Thanks for the View, Mr Mies: Lafayette Park Detroit

Surveys Mies van der Rohe’s Lafayette Park in Detroit, Michigan, showing how its residents live with and experience the architecture

‘Lafayette Park, a middle-class residential area in downtown Detroit, is home to the largest collection of buildings designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in the world. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, it remained one of Detroit’s most racially integrated and economically stable neighbourhoods, although it was surrounded by evidence of a city in financial distress. Through interviews with and essays by residents, reproductions of archival material: new photographs by Karin Jobst, Vasco Roma and Corine Vermeulen, and previously unpublished photographs by documentary filmmaker Janine Debanné, Thanks for the View, Mr. Mies examines the way that Lafayette Park residents confront and interact with this unique modernist environment.

This book is a reaction against the way that iconic modernist architecture is often represented. Whereas other writers may focus on the design intentions of the architect, authors Aubert, Cavar and Chandani seek to show the organic and idiosyncratic ways in which the people who live in Lafayette Park actually use the architecture and how this experience, in turn, affects their everyday lives.

Thanks for the View, Mr. Mies was originally published in 2012, two years before the city of Detroit entered into the largest municipal bankruptcy in the country. This second edition updates the introduction add adds additional text by the residents – the authors have also updated comments to reflect the ongoing changes happening in the area’.

July 2020 edition

Edited by Danielle Aubert, Lana Cavar and Natasha Chandani

304 pages

241 x 152 x 25 mm