Cranbrook Educational Community

The story

George Gough Booth, who ran a Detroit newspaper empire, and his wife Ellen Scripps Booth purchased a 174-acre farm in Bloomfield Hills in 1904 and named it Cranbrook after the English village where George's father was born. Their Arts and Crafts manor, Cranbrook House, was designed by Detroit architect Albert Kahn and completed in 1908; it remains metro Detroit's oldest surviving historic manor. Rather than keep the estate private, the Booths began layering schools and cultural institutions across the grounds.

The turning point was the Finnish architect Eliel Saarinen, who came to Cranbrook in 1925 and designed most of the campus that followed: Cranbrook School for boys (1928), Kingswood School for girls (1929-31), the Institute of Science, and the Cranbrook Academy of Art, founded by the Booths in 1932 with Saarinen leading it. The Academy became, in the phrase that stuck, the "cradle of mid-century modernism." Its students and faculty rolls read like a design hall of fame -- Charles and Ray Eames, Florence Knoll, Harry Bertoia, and Saarinen's own son Eero.

Cranbrook was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1973 and designated a National Historic Landmark on June 29, 1989, recognized as the most complete surviving expression of Eliel Saarinen's work.

What's There Now

A 319-acre active campus still operating as Cranbrook Schools, the Academy of Art, Art Museum, Institute of Science, and the public House and Gardens.

Everything that was here

• 1904–present · still open

  Cranbrook Educational CommunitySchool

  A newspaper baron and his wife bought a Michigan farm in 1904, and over the next forty years turned it into the place where mid-century American design was effectively invented.

  See the map in 1905 →

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Connected places

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Nearby history