Feelings must be combined with facts

before anything new, of value, can be created.

-Alden B. Dow

Alden Dow was a midwesterner by birth, but he left a legacy national in stature. Active from the early 1930s through the late 1970s, he designed some six hundred projects-often daringly modern houses and religious buildings, schools and colleges, business and civic structures, and even a new town in Texas. Dow changed the face of his hometown of Midland, Michigan, leaving it more than one hundred houses, offices and plants for The Dow Chemical Company, churches, banks, schools, and recreational structures.

Nowhere is Dow's genius more evident than in his Home and Studio in Midland, a National Historic Landmark. Alden B. Dow: Midwestern Modern tells the story of both this exceptional residence and the architect who spent a half century developing his vision of a more humane way of building. Beginning with the family-his father founded The Dow Chemical Company-and the town that encouraged him, the book traces the life and work of Alden Dow as well as the intensely personal philosophy that governed everything he did.

The architect rejected the traditional concept of style and instead urged that buildings reflect their function, inspire their users, and encompass the qualities of honesty, humility, and enthusiasm. There is never a fine thing unless it is original, he suggested, emphasizing the need for creativity and quality. Dow's influences were numerous: nature, the organic architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright (with whom he studied briefly as part of the Taliesin Fellowship), reason and practicality, the arts ofJapan, the color wheel, and, always, an unfailing sense of fun and joy.

Dow's Home and Studio-which rises like a visionary island from an enveloping pond-represents one of the earliest of his many architectural experiments. It and a dozen other homes were built of what he called Unit Blocks, an innovative and adaptable material created from cinder ash recycled from Dow Chemical furnaces. His studio and one of his Unit Block houses captured the grand prize at a 1937 Paris exposition, bringing him instant international recognition. Dow went on to design hundreds of other houses, from inexpensive prefabricated dwellings to provocative prototypes to residences of America's business leaders. During his half-century career, he was repeatedly honored by civic, educational, and architectural institutions.

The architect's exceptional talents and vision were recognized while he was still in his thirties. In 1942 the noted architecture critic Talbot Hamlin captured the essence of this progressive designer: Alden Dow . . . has not been content to accept the accepted. . . . He has sought to create out of building materials a poetry of plane and line, of outside and in, of color and form . . ., noted Hamlin. Here is a man not content with building mere comfortable and efficient shelters but a man who conceives that architecture . . . must also create buildings which enlarge the imagination and enrich the emotional life of those who dwell in them.

This book traces Alden Dow's life and work as well as the intensely personal philosophy that governed everything he did: houses, churches, schools, business and civic structures, and even a new town in Texas. Dow changed the face of his hometown of Midland, Michigan, leaving more than one hundred buildings, including his Home and Studio, a National Historic Landmark. 185 color and 220 black-and-white illustrations.