Events

Engel Residence Open House

Engel Residence

A2modern is hosting another open house, on Sunday the 6th of October at the Edward Olencki and Joseph Albano designed house at 3087 Overridge Drive in Ann Arbor Hills. The house was designed for Edwin A. and Dorothy Engel in 1962. Edwin Engel was a professor of English and Dorothy worked in Social Work in Ann Arbor. The Engels occupied the house until 1989 when they sold it to Tom and Sally Klein, who lived there until their retirement to Florida in 2022. The current owners are only the third family to occupy the house and few changes have been made to the original house.

There will be three entry times: 1:00pm, 2:00pm and 3:00 pm and each ticket will cost $15.00.

Click here for tickets.

Eberbach Residence Open House

Eberbach Residence

We are having an open house on Sunday, August 11, at the home of Oscar and Minerva Eberbach. The house was built in 1950 at 2250 Belmont and the architect was Walter Sanders. Sanders was on the UM Architectural faculty, including a stint as chair of architecture.

Sanders designed four houses in Ann Arbor while a UM faculty member and worked with Theodore Larsen on the Unistrut method of constructing a house. His own house, in Barton Hills, 99 Barton North Drive is a Unistrut house.

The Eberbach family is a long time Ann Arbor family. This mid century modern home for Oscar and Minerva represents the third generation of Eberbach’s to have rather grand homes here. Oscar’s grandparents, Christian and Margarethe Eberbach, had an 1863 Italianate style house with tower at 1115 Woodlawn. It was outside the town on their farm when it was built. His father Ottmar had an1884 Victorian towered mansion at the corner of South Fourth Avenue and E. William streets; it’s still there, connected to the drive-through beer place (Harris Tire Company originally) to the west.

Christian Eberbach founded a successful drug store and laboratory equipment manufactory in 1843 and was an officer in the Ann Arbor State Bank. Son Ottmar continued in the pharmaceuticals and scientific equipment business. His son Oscar was also in the pharmaceuticals business, was an officer with the Ann Arbor Bank, and an early investor in the Argus Camera Company. He acted as the Treasurer for the University Musical Society for 12 years. He prided himself on having attended _____ continuous years of May Festivals. The Eberbach Corporation is still in business.

Walter Sanders was also a native of Ann Arbor. But he left and then came back in 1949 to join the University of Michigan architecture faculty. He was trained at the University of Illinois and University of Pennsylvania, taught at Columbia University and Pratt Institute. At the UM he worked with Theodore Larsen on the Unistrut experimental materials to build homes. Theodore Larsen’s own home on East Huron River Drive and Sander’s Barton Hills home are two of the few that were constructed. Assembling the panels turned out to be very time-consuming and they never took off as a building material. Walter Sanders continued to teach, established the first in the country PhD program for architects, was brought back to be the chair again in 1971 and passed away in 1972.

Purchase Tickets Here

Video and Slide Deck of Miller House and Garden Talk

The Ann Arbor District Library made a video of the recent presentation:

Quintessentially Modern—and Midwestern:
Landscape Typologies and Cultural Memes in the
Miller House and Garden, Columbus, Indiana
Peter Osler, speaker

You can watch the video here, courtesy of the Ann Arbor District Library.

Peter Osler made the slide deck he prepared available:

Download the slide deck here, courtesy of Peter Osler.

Miller House and Garden Talk

Quintessentially Modern—and Midwestern:

Landscape Typologies and Cultural Memes in the

Miller House and Garden, Columbus, Indiana

Peter Osler, speaker

Sunday, October 1, 2023
2:00 – 3:30 PM Eastern
Ann Arbor District Library Downtown
353 S. 5th Avenue, Ann Arbor, MI 48204
4th Floor Meeting Room
Admission is free, there is no need to register in advance

Long hailed as one the most iconic works of mid-20th-century American design, the J. Irwin and Xenia Miller residence (1957) is noted for its material and formal elegance. While the designers—and indeed, the client—for this project were of global importance in both reach and influence, Peter Osler, Architect and Site Designer, FAAR, will present a less common reading of this landmark, emphasizing its abstraction of familiar midwestern landscape typologies and cultural memes.

About the speaker: Peter Osler was born into a family with farmers on one side and an obscene number of architects on the other, and has spent his peripatetic adult life as a spatial practitioner and part time academician. He has lived in Ann Arbor—his birthplace, as well as that of his parents—for two-thirds of his life, but has also enjoyed stops in Bloomington, Indiana; Cambridge & Boston; San Francisco; Chicago; Champaign-Urbana; and Rome, Italy. He has taught at the University of Michigan (where he received his B.S. in Natural Resources and where he was Associate Professor of Practice at the Taubman College), the University of Illinois, the Escola Tecnica Superior d’Architectura in Barcelona (ETSAB), the Harvard Graduate School of Design (where he received his professional training in both landscape architecture and architecture), the Illinois Institute of Technology, where he directed the Master of Landscape Architecture Program for its first seven years, and most recently, Washington University, St Louis. He is currently developing a landscape design curriculum for the Women’s Huron Valley Correctional Facility, to improve both employment opportunities for, and the dignity of, its inmates and returning citizens. Osler’s academic interests are focused on modernist site planning and landscape materiality, especially plants as historical and cultural ciphers, their potential as a contemporary art medium, and their maintenance as an untapped source of poetics–a subject about which he has lectured widely, at venues such as the Arts Club of Chicago, the University of British Columbia, Ohio State University, and Harvard.
Professionally, he has worked in architecture, landscape architecture, and urban design practices large and small, and as Campus Landscape Architect and Planner at the Cranbrook Educational Community. He works at a wide variety of landscape types and scales, both as a sole practitioner and in collaboration with larger firms. Recent completed projects range in scale from the outdoor spaces of Title Town in Green Bay, Wisconsin (in collaboration with Design Workshop), which won the Merit Award from state ASLA chapters of Illinois, Wisconsin, and Colorado, to sculptural stainless steel furniture for the Knight Wallace Journalism Fellowship program at the University of Michigan. His designs have been published in the United States, Europe, and Asia, and he has been an invited juror at universities throughout the U.S and in Europe. Having won the Rome Prize in landscape architecture, he is a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome.
Peter’s sister, Molly Osler, was a long-time a2modern board member until her passing in 2019.

American Mid-Century Modern Dinnerware

The Ann Arbor District Library will have a presentation on American Mid-Century Modern Dinnerware online over Zoom,, with Michael E. Pratt, Wednesday, September 14, 2022,  6:30pm to 7:30pm.

 
For more information, and instructions on connecting to the Zoom call, click here.

The Return of Walking Tours!

Buy Tickets Here

Mark your calendars for our fall walking tour on September 18 at 1 p.m., starting at the corner of Devonshire and Heather Way. We will look at the exteriors of a variety of midcentury modern homes designed by local architects including Robert Metcalf, David Osler, Herb Johe, William Muschenheim, Joe Albano, Edward Olencki, Thomas Tanner, and Walter Sanders. We will also see an example of famous Midland architect Alden Dow.

The cost of the walk will be $15.00 per person. Follow this link for tickets.

If it rains, we will walk the following Sunday, at the same time.