Frieze Building Blog

Frieze will fall but aesthetic bar has risen
Sunday, April 30, 2006
Between the condition of the 1907 structure and its prime location, there was simply no "saving'' the Frieze Building.

However, the historic preservationists and graduates of the former Ann Arbor High School who tried to dissuade the University of Michigan from razing the Beaux Arts building did - in fact - help save Ann Arbor from a nondescript or perhaps even homely building. At least they helped give U-M another chance to get it right.

The architects did a great job accommodating the academic departments that, along with a 500-bed dorm, will occupy the new North Quad complex, says Ann Arbor resident and U-M Regent Rebecca McGowan.

But in the course of juggling what were undoubtedly competing interests for space and function inside the 350,000-square-foot facility, the facade got short shrift.

Indeed, it seems that the design for the front of the new building was so lackluster that as community members touted the aesthetic qualities of the Frieze Building and university officials looked at what was to have been the final design of its successor, the latter had second thoughts.

The plans - as folks following the project know - were withdrawn a day before they were to go to the Board of Regents for approval.

The commitment to the project hasn't changed, says McGowan. Nor is anything about the plan for the inside of the $137 million complex being altered.

But the new building's State Street front?

That's gone back to the drawing board.

"That location is the western gate to the university. It's going to be the first things some visitors see and a repeated reminder of the university for those of us who go by it every day,'' says McGowan, a two-term Democrat. "It's an important portal and the building needs to indicate that, seriousness of purpose and the importance of the site.''

The save-the-Frieze activists, she says, helped "articulate the importance of the State Street facade.''

One of three Ann Arbor residents of the eight-member board, McGowan is very much in tune with community members' opinions about what's going up on campus. And in this case, she had family members as well as friends and neighbors to contend with.

"My father-in-law went to school in the Frieze Building,'' says McGowan who - after examining the building top to bottom - says she asked for and received her family's OK, or at least forgiveness, for the decision. The building, she says, is simply "spent.''

The architects who designed the new, and well received, Biomedical Science Research Building on Washtenaw Avenue, have been asked to work on the North Quad facade, McGowan says. Polshek Partnership Architects of New York, whose BSRB sports the potato chip-shaped auditorium, will work with North Quad architects Einhorn Yaffee Prescott of Albany, N.Y., on redesigning that front.

"Everybody on the project gets the message,'' McGowan says.

More often than not, U-M decides what it wants and then crashes ahead apropos its role as an 800-pound gorilla, unfettered by local building or planning processes and unfazed by the squeals of the lesser creatures around it.

This time, the squeals registered. And though the friends of the Frieze didn't achieve their goal, they did achieve that much. And the university and the community are better for it.

Judy McGovern is managing editor, features, at The News.