Peter Forguson says he first developed his passion for architecture as a child, when he saw photos of iconic skyscrapers like New York City’s Chrysler Building in books. As an adult, the Oak Park native began to travel the country with a Frank Lloyd Wright field guide in hand.
From his day job owning and operating a Detroit-area landscape company, he realized he was working among many such treasures right here in Michigan — sleek, innovative designs from the style known as mid-century modern that stand up with the best in the nation, some even owned by his friends and his clients. “It just turns out that, unbeknownst to me, my backyard was a literal Mecca of this,” Forguson tells Metro Times.
“After years of paying admission to tour architecture, I thought, you know, I work on the grounds of so many amazing houses all the time,” he says. That’s when he decided to try his hand at publishing a coffee table book with a focus on local homes. “I was cold-calling people with the idea, essentially,” he says of his search for homeowners who would agree to open their doors to photographers.
Five and a half years later, in 2022, he released his debut book Detroit Modern: 1935-1985. The first edition sold out within months, and Forguson decided to keep going. “I began writing another book almost immediately,” he says.
The sequel, Contemporary Michigan: Iconic Houses at the Epicenter of Modernism, will be celebrated with a release party from 6-8 p.m. on Thursday at Keego Harbor’s Le Shoppe Modern, where Forguson will share stories behind the project alongside some of the notable architects featured in the book.
This time, Forguson widened his scope to include Michigan’s entire Lower Peninsula, featuring cities like Ann Arbor, East Lansing, Bay City, Midland, St. Joseph, Harbor Springs, Saginaw, and Kalamazoo. Despite the larger geographic region, the project only took two years to complete. “The reason we were able to get it done so quickly was the credibility that Detroit Modern gave us,” he says.
The latest book clocks in at 300 pages, with more than 500 color photos. It also covers a wider span of time and styles, ranging from the David and Hattie Amberg House — a Prairie style home with a unique pinwheel shape built in 1910 in Grand Rapids by Wright’s former draftswoman Marion Mahony — to the the more recent Eric and Lauren Bean House in Franklin, designed by local firm McIntosh Paris Architects.
“So you have 115 years, roughly, of the evolution of modern home design in the state of Michigan,” he says.
There is only a little bit of overlap in coverage between the two books, which Forguson handled by depicting Detroit-area homes as stylized illustrations in Contemporary Michigan.
While there are plenty of other coffee table books dedicated to mid-century modern architecture, including in Michigan, one thing that makes Forguson’s book different is that many of the homes feature the owners’ classic cars as part of the photo shoots.
“You can follow the evolution of architecture and car design side by side, which is a really cool thing,” Forguson says. “If it was a book about Palm Springs or something, that might not make much sense. But this is Michigan. We are the birthplace of the mass production of automobiles, so the cars are a nice twist.”
That’s appropriate, because the auto industry is the main driver of Michigan’s legacy in modernism. Years before Detroit became the largest municipality to file for bankruptcy in U.S. history, the region is believed to have boasted the most wealth per capita in the entire world. And it was in that context that the Cranbrook Academy of Art was founded in suburban Bloomfield Hills, tapping Finnish architect Eliel Saarinen from the University of Michigan School of Architecture in Ann Arbor to launch what would grow into arguably the most important school of modern design outside of Germany’s famous Bauhaus. Its artists went on to become major players in various fields of design like furniture, and Saarinen’s son Eero would go on to design the monumental Gateway Arch in St. Louis.
“We had these industries in place, and these institutions of higher learning in place, and you couple that with the average and highest average median household income in the world at that time,” Forguson says, adding, “There’s really no better recruiter of talent and plentiful resources, and nobody had them in spades quite like we did.”
He adds, “[These books are] long overdue for our region.”
When pressed, Forguson cites some of his local favorites as the W. Hawkins Ferry House, a futuristic home with wide views of Lake St. Clair in Grosse Pointe Shores built in 1964, and the Abby Quail House, designed by architect Don Paul Young in 1977 with a dramatic, angular shape that juts out over a bluff on Lake Michigan in Harbor Springs.
“The thing about modernist homes is the attempt is to break the mold every time,” Forguson says. “They’re all one-off. That’s why it never gets old doing what I do, because they’re all so different. The sites are different, the design aesthetics are different, the materials are different.”
He says he’s already working on a third book in the series.
“That book will be titled Great Lakes Modern,” he says. “I’m expanding the geographic scope every time. I had thought about highlighting houses that were sited on the Great Lakes in the U.S. and Canada … so it’ll give me a lot of stuff in the Chicago area, all the way up to Duluth, the Upper Peninsula, Cleveland, Buffalo, Rochester, Toronto ... So that’s the next one. In two or three years, people should expect to see that.”
Forguson says he can’t wait to dive in.
“It’s been quite an education ... it never, ever stops being fun,” he says. “You never stop learning.”
The book release party is scheduled for 6-8 p.m. on Thursday, Jan. 9 at Le Shoppe Modern; 3325 Orchard Lake Rd., Keego Harbor; leshoppemodern.com. Admission is free, and signed copies of both books will be available for purchase. Books can also be purchased from peterforguson.com for $100.
