Track 10 MODERNISM, Presentation 2
Housing Solidarity: Building by and for the United Auto Workers in Detroit, 1935-196X
Michael Abrahamson
Assistant Professor
College of Architecture + Planning, University of Utah
abrahamson@arch.utah.edu
How might our histories be different if we foregrounded buildings by and for working class organizations like labor unions instead of those built for business and institutional elites?
As a test case, consider that conventional histories of twentieth-century architecture often highlight groundbreaking corporate buildings in Detroit like the General Motors Technical Center designed by architect Eero Saarinen or the Ford Motor Company Headquarters building by Skidmore Owings & Merrill, but have ignored equally progressive but much lesser-known buildings commissioned by labor organizations like the United Auto Workers (UAW), with whom those same corporations negotiated. Just as crucially, conventional histories foreground the singular creative individual of the architect at the expense of other contributors to the construction and maintenance of the built environment. This chronic centering of elite culture arguably undermines any claims to progressive value and transformative potential we make on behalf of our work.
An early dispatch from a research project on the architectural and construction history of organized labor in the United States, in this paper I will narrate the strata of twentieth-century history on one particular site on the north side of Detroit, which since 1951 has served as headquarters of the UAW. Reaching backward to the founding of the union years earlier and forward to the strange, presently uncertain fate of the union’s headquarters building, known as Solidarity House, this history reveals the necessity of space and the functions of construction in the building—and maintenance—of class solidarity. Designed by Oscar Stonorov—a Philadelphia architect known primarily for labor union housing in that city and a personal friend of UAW President Walter Reuther—Solidarity House was located on the same site as an Italianate home once occupied by Edsel Ford, son of Henry and President of Ford Motor Company until his untimely death in 1943. The residence was originally built for lumber, railroad, and real estate baron Albert L. Stephens, making the history of this single site a microcosm for Detroit as a whole from Gilded Age to manufacturing mecca to the power-sharing détente established between labor and industry by midcentury.
Stonorov’s design aimed to capture the spirit of this optimistic alliance through the now-familiar forms, materials and construction methods of modernist architecture. What made Solidarity House unusual was its function. Unlike the slick symbols of consolidated corporate power that populate most textbooks on modernism, this was a building by and for laborers and their elected leaders. Union archives now housed at the Walter Reuther Library at Wayne State University expose the extent to which construction labor was documented on site, as well as the revealing ways laborers themselves featured in such documentation. The site’s history of organizing successes (as well as architectural additions, renovations, demolition—and inferno) paralleled continued collaborations between Reuther and his favored architect, culminating in their tragic deaths together in a plane crash while inspecting a new UAW education center designed by Stonorov in northern Michigan.
Ultimately, the history of this singular site suggests a new focus and perhaps even a new methodology for a construction history that shifts its attention away from the making of symbols of elite power toward the maintenance of solidaristic spaces.
Michael Abrahamson is an award-winning architectural historian and critic whose research explores the materiality of buildings and the methods of architectural practice across the twentieth century. He is an Assistant Professor of Architecture at the University of Utah, where he teaches history and theory surveys, research and professional practice seminars, as well as design studios.
