If the great Wrightian strain of American modernism is about stitching a structure seamlessly into the landscape, Alden B. Dow (1904-1983) is its most committed tailor, an architect who ardently took his small, Midwestern hometown as his cloth and thread.

An heir of the Dow Chemical fortune, Dow lived most of his 79 years in Midland, Michigan. After he graduated from Midland High School, Dow visited Japan with his family in 1923, where he stayed in Frank Lloyd Wright’s Imperial Hotel. He attended the University of Michigan to study chemical and mechanical engineering—in preparation to enter his father’s company—but a few years later left for the Columbia University School of Architecture, graduating in 1931, the same year he married his wife, Vada. In 1933, the two became charter members of the fellowship at Taliesin in Spring Green, Wisconsin, under the tutelage of Wright, with whom Dow struck up a lifelong friendship.

Dow, whose work was a blend of Wright’s organic architecture and European modernism, also drew deep inspiration from nature, Japanese art, and his own philosophy regarding individuality and creativity, which he called the “Way of Life Cycle.”

Over the course of a career that spanned five decades, Dow designed about 600 projects, including more than 100 churches, fire stations, offices, schools, research institutions, and other civic buildings in his hometown, as well as scores of houses—perhaps making Midland America’s most architecturally unique small town.

Dow had one foot firmly planted in midcentury design and the other in the materials lab—having Dow Chemical’s considerable R & D team available for questioning does wonders when devising new building blocks. His reputation and reach were broad. An international architecture grand prize in 1937, coverage in Time magazine, and the designing of the low-cost, quickly built 1941 city of Lake Jackson, Texas, drew considerable attention to the great modernist of central Michigan.

His real love was Midland, however. Architecture was the medium through which Dow helped express what it meant to be an American in the mid-20th century. But perhaps even more telling of this fortunate son’s everyman values, his scores of designs in Midland feel like one continuous act of civic pride.

The Alden B. Dow Home and Studio

Dow’s masterpiece is undoubtedly his home and studio in Midland. Designed in 1933 to be built in stages, the sprawling manse appears to rise out of a pond, its green copper roof and bright-white, geometric form seemingly birthed by the landscape. It’s a nearly perfect evocation of a guiding Dow dictum: “Gardens never end, and buildings never begin.”

The home is an object lesson in Dow as innovator. In 1938, he patented one of his preferred building materials, the Unit Block, and used it to great expressive effect. Comprised of cinder ash residue from the coal furnaces of Dow Chemical, these rhomboid cinder blocks give the home its earthbound, horizontal gravity, while simultaneously shooting up in playful spires and chimneys.

In the family spaces, a sense of play abounds. The downstairs bursts with color and holds a small theater, and the main living and dining rooms are vibrant, open areas with ample space to display the treasures of the family’s travels. One of Dow’s beloved model trains runs on a circular track overhead in a sitting room.

Dow’s office—the connecting point between the home and drafting studio—is equally colorful, and, in a gesture you’d never expect from his mentor, Wright, located a few steps below his employees. The drafting studio, however, is all warm wood and crisp angles.

Most dazzling in the studio, a canny balance of modernist form and Dovian wit, is the submarine room, where Dow held meetings with clients. Built 18 inches below pond level, it has a bright-pink ceiling, and the water just outside the windows refracts dancing light onto the white walls.

The submarine room is embedded 18 inches below the surface of the pond. Dow met with his clients there, immersing them in the idea that nature and architecture are intimately connected." layout="undefined" credit="Photo by Preston Sweet, courtesy Alden B. Dow Archives" photoUserId=""/>

Midland Modern

See more of Dow’s architectural footprint in his Michigan hometown.

The John Whitman Residence

St. John’s Lutheran Church

The Peter Carras Residence (aka the Dow Test House)

Lower Pond Bridge at Dow Gardens

Dow Company’s 2040 Plastics Building

The Josephine Ashmun Residence

The Bay Service Station

This article was originally published as “Hometown Hero” in a 2011 issue of Dwell. It was updated on August 23, 2024, to include current information.

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