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| The Designing of a Home |
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 Edsel and Eleanor Ford had a personal commitment to and passion for quality design. The couple's personal taste, as well as their work with design leaders such as architect Albert Kahn, landscape architect Jens Jensen, industrial designer Walter Dorwin Teague, visionary artist Diego Rivera, among others, are wonderful examples of the quality design that was very much a part of their daily lives.
Edsel had an eye for design, whether it was in architecture, automobile design, or even fashion. He and Eleanor studied the arts, and their trips abroad included visits to galleries and art museums. Eleanor's flair for design could be seen in everything from her support of and participation in Edsel's work, to her choices in holiday and party decorations, and her carefully selected silver, china and crystal.
Edsel & Eleanor Ford House is an excellent example of how this commitment to design excellence touched every aspect of their lives.
This section provides a brief look at four designers with whom the Fords collaborated in creating their home.
Albert Kahn, Designing an architectural masterpiece
 In 1926, Edsel Ford commissioned Albert Kahn, Detroit's most prominent architect, to create their home. Ford Motor Company had been working with Kahn since the early 1900s on creating vast industrial complexes. His work with Henry Ford in creating a continuously moving assembly line and a factory that could accommodate all production stages helped make mass production of affordable automobiles a reality. Kahn's combination of artistic achievement of beautiful buildings and the functional innovations in industrial design helped contribute to Detroit's emergence as an industrial giant.
A master of commercial, civic, institutional, domestic and modern industrial architecture, Kahn became America's foremost industrial architect. In fact, Architectural Record Magazine once wrote, "No other architectural firm had a greater influence on the development of industrial architecture than Albert Kahn's. But there is evidence that the architect's work had a wider influence, too, affecting the development of Modernism itself."
Kahn's immense influence on the art and architecture of this time even influenced other visual artists, such as Diego Rivera, with his industrial vision.
Click here for the on-line Ford House tour.
Other Albert Kahn Resources
- W. Hawkins Ferry, The Legacy of Albert Kahn, Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1987. (available in the Gallery Shop)
- Albert Kahn & Associates architectural firm. Visit the web site - www.albertkahn.com Jens Jensen, Designing a modern landscape
Danish-born Jens Jensen (1860 - 1951) studied at Tune Agricultural School, outside Copenhagen, and in 1884 immigrated to the United States. He found a job as a laborer for the Chicago West Parks, where he created the "American Garden," a unique prairie wildflower garden that revealed the beauties of the local region to park visitors. Jensen's long, sometimes stormy American career built firmly on this early experiment. He continued to advocate for the appreciation and conservation of the natural landscape, creating parks and gardens that utilized primarily native plants in spatial arrangements that evoked native landscapes. His enthusiasm for the mystery and power of nature was unbridled.
Jensen came to know Edsel Ford through his mother, Clara and his father, Henry, founder of Ford Motor Company. At Fair Lane, the Fords' Dearborn, Michigan estate, Jensen had created huge tree- and flower-lined meadows aligned to the path of the setting sun. Artistic differences eventually separated the senior Fords and Jensen, but Edsel (an inspired automotive designer and avid art patron) so admired Jensen's talent that he and Eleanor commissioned him to design four residential landscapes for their family, the last of which was begun in 1927, on Lake St. Clair.
None of Jensen's other gardens so focused on the poetry of water and its effects on changing light and mist. Along the northern edge of the point on which the 65-acre estate was sited, Jensen created an island bird sanctuary that increased the shoreline total to more than 3,000 feet; on the south, he developed a lagoon and naturalistic swimming pool surrounded by plants from the Michigan woods. A great meadow stretching from the house toward the sunset is the centerpiece of Jensen's design. Untroubled by the art/nature dichotomy that preoccupied many American landscape architects of the day, Jensen, like his Danish forebears, regarded the spirit of nature as the enlivening force behind all artistic expression.
From the exhibit A Genius for Place:
American Landscapes of the Country Place Era, Robin Karson, curator and writer
Click here for the on-line gardens and grounds tour.
Other Jens Jensen Resources:
- Robert E. Grese, Jens Jensen, Maker of Natural Parks and Gardens, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992 (available in the Gallery Shop)
- Jens Jensen, Siftings, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990 (available in the Gallery Shop)
- The Clearing, an adult school of discovery in the arts, nature, and humanities founded by Jensen. Visit the web site - www.theclearing.org
- Jens Jensen Legacy Project, Chicago Parks District. Visit the web site - www.jensjensen.org Walter Dorwin Teague, Designing the streamline
One of the most visible examples of the Fords' broad tastes and dedication to contemporary design came with the addition of the Modern rooms to their home.
Throughout the 1930s, Edsel Ford retained Walter Dorwin Teague to design Ford Motor Company's pavilions and new-product exhibits at world's fairs, auto shows and dealer showrooms. As an industrial designer, Teague's forte was office interiors, buildings, cars, trains and planes. The field of industrial design developed throughout the 1920s was a potent influence in American marketing as consumer goods were modernized for a new mass market. Streamlining, or smoothing the lines, of everything from toasters to automobiles for the illusion - if not the fact - of increased speed was everywhere.
In the mid 1930s, Teague redesigned four rooms in the house in his dramatically modern style of sleek, custom-made furnishings in exotic hardwoods, recessed lighting reflected in mirrored surfaces and leather-paneled walls. These rooms - the boys' bedrooms and sitting room and a game room on the main floor - were intended primarily for use by the Ford's teenaged children. Teague's signature streamlined seating, radios built-in to plastic topped tables, and industrial metallic finishes in copper and brass provided comfortable contemporary rooms for the family.
The fact that these interiors were built into Ford House in the 1930s makes a strong statement about Edsel Ford's vision of the 20th century design and his courage in embracing the work of the most contemporary of the creative geniuses who entered his world.
Click here for the on-line house tour, including a look at the Modern Rooms.
Other Walter Dorwin Teague Resources:
- Walter Dorwin Teague, Design This Day – the Technique of Order in the Machine Age, NY Harcourt, Brace & Co, 1940; rev. ed. 1949.
- Icons of Design: The 20th Century, Prestel Publishing, 2000.
Diego Rivera, Designing a piece of history
The Fords had a long association with the Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA), Detroit's major art museum, where Edsel served on the Board of Trustees. The Fords' hope was that art would enrich the lives of others, as well as their own. During the Depression, they helped to pay the salaries of the professional staff of the Detroit Institute of Arts to avoid a shutdown.
When William Valentiner, long-time director of the DIA, conceived the project of having artist Diego Rivera transform the DIA's inner court with fresco murals, Edsel Ford underwrote the costs. Edsel and Rivera formed a curious patron-artist relationship, with the communist Mexican artist finding a genuine admiration for Edsel's commitment to esthetics and design in his automotive industry. Rivera not only immortalized Edsel as patron in the murals, but his canvas portrait of Edsel shows him, then president of Ford Motor Company, before a triptych of the long blackboards used in the automotive design process. Upon these blackboards appears a sketch of the current design project, reminiscent of a 1932 Ford Coupe, which seems to spring from Edsel's mind. According to Valentiner's biographer, Rivera came to feel that Edsel, as a car designer, was fully qualified to be considered an artist in his own right.
Though controversial in their day, the frescos, entitled "Detroit Industry," stimulated a large increase in attendance at the DIA, which pleased Eleanor and Edsel. Although many influential citizens wanted them destroyed, Edsel quietly stood firm in his defense of the murals as they were Rivera's artistic tribute to the quality of Detroit's automotive labor force. Most historians and art historians look upon Edsel Ford's determined stand as a major statement in the defense of politically controversial art.
Other Diego Rivera resources:
- A virtual Diego Rivera Museum Visit the web site - www.diegorivera.com
- Rivera, Diego, MY ART, MY LIFE, An Autobiography, New York, Dover Publications, 1991.
- Pete Hamill, Diego Rivera, New York, Harry N. Abrams, 1999.
(both available in the Gallery Shop)
- Founders Society Detroit Institute of Arts, Diego Rivera, A Retrospective, New York, W.W. Norton & Company, 1986.
To view the Detroit Industry fresco murals, visit:
Detroit Institute of Arts
5200 Woodward Avenue
Detroit, Michigan 48202
Telephone 313.833.7900
www.dia.org
 
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