Michigan

The five-story Mazer-Cressman Cigar Company Plant is one of few factories surviving from the era when Detroit rivaled Tampa as the center of America’s cigar industry. To reduce costs of the labor-intensive process of cigar rolling, Mazer-Cressman and other Detroit firms constructed factories in Poletown for proximity to a workforce of Polish immigrant women. Located south of the Dodge Main automobile manufacturing plant, the neighborhood formed the core of the city’s Polish community and hosted parishes, bakeries, and light industry.

To attract new residents to Oaklands, its suburban development in Farmington, Michigan, roughly 20 miles from Detroit, the Great Lakes Land Corporation of Ohio hired architects Butterfield and Butterfield. The firm, which consisted of Emily Helen Butterfield, Michigan’s first licensed woman architect, and her father, Wells D. Butterfield, architect and first mayor of Farmington, designed the Glen Oaks Country Club and at least seven of the eleven houses built in the subdivision between 1925 and 1930.

Tusen Takk, which means “a thousand thanks” in Norwegian, is sited among the protected coastal sand dunes along the northeast shore of Michigan’s Leelanau Peninsula. It is surrounded by a dense forest of red pine, cedar, and mixed hardwood. The residence comprises a main house and a detached guest house, located on separate dunes but connected by an elevated sheltered boardwalk that traverses the ravine between the two. To protect the ecologically sensitive site, both the house and boardwalk are supported by steel columns.

Lying on the northeastern shore of Michigan’s lower peninsula, or “little finger,” Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore comprises 65 miles of the Lake Michigan shoreline and contains the largest collection of freshwater sand dunes in the world. The park has enormous dunes and moraines, many towering 400 feet above lake level, as well as numerous inland lakes and streams, and an exemplary display of glacial land formations.

The Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA) is a civic monument in white Vermont marble that relates to the library (

The Law Quadrangle is the most beautiful and functional group of educational buildings in Michigan. The quadrangle is made up of four buildings: the Lawyers' Club, which has a lounge, a recreation room, guest rooms, a dining hall, a kitchen, and a residence hall; the John P. Cook Dormitory; the Legal Research Building; and Hutchins Hall, which contains administrative and professional offices, as well as lecture, class, and seminar rooms, the courtroom, and the editorial rooms of the law review.

The center is significant from a city planning perspective. Similar developments in other major U.S. metropolitan centers are considered by some planners to represent the late-twentieth-century stage in the development of the American suburb, which has historically been viewed as largely residential outgrowths of specific urban centers.

Most of the buildings here are three-story brick Italianate storefronts with round-arched windows, hood molding, and corbeled cornices. Of special note are the commercial buildings at 82 W. Front Street, The August and Clark Building (12–14 W. Front Street), and Haeger's (33 W. Front Street), built in the 1870s. The Monroe Bank and Trust Building (102 E. Front Street), the Reaper Building (123–125 E. Front Street), and the River Raisin Centre for the Arts, formerly the Monroe Theater (114 S. Monroe Street), are notable early- to mid-twentieth-century buildings.

The GM Technical Center is the main facility for advanced research, engineering, and product design for the General Motors Company, then the largest corporation in the world. Planned to foster creativity in an idyllic campus setting, it was cast by Eliel and Eero Saarinen, on the pattern of Cranbrook, but with totally different exterior designs. Alfred P.

The historic Ryerson library was restored and the Keeler Wing addition was stripped to its skeleton frame and rebuilt in the largest improvement ever undertaken on a library in Michigan. Now the two buildings of the Grand Rapids Public Library flow together.