Every four years, we add an extra day to the calendar to catch up to Earth’s revolutions around the Sun. For most of us, it is just February 29th, an extra day in the week. For leaplings, it is a day to celebrate their true birthday.
Different cultures have different customs associated with February 29th, known as Leap Day. In some cultures, it is also known as Bachelor’s Day or Ladies’ Privilege, because that is the day that women can propose to men.
In Finland, leap-year day proposals are considered good luck. If, however, the gentleman says “no,” he is required to give the woman enough fabric to make a skirt.
According to Medium.com, “The tradition reflects the Finnish spirit of equality and a shared sense of humor within romantic relationships. It challenges gender norms in a playful manner, encouraging women to take the lead in expressing their feelings and creating a shared memory that will be cherished for years to come.”
“While leap-year day may be just one day every four years, the tradition of women proposing adds a touch of magic and unpredictability to Finnish love stories. It’s a celebration of love, luck, and the joy of shared laughter, reminding couples that romance can be both traditional and delightfully unexpected in the heart of Finland.”
Something else unexpected is an elopement, a sudden and secret ceremony involving a flight from home without parental approval. One of Cranbrook’s “Finnish love stories” involved one such elopement.
Shortly after she turned 21, Eva-Lisa “Pipsan” Saarinen eloped to Toledo, Ohio with Jons Robert Ferdinand “Bob” Swanson, one of Eliel’s architecture students. They were married on May 8, 1926. According to Pipsan Saarinen researcher Alison Kowalski, “The young couple eloped because Eliel and/or Loja objected to the match, probably in part because Bob was of a lower socio-economic status than the Saarinens. According to Henry Scripps Booth, a close friend of Bob and Pipsan, Loja felt Bob was using Pipsan to get close to Eliel.”
Eliel, Bob, Bobby, and Pipsan aboard the MS Gripsholm, 1929. Courtesy Cranbrook Archives.
Bob struggled to support himself and Pipsan at the beginning of their marriage. Perhaps she proposed, and he didn’t have enough money to cover the cost of skirt fabric for such a fashionable lady.
Watercolor dress design by Pipsan Saarinen Swanson, circa 1933. Collection Cranbrook Art Museum.
More likely, they were truly in love. They were married from 1926 until Pipsan passed away in 1979.
—Leslie Mio, Associate Registrar, Cranbrook Center for Collections and Research
Cranbrook Archives is excited to announce the launch of a historical digitization project, made possible by a generous two-year grant from the National Historical Publications & Records Commissions (NHPRC). The Archival Projects grant “supports projects that promote access to America’s historical records to encourage understanding of our democracy, history, and culture.” One of 21 awardees in 2023, alongside the Amistad Research Center, NYU, and others, we have begun full digitization of Cranbrook Schools’ Horizons-Upward Bound Program (HUB) records in an effort to facilitate discovery and use of material that documents one of the nation’s oldest and largest college access programs. The new online collection promises to elevate the visibility of HUB’s important story, and by extension, experiences of under-represented youth, primarily African American, in the U.S. educational system.
Cover of Horizons-Upward Bound’s first annual report, 1965. Courtesy of Cranbrook Archives.
HUB historical materials include approximately 18 boxes (20.4 linear feet) of material relaying HUB’s history from its founding in 1965 through the year 2000. Material includes paper, news, photo, and film media primarily generated by HUB administration and HUB students. During the first year of the grant we are focused on digitizing all paper material. The second year will be devoted to digitizing photography and film, including images taken by local photographer Jack Kausch.
Digitization workstation where paper records are currently being scanned.
What we’ve done so far…
Digitization began in-house at the Archives in Summer 2023, with two HUB student volunteers who scanned a selection of newsletters and annual reports and drafted initial keyword/descriptions of the material. Later that Fall, I was hired to dedicate full-time attention to the project for the duration of the grant period. I continued the students’ work by first conducting quality control of the scanned material and digitizing the remaining publications in the collection. So far, I have digitized and quality checked over 7,500 pages of paper material. Currently, I am writing descriptions and creating keywords for these items and transferring the digital files to our online collections website, where they will be made public at the end of the project.
Selection of Horizons-Upward Bound publications spanning from the 1960s to 1990s, including annual reports, literary magazines, brochures, and newsletters. Courtesy of Cranbrook Archives.
More to come!
In honor of HUB’s founder and first director, Ben Snyder (1965-1989), we hope for this digitization project to help realize the desire he expressed for HUB’s records in his 1977-1978 Annual Report:
Annual Report cover, featuring HUB’s first cohort to include young women, 1977-1978. Courtesy of Cranbrook Archives.
“One hopes that these annual entries will, at some point in the future, be useful to the educational historian or, in a narrower sense, to someone reviewing the Cranbrook scene as it relates to community involvement. Should that time come in say the next century, the task would be far happier if the nation had in the meantime eliminated the need for compensatory education.”
–Ben Snyder (pg. 34)
Initially self-described as “An Experimental Enrichment Program,” in conjunction with representatives from Detroit Public Schools and Oakland County Schools, HUB was the only program of its kind at its inception. The artifacts and stories found within its historical collection have great potential to inform and inspire continued community-building and educational programming that span across metro Detroit and the nation. We hope you will share in our excitement about this project and we look forward to sharing more updates about the Horizons-Upward Bound collection!
– Courtney Richardson, Project Archivist, Cranbrook Center for Collections and Research
Editor’s Note: The NHPRC was established by Congress in 1934 as a statutory body affiliated with the National Archives and Records Administration. Chaired by the Archivist of the United States, it is composed of representatives of the three branches of the Federal Government and professional associations of archivists, historians, documentary editors, and records administrators.
Each year before my History of American Architecture lecture series, I like to commission Cranbrook Academy of Art student or recent alumni to design a poster to promote the event. This year, I asked second-year 2D Design student Luis Quintanilla to create a poster for this year’s series, Detroit and the World. I am thrilled with how the poster turned out—you can pick one up at the first lecture February 6, 2024—and thought I would share with you some of how it came about.
When I visited Luis’ studio in the Arts and Crafts Court, I was struck by their graphic sensibility combining imagery and text in sticker-like collages. I was also very impressed by a series of stipple drawings in ink on tracing paper, which Luis kept in a shoebox. As we talked about the themes of my upcoming lectures, and what we both admire about Detroit and its architecture, the idea of the poster came about. With Luis’ sketches strewn across the table in their studio, I was reminded of the great tradition of architectural capricci.
Architectural capprici are fantasies, where artists or architects combine buildings from across time in a single image. Traditionally, 18th century capprici could be oil paintings, pencil or ink sketches, or engravings. Joseph Michael Gandy is the most famous painter of architectural fantasies. Here, he is combining the London works of Sir John Soane into a single fantasy, set within the studio of Soane’s own house.
Joseph Michael Gandy, Public and Private Buildings Executed by Sir John Soane between 1780 and 1815, first exhibited 1818. Courtesy of Sir John Soane Museum, London.
If you’ve come to many of my previous architecture lectures, you might recognize my favorite painting: Thomas Cole’s The Architect’s Dream of 1840, a capprici which embodies the mid-19th century debate between gothic and classical styles. Contemporary British painter Carl Laubin creates stunning work inspired by Gandy, using contemporary architects for elaborate capprici.
What might an architectural capprici of Detroit include?
Marshall M. Fredericks’ The Spirit of Detroit, 1958, photographed by Helmut Ziewers for Historic Detroit Area Architecture.
I created a list of forty buildings I thought embodied the best of Detroit architecture. I narrowed it down to twenty buildings for Luis’ consideration, and shared images of each. My only real request: include at least one building from each of the five lectures, and center the poster on John Portman and Associates’ 1977 Renaissance Center.
I don’t think Detroit has a more iconic building than the RenCen, with its piston-like glass towers rising up from the Detroit River. There are better works of architecture, sure, but as far as an associated image of Detroit? Nothing tops the RenCen.
I suggested, too, that Luis include the 1901 St. Josaphat’s church by architects Joseph G. Kastler and William E. N. Hunter in front of the RenCen, to recall the almost too-good-to-be-true alignment of these two structures when driving into the city from the northern suburbs on I-75. After all, by the nature of delivering lectures about Detroit from the distance of Cranbrook, this is the view (from the suburbs, from the car) many of us hold toward the city.
We went back and forth about including the Spirit of Detroit, former Cranbrook Schools faculty member Marshall M. Fredericks’ monumental bronze at the Detroit City-County Building. What attracts me to the Spirit is its iconic status and its graphic replicability: whether on the redesigned city buses or the new city holiday lights, all you really need is an orb and some rays of light to know: that’s the Spirit of Detroit.
What would be the mood of our Detroit capprici?
Inextricably linked to the history of Detroit since 1980 is Detroit Techno, a form of Electronic Dance Music (EDM) that combines synth-pop with African American styles such as house, electro, and funk. For me, Detroit is most exciting, and its dynamism most electrifying, at night. In riding through the city after dark, buildings become speeding landmarks, and its possible to disappear for a time into a former factory or repurposed commercial building for a party or a rave. In these moments, buildings become less defined by their former glory or current decay than by their inhabitation as a dancefloor pulsating with music and lights. It’s a new way of occupying the city’s architecture to unique advantage.
Luis went to work. They began by printing out and arranging the buildings I’d shared. Then, they began overdrawing some of the images—distorting or highlighting certain features.
Layering on tracing paper, Luis dutifully stippled certain prominent architectural elements. I was especially impressed at the beautifully rendered hand, orb, and rays of Spirit of Detroit.
Luis then cut out stars on blue and yellow paper, adding in light sources to the night scene. The Ambassador Bridge, Dodge Memorial Fountain, Penobscot and Fisher Buildings are all recognized for their dramatic nighttime illumination, and Luis captured this with hand-drawn and cut stars.
Fisher Building with Full Moon Eclipse in Nov. 2022
Finally, Luis scanned in the physical elements of the poster and reassembled them in Illustrator, where text was added. Luis took inspiration from Detroit Techno posters for the colors and fonts. I could not be more thrilled with our poster, and the capprici of Detroit at night (with techno).
Luis Quintanilla, CAA ’24, working on the poster. Luis is from Austin, Texas, and earned their BFA from Virginia Commonwealth University.
Can you identify all the buildings shown? Can you speculate why I chose them?
If you can, you’ll love this year’s History of American Architecture: Detroit and the Worldlecture series! If you can’t, you’ll also love this year’s History of American Architecture: Detroit and the World lecture series! The first lecture is February 6, 2024, at 12:00pm ET online and at 6:30pm ET online and in de Salle Auditorium at Cranbrook Art Museum. Purchase your tickets and learn more on our website. All lectures will be available for viewing after the lecture to ticket holders. See you there!
—Kevin Adkisson, Curator, Cranbrook Center for Collections and Research
Special thanks to Artist-in-Residence Elliot Earls, Head of 2D Design, for suggesting Luis for this project. A perfect fit!
Cranbrook Kitchen Sink 