Mid-century Michigan Masterplans: The Case of Two Campuses

As the Second World War transitioned into the Cold War, and Southeast Michigan transitioned from being the "Arsenal of Democracy" to a mere node in America's postindustrial rustbelt, two Michigan institutions of higher learning saw an opportunity to assert and expand their presence in their respective cities. During the 1950s, the state's flagship public university and its oldest Catholic college announced ambitious postwar campus development projects. The former, the University of Michigan (UM), established a new campus on the outskirts of its hometown of Ann Arbor, and the latter, the University of Detroit (UD), undertook an ambitious capital campaign. Though both were conditioned by the postwar and Cold War fervors sweeping the nation, UM's project embodied an ostensibly technocratic peacetime channeling of the war's scientific fruits while UD's project embraced an explicitly political tenor. As situated urban actors and knowledge institutions, each university toyed with patriotism by attempting to funnel developments on the national (and even the geopolitical) stage into developments at the local level. In both cases, campus masterplans succeeded the universities’ initial rhetoric—UM’s in 1960 and UD’s in 1966, both produced by the same architect. These two unimplemented campus masterplans document the implications of the universities’ divergent postwar strategies on concrete campus projections. Despite the two institutions’ distinct visions for their development in the long term, translation into road maps for campus-building muted the ideological motivations underpinning the projects. As aspirations became plans, institutional anxiety ceded the ground to the comforts of pragmatic convention.