and Library and newspaper plants in Detroit, Grand Rapids and
Chicago, fulfilling, in some measure, his earlier dreams.
In 1922, Charles R. Richards, president of the National Society
for Industrial Education, published the influential study Art in
Industry, which affirmed the inferiority of arts and crafts educa-
tion in the U.S., especially compared to European training pro-
grams. Germany’s Bauhaus, for example, which operated from
1919 to 1933, combined craft and the fine arts. The American
Academy in Rome, founded by Andrew Carnegie and John D.
Rockefeller, among others, funded independent artistic pursuits
and advanced research in the fine arts and humanities. American
schools, in contrast, had strict curricula that prohibited the kind of
informal creativity Booth saw as essential to design innovation.
Booth’s visit to the American Academy in the early 1920s
inspired him to develop a similar institution in the United States.
He had already begun to transform his rural family retreat near
Detroit into an educational and cultural campus, with grammar
schools for boys and girls, a science institute and an Episcopalian
church. Now he would also provide an educational environment
for artists. He named the entire complex Cranbrook, after his
ancestral village in England.
Top Charles Eames as an instructor in the design studio in 1940. Former Cranbrook student Ben
Baldwin is at back right; a chair model for the Kleinhans Music Hall is on the back table. Eames and
Ralph Rapson collaborated with Eliel and Eero Saarinen on designs for the music hall.
Above Architecture students Fuad Hasson, Charles Granger and George Matsumoto discussing city
planning designs with Eliel Saarinen in 1944.
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