What is it?
It’s a cellphone tower. Gunnar Birkerts, an internationally esteemed Latvian American modernist architect who spent much of his career in metro Detroit, designed the tower as well as the Domino’s Farms Office Park (home to the Domino’s Pizza world headquarters) and the still-standing model for the never-built Leaning Tower of Pizza (originally intended to be said headquarters).
Why did a modernist architect design a cellphone tower?
It was a condition laid out by the Domino’s Pizza founder and then-CEO, Tom Monaghan. AirTouch, a wireless phone provider, agreed to pay around $500,000 toward construction, as opposed to leasing the space, and to let Birkerts design it.
What is it supposed to represent, anyway?
Birkerts’s design depicts a lightning bolt and also may have drawn influence from a Salvador Dalí-designed table lamp, according to John Petz, spokesperson for Domino’s Farms Corp. The white triangular platform atop the 165-foot tower symbolizes a cloud. The red box at the bottom, a steel-clad shelter for electronic equipment, symbolizes “fire that would have been started by a lightning bolt across a prairie,” Petz says. Notice another pattern with the paint job? It’s in the Domino’s colors.
How does it stay up?
Guy wires (tensioned cables) hold it up, and its foundation is a 26-foot-deep belowground pier.
Wasn’t it part of a Christmas display?
Yes. Between 1997 and 2001, the wires were strung with lights during the holidays for the farm’s St. Nicholas Light Display.
What was one of the biggest obstacles to construction?
The cell site shared real estate with Monaghan’s famous bison herd. For that reason, the construction team built a protective fence around the tower’s approximately 176-square-foot perimeter.
Were there any other challenges?
Greg Szabo, then senior vice president of AirTouch, recalls his team butting heads with Birkerts — who had a Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired vision that characterized the rest of the farm’s look — over some practicalities, such as the fact that the plastic covering over the antenna needed to point up; the artist wanted it to face down. “We had to change that,” Szabo recalls, “and Gunnar was all pissed off at me.”
But in the end, things seemed to work out well for both parties. After the tower was completed in 1997, Birkerts’s design was recognized in the October 1998 issue of The Architectural Review. It would later appear on the August 2007 cover of the Ann Arbor Observer in artist Steve Gilzow’s colored pencil drawing “Where the Calls and the Buffalo Roam: Cell Tower at Domino’s Farms.” Today, it’s operated by American Tower, providing service for Verizon Wireless customers.
This story originally appeared in the March 2025 issue of Hour Detroit magazine. To read more, pick up a copy of Hour Detroit at a local retail outlet. Our digital edition will be available on March 10.
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