During the Cranbrook Educational Community’s initial development nearly a century ago, founder George Booth suggested to Loja Saarinen that she should create textiles to complement her husband Eliel’s architectural designs.
Eliel became president of Cranbrook in 1925 and drew up the campus with the help of Loja, an architectural modelmaker and sculptor. Booth assumed the textiles would be woven in Finland, where the Saarinens were from. Loja countered: “Why not design and weave them here?”
Loja Saarinen was 49 years old in 1928, when she learned to weave, and completed Cranbrook Rug No. 1 in a month. From a single loom, the new Studio Loja Saarinen quickly expanded. Maja Andersson Wirde and other weavers skilled in the knotted-pile ryijy technique came from Sweden in 1929. With more than 30 looms, the studio produced draperies and rugs for Cranbrook’s buildings, but also sought outside commissions, working the space between industrial design and studio arts and crafts.
“Perhaps the most persistent myth about Loja Saarinen is that she was a weaver,” explains Cranbrook Center for Collections and Research curator Kevin Adkisson in “Room for a Lady: Loja Saarinen at Cranbrook,” the 2022 documentary he wrote and directed. “It’s an easy mistake to make. Loja helped create many remarkable rugs for Cranbrook, and they are often labeled ‘By Loja Saarinen.’ But she wasn’t sitting at the loom.”
Indeed, she created samples with her own hand-dyed yarns, working out designs and planning the purchase of materials. In a 1929 interview, she insisted hers was an American studio, saying, “We are not trying to copy the work of the European craftsmen. Instead, we are studying the yarns and threads available here, and are seeking to develop patterns and fabrics which will meet a need in this country.”
Dissatisfaction with existing looms led to Loja’s collaboration with John Bexell, a cabinetmaker from Korsträsk, Sweden, whose wife, Marie, worked with Loja Saarinen. John and Loja created a “countermarch” loom in 1936 that was quieter, more dexterous, and better-suited for large works.
“The Cranbrook Loom is a special loom in that it both raises and lowers the thread of the warp,” says Lynn Bennett Carpenter, artist-in-residence at Cranbrook Schools, who appears in the documentary. “The Cranbrook looms are incredibly successful. I call them the Cadillac of looms.”
An employee of General Motors Truck Co. (now GMC) in Pontiac, Bexell moonlighted by starting small-scale production of the looms. In the late 1930s, the Farm Security Administration put in a large order that allowed him to quit GM and form John P. Bexell Co.
Loja Saarinen lived and worked at Cranbrook for more than 25 years. Her successor, Marianne Strengell, guided the department from 1942 to 1961.
“Weaving and textiles at Cranbrook emerged as an entirely modern discipline that served a vital contemporary market in all sectors of industry, including, but not limited to, corporate and residential interiors, fashion, and industrial and commercial applications,” scholar Jennifer L. Lindsay wrote in a master’s thesis. Today, with 64 looms, the Cranbrook studio is claimed to be the country’s largest.
After World War II, Bexell’s son, Bert, joined the business, which took the name J.P. Bexell and Son. John retired 1964; one of Bert’s prime customers was Robert Kidd, a Cranbrook graduate. His Robert Kidd Gallery in downtown Birmingham employed 18 weavers for corporate commissions.
Bert Bexell sold J.P. Bexell and Son in 1978, but worked for the new entity, Heritage Woodcrafts, for two more years. In 1984, Norwood Looms, of Baldwin, Mich., acquired Heritage. Twelve years later, Schacht Spindle Co. of Boulder, Colo., bought rights to the Cranbrook loom, executed a redesign, and continues making it today, with prices ranging from $7,839 to $13,072.
