‘Unbuilt Michigan’: A Planner Looks at Buildings Never Constructed

At many colleges and universities, what never got built is almost as interesting as what did. The University of Minnesota-Twin Cities has beautiful elevations for never-constructed riverfront buildings by Cass Gilbert. The University of Pittsburgh’s original campus plan, by Henry Hornbostel, envisioned a series of temples arrayed, Acropolis-like, on a hillside north and west of where the Cathedral of Learning later rose. And Phoebe Apperson Hearst’s competition for a campus plan for the University of California at Berkeley produced some of the most engaging and elaborate university designs ever imagined.

Now Fred Mayer, a retired campus planner at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, has published an interesting article in the Ann Arbor Observer entitled “Unbuilt Michigan: The University That Never Was.” The article, posted by the Society for College and University Planning, focuses on plans for several high-profile buildings that the university never put up, including:

A main building by the influential American architect Alexander Jackson Davis, who in 1838 would have constructed a very large Gothic building to house both classrooms and dormitory rooms. A state official vetoed the design because he thought it would be too expensive.

A Beaux Arts art museum by Henry Ives Cobb, another prominent designer, who in 1898 proposed abandoning the red-brick Romanesque architectural vocabulary that then dominated in the campus and instead adopting Classical ornament and white limestone facades. The university raised money for the museum but later decided to spend it instead on a memorial to Michigan residents killed in the Civil War.

A bell-and-clock tower designed by Eliel Saarinen sometime in the 1920s. It was never built as Saarinen planned it, but it did finally get constructed in a somewhat shortened version. By then Saarinen was no longer involved, and the final plans were drawn up by Albert Kahn.

There must be plans for hundreds of other interesting college buildings languishing in file cabinets in facilities offices and archives. Has anyone ever attempted to set up a catalog for them? If not, shouldn’t someone start?