​

Good evening, everyone:

On Friday evening, General Motors will celebrate their new home in the Hudson ’s Building. That is a wonderful development for the building, for the company, and for downtown. But I was particularly taken by the centerpiece of the seven-story atrium: a sculpture by Cranbrook artist Henry Bertoia.

In a piece in Automotive News, Nick Bunkley writes that the 70-foot-high bronze sculpture had been commissioned in 1970 by J.L. Hudson, but had sat forgotten and neglected for nearly 50 years.

Twenty-six feet high and made of steel wire coated in brass, bronze, and other metals , the sculpture languished in a basement of the Hudson department store in a mall near Flint, where GM was founded in 1908.

There are all sorts of reasons I find the installation noteworthy.

First, Bertoia – who was at Cranbrook with my father in the 1930 ’s – has become an integral part of the mid-century Modern furniture cannon. Here is the famous Bertoia “Bird Chair, ” produced by Knoll Furniture:

And his ubiquitous “side chair ”:

It was no coincidence that these, and other pieces, would be picked up by Knoll Furniture Company: Florence Schust Knoll – an architect, planner, designer, and business-woman – was at Cranbrook at the same time, and would later marry Hans Knoll, the founder of Knoll Furniture. [Now that I think about it, she is so incredibly interesting that I ’ll come back to her in another note.]

Second, and in a related vein, my father and Bertoia were close friends and lived peacefully on the same hallway at Cranbrook – except for one falling-out episode over Bertoia ’s insistence on creating a “book ” that would make different sounds as the pages turned – his incessant nocturnal pounding of metal devices for the book ’s operation kept my father awake for weeks.

To my father ’s credit, that didn ’t get in the way of my father (and mother) including Bertoia ’s furniture in the nation ’s first modern design furniture store: Rapson, Inc. in Boston ’s Copley Square, which they opened in 1948 (note also, the chair in the foreground, a version of which is in my office):

Third, Bertoia ’s first public sculpture – a brass and bronze “screen ”– was installed in 1953 in an iconic building designed by another Cranbrook classmate: Eero Saarinen ’s GM tech center, known now as the Cadillac House:

Fourth, the construction crews had to make a five-story opening in the side of the Hudson building to install it. Good reminder for us to think carefully about the art we choose to include in our new headquarters.

Fifth, and most importantly, GM has recognized the power of art in echoing its history, in reflecting the importance of metal-work in the automotive industry ’s design process, and in preserving the legacy of an important figure in Michigan ’s design legacy. Hats off to Mary Barra, Mark Reuss, and their team.

Henry Bertoia, circa 1938

Rip

‍