Cranbrook Academy of Art

PurplePrice Mag · October 26, 2026 · 3 min read

The Cranbrook Academy of Art is a graduate school of art, architecture and design in Bloomfield Hills, near Detroit, Michigan. Officially founded in 1932, it has been called the cradle of postwar American design: in the 1930s and 1940s almost all the protagonists of modern American furniture met in its studios, from Charles and Ray Eames to Eero Saarinen, from Harry Bertoia to Florence Knoll.

The Booths and Eliel Saarinen

The Academy is part of a larger educational complex, the Cranbrook Educational Community, created by the newspaper publisher George Gough Booth and his wife Ellen Scripps Booth. In 1925 Booth put the idea of an art academy to the Finnish architect Eliel Saarinen, who was teaching at the University of Michigan. Booth dreamed of a school inspired by the English Arts and Crafts movement, where artists and craftsmen would teach through the example of their own work and live on site with the students. Saarinen designed the entire campus, with schools, church, museum and gardens, and became its first head; he involved his whole family: his wife Loja led the weaving department, and their children Eero and Pipsan studied at the Academy. The Swedish sculptor Carl Milles headed the sculpture department and filled the campus with fountains.

A method without lectures

Cranbrook is still organised in a very particular way today: each department is led by an artist-in-residence, who acts as mentor and guide to a small group of students. There are no traditional courses: students learn by working in a studio under the artist's supervision. The school sees itself as the only great experiment in radical art education still active, having outlasted the Bauhaus and Black Mountain College.

The golden generation

Between the late 1930s and the early 1940s an extraordinary group came together at Cranbrook. Charles Eames met Ray Kaiser there in 1940; with Eero Saarinen, that same year, he won the MoMA competition Organic Design in Home Furnishings with bent plywood seats, the manifesto of Organic design. Harry Bertoia, who arrived on a scholarship, reopened the metal workshop and taught jewellery; he even made Ray Eames's wedding ring. Florence Schust, the future Florence Knoll, raised almost as a daughter by the Saarinens, studied architecture and experimented with furniture alongside Eero and Charles. After the war these bonds became industry: Florence founded the Knoll Planning Unit and brought Saarinen, with the Womb and Tulip chairs, and Bertoia, with his steel wire seating, to Knoll; the Eameses worked for Herman Miller.

The legacy

In 1984 the New York Times wrote that no institution had more right than Cranbrook to think of itself as synonymous with contemporary American design. Its influence continued later too: from 1971 to 1995 the design department, led by Katherine and Michael McCoy, became a centre of experimental graphic design. The campus, with the Cranbrook Art Museum holding works by the Eameses and Bertoia, has been a US National Historic Landmark since 1989.