan Modern, Susan Bandes took the shades off my eyes allowing me to develop an appreciation for this iconic style.

...and was proud to see my home in it!

The detailed descriptions and personal correspondence between clients and architects really help put you into the minds, time, and motives behind many of the great mid-century buildings in this region. This book loses you in the author’s odd layout that separates the description from the image(s) of each respective building. Whole chapters will pass before you see an image of a home or building discussed up to 100 pages prior.I love this period of architecture and learning about the thinking behind the designs and reaction to them. Susan Bandes deserves a lot of credit for the painstaking research she underwent to bring the backstory of all of the discussed buildings into the light. The letters between Frank Lloyd Wright and his clients are particularly illuminating. I just wish she had taken a different approach to the layout so that her well detailed descriptions could be studied against the buildings themselves.All of this results in a disjointed experience. Imagine going on an architecture tour where they spend hours telling you everything about the buildings but did not show them to you until after they were done with their explanations. You would have to keep and trace back all of these mental notes to make sense of the tour. The one enjoyable aspect of this collection is the look back at mid-century architecture in general. A period of some of the most thoughtful design around creating spaces for the human experience.

Very well produced and informative book. Many good illustrations and photographs and thoughtful copy. A great deal of effort has been put into creating a quite comprehensive summary of the region's unusally rich Modern architecture. (By the way, I purchased the book elsewhere but thought it was worth a mention here.)

Outstanding resource