The Cranbrook Educational Community, a National Historic Landmark, in the US state of Michigan was founded in the early 20th century by newspaper mogul George Gough Booth. Cranbrook campus is in the Detroit suburb of Bloomfield Hills consisting of Cranbrook Schools, Cranbrook Academy of Art, Cranbrook Art Museum, Cranbrook Institute of Science and Cranbrook House and Gardens. The founders built Christ Church Cranbrook as a focal point in order to serve the educational complex, though the church is a separate entity under the Episcopal Diocese of Michigan. The sprawling, 319 acre (129 hectare) campus began as a 174-acre (70 ha) farm, purchased in 1904. The organization takes its name from Cranbrook, England, the birthplace of the founder's father.
Cranbrook is renowned for its architecture in the Arts and Crafts and Art Deco styles. The chief architect was Eliel Saarinen with Albert Kahn responsible for the Booth mansion, 1908,1919. Sculptors Carl Milles and Marshall Fredericks also spent many years in residence at Cranbrook.
The Cranbrook Academy of Art, one of the nation's leading graduate schools of architecture, art and design, was founded by the Booths in 1932. By 1984, the New York Times would say that "the effect of Cranbrook and its graduates and faculty on the physical environment of this country has been profound ... Cranbrook, surely more than any other institution, has a right to think of itself as synonymous with contemporary American design."
The buildings were designed and the school first headed by Eliel Saarinen, who integrated design practices and theories from the arts and crafts movement through the international style. The school continues to be known for its apprenticeship method of teaching, in which a small group of students, usually only 10 to 16 per class (150 students for the total of ten departments), study under a single artist-in-residence for the duration of their curriculum. The graduate program is unusual because there are no "courses": all learning is self-directed under the guidance and supervision of the respective artist-in-residence.
Beginning in 1983, a major exhibition of works by Cranbrook's faculty and graduates, entitled "Design in America: The Cranbrook Vision 1925–1950", toured major museums in the United States and Europe. The Detroit Institute of Arts and Metropolitan Museum of Art co-authored a book detailing the works in the exhibit.