Sometimes it takes something small to make you notice something big.

On the first night of the Ann Arbor Art Fair, I was in the outdoor seating area of The Ravens Club on Main Street, with my back to vendors who lined the road. I leaned back in my chair, looked to my right, and scanned the restaurant and bar's red-brick building, admiring the two levels of black metal balconies unique to its facade. 

My eyes then drifted left to the adjacent building, composed of large gray-white bricks and featuring a tall tower on the corner of Main and Washington. The words First National Building appear above the tall arch of the tower entrance, with decorative cornices above the text. As my eyes glided up, I noticed the two first two levels of windows were arched, but the next four floors were rectangular. The arches return for two of the final three rows of windows, and four carved lions’ heads jut out at the top of the building between the three window rows.

All of this looked familiar. But it’s not because I’ve walked by the First National Building hundreds of times, or because I’ve sat at this approximate spot at The Ravens Club dozens of times.

The familiarity came from my having just seen Melissa Dehner’s drawings for the Bicentennial Blocks that the Ann Arbor District Library commissioned.

The Kansas City, Kansas, illustrator and owner of HoneyBee Creative was hired to draw seven architectural landmarks as part of the Ann Arbor 200 celebration: First National Building (201 S. Main St.), First National Bank Block / Goodyear's (120-124 S. Main St.), Glazier Building (100 S. Main St.), Michigan Central Railroad Depot / Gandy Dancer (401 Depot St.), YMCA Building (110 N. Fourth Ave.), Hill Auditorium (825 N. University Ave.), and Burton Memorial Tower (881 N. University Ave.).

The drawings were then printed on heavy-duty cardboard and folded into cubes to fashion blocks that can be as large as a foot tall. Each building is sectioned into thirds, so you have to stack the boxes to complete the structure. Full sets of the seven buildings are now in the kids’ areas of AADL’s five locations, and people can also pick up smaller printouts of the buildings at the branches to construct and display at home.

Dehner’s drawings made me feel like I was finally fully seeing the First National Building for the first time—a pleasure the Kansas artist has yet to experience because she’s never visited Ann Arbor.

“No, I haven't. And I've always wanted to check it out because I hear so many good things about it,” Dehner said.

She had worked on a similar project for an art deco exhibition at Kansas City’s Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, but that client requested computer illustrations. For the A200 project, Dehner returned to what feels most natural to her: drawing by hand.

“I'm such a hand-drawn person,” she said. “I love to do things by hand and [Nelson-Atkins Museum] really wanted more of a slick feel because it's art deco. It takes more thought and focus for me to do something in vector with the computer lines rather than just getting out my pencils and drawing.”

Hand-drawn was also the request of Eli Neiburger, AADL’s director, and Andrew MacLaren, AADL’s archives manager. The duo was also responsible for picking the buildings for the project.

"Andrew and I both drew upon our backgrounds in Architecture to winnow down the possibilities," Neiburger said. "We wanted to stick with buildings that are still standing for familiarity, and we looked at buildings that could be fairly well-captured in this blocky format. We worked with Melissa's first sketches to determine how best to slice up the contenders into the sizes of box that were available from the printer, and settled on these seven buildings as a representative sample of Ann Arbor's best-known historic structures. I will say there is one particular building we considered that no longer stands, but it wasn't a great contender to be boxified, so we've got something else cooking. Stay tuned for another architectural surprise later this year."

The blocks debuted at the branches near the end of July, and a library patron wrote in to say, "Thanks for letting this old lady play with blocks at the library. It was wonderful getting lost in the process of building iconic Ann Arbor places."

Dehner’s work for the Nelson-Atkins Museum was based on art deco ideas, not actual art deco buildings, so “it was made up and it was interpretive ... [with] very structured windows and doors. And that was easy,” she said.

For the Ann Arbor creations, Dehner used reference photos—both new and historical—but the point of view in those images was primarily from the street, which meant it was tough to see details at the top of the building, or perhaps the front of the structure was blocked by trees with full canopies of leaves. 

“I have some background working in an architecture firm years and years ago,” Dehner said, meaning she’s comfortable interpreting construction details. “I still was very challenged because so many of the photos were not at the front angle and I had to basically guess what they look like. And some of the [photos], no matter how far I could zoom in, I couldn't see if that was a flower or a lion's head or what was in the molding.”

While Dehner strived for accuracy, she wasn’t creating blueprints; she was making art.

“I knew I was going to generalize it pretty heavily anyway,” she said, “because I was not going for realism. I can do realistic, but I knew this needed to be more whimsical—not the right word and neither is cartoony, but along those lines. I wanted it to be more fun.”

Dehner combined the buildings’ major details with interpretive elements, especially how she presented textures on the buildings’ stones and bricks. She would start with line drawings on paper, scan them into the computer, and then add the coloring and textures that fit the image even if they didn’t stay glued to photorealism.

“I was so glad I was able to be a little bit funky,” Dehner said. “I wanted to use ... watercolor textures, acrylic paint textures ... and I wanted to use them very loosely so that they didn't necessarily have to look exact. ... And in a way that's not, that isn't exactly traditional or correct.”

She was a bit worried that townies would nitpick any interpretations “because I have never seen these [buildings] in person and there are going to be people that know exactly what that stonework looks like up close.”

But do you really know what the stonework looks like up close? Or the tops of the buildings? Or even the facades that you’ve walked by hundreds of times?

Stack some blocks and find out.

Christopher Porter is a library technician and the editor of Pulp.