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Hill Auditorium and its historic design Hill Auditorium memorabilia are on sale at: http://www.hillauditorium.com/Home.php By Susan Wineberg On January 8, 2004, the University’s Hill Auditorium itself took center stage when President Mary Sue Coleman cut the ribbon and rededicated the building before an audience of 3,000. Albert Kahn When the building, designed by renowned Detroit architect Albert Kahn, opened in 1913 the Ann Arbor Daily Times News heralded it in a front-page story as one of the most complete music auditoriums in the United States. The headline declared that the new auditorium would be the site of the “Greatest May Festival in the U.S.” The University Musical Society was bringing the “stars of the [New York] Metropolitan Opera Company to Hill for the occasion," the article said, with a program commemorating the centenaries of Verdi and Wagner. But the Hill Auditorium site had a fascinating history decades before 1913. In 1858, when only six houses lined North University between State and Fletcher (then 12th Street), Prof. Alexander Winchell, a geologist and paleontologist, built an enormous octagon house, situated far from the road and surrounded by gardens and lawns. The Octagon House Craze Winchell’s Octagon House (1886) on the site where Hill Auditorium stands today. The octagon house was part of an American architectural craze that ignited in 1848 when Orson Squires Fowler published his popular book, A Home for All, or the Gravel Wall and Octagon Mode of Building, and lasted to 1860. Fowler was primarily a phrenologist (someone who could supposedly tell your fortune by rubbing the bumps on your head) and also a writer interested in improving the human condition. He maintained that octagons clustered purposes in the center of the house—such as heating and plumbing—and thereby saved the housewife unnecessary work. He also claimed it was more beautiful because it was closer to a sphere, “the predominant or governing form of Nature.” Alexander Winchell Winchell used concrete, a progressive material for the era. (He and other builders of octagon houses were like the forward-looking people who built geodesic domes and solar houses in the 1970s.) Old photographs show a large greenhouse on the west side of Winchell’s octagon, perhaps part of his scientific investigations. The vogue for such houses, professor of architecture Fiske Kimball said in 1919, derived from the “initiative of Thomas Jefferson, who at his little-known plantation of Poplar Forest [in Virginia] realized the paper projects of Italian and English academic theorists. Surprisingly, the interiors of these houses had novel facilities by ingenious planning which also disguised the unusual shape of the exterior. In cruder examples of the fashion there was a single chimney with rooms around it, arranged very like so many pieces of pie.” Arthur Hill (1847-1909) of the Class of 1865 left a bequest to the University to build the auditorium that bears his name. He made fortunes in lumber and steamshipping. (Professor Winchell was as complicated and controversial as his house, and is famous for two things in University history: he was a strong advocate for the admission of women and a fierce opponent of U-M’s first president, Henry Tappan, whom he despised because Tappan allowed students to drink beer and skip chapel. It seems that part of Winchell’s animosity was personal rather than principled: Tappan had shifted him from a chair in the Department of Physics to one in Natural History, in response to what Tappan said were Winchell’s “inattention to details.” In any event, Winchell was successful and Tappan was fired in 1863, ending a career that many academic historians credit with having set the stage for Michigan’s emergence as a great university.) In 1875-6, while Winchell was at the University of Syracuse serving briefly as president, the octagon house was rented to Alpha Delta Phi, making it the first fraternity chapter house at U-M. Winchell went on to teach at Vanderbilt University but was fired because of his advocacy of evolution. He returned to Ann Arbor and was a professor in geology and botany and zoology and paleontology until his death in 1891. Kahn’s 3rd Major U-M Building   Kahn used bands of applied decoration for Hill as Sullivan had done for several Midwestern banks, like the 1907-08 National Farmer's Bank in Owatonna, Minn, shown here. After Winchell’s death Delta Tau Delta used the house until 1909, when it was sold to the University and demolished the following year. Kahn’s design for Hill Auditorium on the site was his third major building for the University. Kahn employed a spare style that reflected his grounding in the Prairie Style popular in this period. Beginning with Louis Sullivan and developing under his pupil Frank Lloyd Wright, this very American style emphasized straight lines and simplicity of decoration. Kahn developed the concrete framing system for factories like the Ford Motor Co. auto assembly plant in Highland Park, Mich., which opened in 1912 a year before HIll.   The facade of Hill, with its banding of tiles around the columned entryway and its use of tapestry brick designs, is classical in spirit and somewhat Sullivanesque in its decoration. Sullivan’s bands of applied decoration can be seen in the banks he designed for small Midwestern towns in the early 1900s. But his masterpiece, the Chicago Auditorium built in 1889, illustrates the arcing bands of lights that we now see restored in Hill Auditorium. In his Points of Interest at the University of Michigan (1976), Don Hunt notes that the critic Lewis Mumford called Hill Auditorium one of the outstanding interiors in the country. Kahn went on to design other campus buildings in this style, including Natural Science Building (opened in 1917) and the Hatcher Graduate Library (opened in 1919). Hill Auditorium’s renovated interior. According to Hunt, the Natural Science Building was closest to the factory designs that made Kahn internationally famous. In it he uses the famous reinforced concrete framing system developed by his brother Julius (known as the Kahn system), which allowed for a generous amount of window space, an innovation for academic buildings then, and one scientists welcomed for the additional natural light. Kahn first developed the concrete framing system when he worked with Henry Ford to design the first automobile assembly line in a long, low building in 1909 in Highland Park, Michigan. Kahn went on to design many more factories and of his 2,000 works, some 500 were factories built in the Soviet Union in the 1920s. Susan Wineberg ’67, ’71 MA, ’75 MA, studied Near Eastern Languages and Literature and anthropology at U-M, where she is now an assistant at the Institute of Labor and Industrial Relations. She is a frequent writer and lecturer on Ann Arbor’s architectural history. (Also see in this issue a related article on the reopening festivities for Hill Auditorium.) < Hill Auditorium reopens: Historic restoration, modern amenities