Midland, MI

Midland, Michigan is a company town that hired remarkable architects. Herbert H. Dow founded the Dow Chemical Company here in 1897, extracting bromine from the brine beneath the pines, and the corporation still headquartered in Midland shaped every corner of the city's life — most visibly through the founder's son, Alden B. Dow, a Frank Lloyd Wright apprentice whose home and studio, cantilevered over a garden pond, is a National Historic Landmark and one of the finest works of organic architecture in America; dozens of his houses, churches and schools give Midland an architectural coherence unique among small Midwestern cities.

Alden Dow also designed the city's cultural flagship and the archive's documented address: the Midland Center for the Arts, a sculptural complex housing concert auditorium, theatre and museums under one roof, home to the Midland Symphony Orchestra and to the opera and choral productions — the "Midland Opera Theatre" of the source records names one such resident company rather than a hall (a note for the registry). The founder's other gift blooms next door: Dow Gardens, forty-five hectares of pines, bridges and the astonishing canopy walk. Even the city's landmark is geometric — the Tridge, a three-legged footbridge joining the rivers' confluence. Chemistry paid for it; architecture made it worth visiting.