At Kamper’s Rooftop Lounge on the 14th floor of the gloriously restored Book Tower, you can raise a glass to Louis Kamper, the Bavarian-born architect who, along with the ultrarich Book brothers, made this stretch of Washington Boulevard the “Fifth Avenue of the Midwest.”
Be sure to take in the spectacular view of downtown Detroit, a tasting menu of architectural eras and styles, with skyscrapers old and new on full display. There’s the glass-sided Hudson’s site building, the city’s largest built-from-scratch development in 50 years; it tops out at just over 681 feet, second only to the central tower of the Renaissance Center. That’s a Bedrock project, and so is the Book Tower, examples of the old, the new, and the good-as-new (if not better).
Many of Detroit’s architectural gems date from 1890 to 1930, the height of Detroit’s industrial growth, when the booming real estate and auto industries created vast fortunes. Add big egos and a top architect, and you’ve got the Great Skyscraper Race of the roaring ’20s, when Detroit, Chicago, and New York City vied for the tallest and the grandest. There were hundreds of architectural firms, big and small, ready to give their clients the grand mansions of their dreams or commercial buildings that would advertise their business prowess.
The stock market crash of 1929 put the brakes on all that, but World War II, when Detroit converted its factories to war production to become the “Arsenal of Democracy,” pulled the economy into midcentury prosperity — with whole neighborhoods leveled and lives altered along the way.
You can’t see Michigan Central from Kamper’s Rooftop Lounge, but the newly restored and reimagined station triumphs as the perfect amalgam of future and past: a 1913 Beaux-Arts stunner, designed and opened when train travel was how people got from here to there, left to rot in changing times, and then reborn by Ford Motor Co. as part of an innovation hub dedicated to inventing new ways for people to get from here to there. Indeed, this era may go down as the golden age of architectural restoration in Detroit. Cities are layers of time, after all, collections of structures we build and tear down and save and adapt according to changing trends, economies, ambitions, and dreams. Here’s a look at some of the dreamers.
That Kahn-do Spirit
What’s left of the massive Packard Plant No. 10 still stands on East Grand Boulevard. It has endured decades of neglect, graffiti, raves, demolition, and an indecisive foreign owner who bought it at a foreclosure auction in 2013. But the reinforced-concrete skeleton still stands, a testament to the sturdy design that revolutionized industrial architecture in 1903 and catapulted architect Albert Kahn to wealth and greatness. It is only one of 20,000 buildings his firm designed around the world during his lifetime, a portfolio ranging from skyscrapers and synagogues to lighthouses and libraries — not to mention a good deal of the old University of Michigan. As Detroit architects go, there is Albert Kahn, and there is everyone else.
Kahn’s genius was his versatility, as his graceful commercial buildings demonstrate, particularly his ethereal New Center masterpiece, the Fisher Building (though his chief architect, Joseph Nathaniel French, deserves major credit). But industrial design was his calling card.
One of eight children who emigrated from Germany to Detroit in 1881, Kahn — who was colorblind — did not attend architecture school but learned on sketching tours of Europe, studying the styles that American architecture relied on. He apprenticed in the firm of George D. Mason, an early mentor who designed the Masonic Temple. (They collaborated on the Belle Isle Conservatory and Aquarium.) Kahn paid for his brother Julius to study engineering at the University of Michigan.
In 1895, they joined forces (brothers Louis and Moritz also played roles over the years). Together, they changed history. Old factories of brick and wood were claustrophobic and prone to burning. While reinforced concrete was fireproof, it could collapse; Julius solved the problem by adding metal reinforcing bars at an angle to offset stress fractures.
Julius used the new “Kahn system” in a new Cadillac factory in Midtown, designed by Mason (and still standing), and then Packard’s 10th factory building when he joined Albert’s firm. The system allowed for larger windows, creating an airy, loftlike interior that made assembly-line work much more humane. Kahn and Kahn repeated this approach at Ford’s 1913 Highland Park factory — also a ruin now — where Ford first implemented his gravity-fed assembly line, and Ford’s sprawling River Rouge plant. The unadorned, glass-clad structures predict modern architecture (though Kahn himself despised modernism) and influenced factory design around the world. After 125 years, Albert Kahn Associates is still active, headquartered — where else? — in the Fisher Building.
Skyscraper Superstar
Three of Detroit’s iconic skyscrapers — the Buhl, Penobscot, and Guardian buildings — were erected a few blocks from one another in the financial district within the space of four years. One supremely gifted architect designed them all.
Born in 1878, Wirt Rowland worked for Albert Kahn and George Mason (both of whom urged him to study architecture at Harvard University) before moving to Smith, Hinchman & Grylls in 1922. (Detroit’s oldest firm, it now does business as SmithGroup.) Rowland was known for his stately homes and graceful neoclassical commercial buildings — the Shinola Hotel is housed in one — but in the 1920s, he adopted the trendy art deco style.
According to architectural historian Michael Smith, author of a book on Rowland, the Guardian Building’s unusual orange-brick exterior reflects rock formations of the Southwest, and its zigzag Pewabic and Rookwood tile patterns inside borrow from Native American rugs, which were popular at the time.
Rowland felt architecture should evoke an emotional response, and you’ll feel many things as you behold the dazzling, multihued lobby, beautifully restored and maintained through the years.
The architect himself was rather eccentric. Never married, he lived in a boardinghouse, was chauffeured around in his collection of expensive cars, and gained some renown as a singer. He wore a flowing black cape to two continents to pick out the marble for the Guardian. One of his best friends and collaborators was Italian-born sculptor Corrado Parducci, whose work adorns buildings all around Detroit.
Rowland’s last project was Kirk in the Hills, a stone church in Bloomfield Hills built in the 1940s; he died before it was completed, but Parducci honored his friend by sculpting his image for the exterior.
By the Books
Lucky architects will find steady, enthusiastic, and well-heeled clients. Louis Kamper found the Book brothers, and Detroit has the Washington Boulevard Historic District to show for it.
Like Albert Kahn, Kamper emigrated from Germany in the late 19th century. He worked at the legendary firm of McKim, Mead & White in New York City before coming to Detroit in 1888 and joining the firm of Scott & Scott.
His first commission was the chateaulike Hecker House on Woodward Avenue (now owned by Wayne State University); commissions for fine residential homes began to pour in for Grosse Pointe and Indian Village.
In 1911, he completed a Renaissance revival home for J. Burgess Book Jr., one of three brothers who had inherited a real estate empire from their grandfather while still in their 20s. This empire included a good deal of Washington Boulevard. Thus began a fruitful collaboration that resulted in a half dozen gleaming Italian Renaissance commercial buildings, including the Book-Cadillac Hotel (now the Westin Book Cadillac Detroit), the Industrial Bank Building (now senior housing), and the Book Tower.
At 38 stories, the Book Tower was the tallest building in Michigan until the Penobscot opened with 47 stories. It was in shambles when Bedrock bought and restored the structure, sparing no expense.
Kamper’s son, Paul, worked alongside him. They weren’t very good at skyscrapers; the Book Tower was called overdesigned, a top-heavy wedding cake, complete with 12 caryatids (seminude female forms) holding up the cornice, much to the annoyance of the Catholic church across the street. But that was then.
Now, the Book Tower’s multilevel atrium is a dazzling triumph. ODA, the New York-based architectural firm that performed the restoration, reconstructed the glass skylight with little but an old sketch to go by.
The Great Depression scuttled the Book brothers’ dream of constructing the tallest building in the world. The timing wasn’t good for Paul Kamper’s new hotel venture, either; he lost the property and his entire $500,000 investment. Only 33, with a new wife and baby, Paul shot himself in the chest and died. Louis Kamper passed at 91 and was buried with his family in the Rose Chapel mausoleum in Roseland Park Cemetery, which he designed in 1913. His longtime patron J. Burgess Book is interred next to him.
Jim Scott’s Folly
James Scott was no one’s idea of an upstanding citizen. This 19th-century man-about-town squandered his inherited wealth on women and gambling. He feuded freely, sued frequently, and was universally disliked by the city of Detroit. One local writer described him as a “vindictive scurrilous misanthrope.” Even the Romanesque mansion he commissioned in Midtown was designed to block the light of a neighboring property, payback for the owner’s refusal to sell the lot to him.
Scott loved a practical joke, even from the grave. After his death in 1910, his will revealed he’d donated $500,000 to the city of Detroit to build a spectacular “James Scott Memorial Fountain” on Belle Isle, topped, of course, with a life-size statue of himself.
The bequest sparked a raging debate over whether a person of such low character should be memorialized. (Then his stepson challenged the will, to no avail.) The city accepted the money and doubled it to boot.
In 1914, the commission went to Cass Gilbert of New York City, arguably the nation’s leading architect. His 60-story Woolworth Building was a Gothic Beaux-Arts skyscraper and the world’s tallest building in 1913, and he was already contracted to design the second Detroit Public Library building. He tapped East Coast sculptor Herbert Adams to carve the noble lions, water-spouting cherubs, and sweeping staircases, all out of Vermont white marble.
The fountain was unveiled in 1925, but Scott did not get his life-size sculpture on top; instead, he sits a few feet away, looking glum he didn’t get his way. The fountain has had its ons and offs over the years, but today it’s back to its old burbling, geysering self, thanks to the efforts of the Belle Isle Conservancy.
As for Scott’s spiteful mansion, it was a massive, burnt-out ruin until preservationist developer Joel Landy bought it in the early 2000s and spared no expense restoring it. It is now a luxury apartment building at 81 Peterboro St., and Scott’s namesake fountain is Belle Isle’s most popular attraction.
Designing Women
Before women in the U.S. could vote or divorce their husbands, they could cut their own path in the worlds of architecture and design.
In 1907, Emily Butterfield became the first woman licensed as an architect in Michigan. Born in Algonac in 1884 and a gifted artist, she moved to Detroit with her family as a child and attended Detroit public schools.
When she said she wanted to be an architect like her father, Wells Butterfield, her parents sent her to Syracuse University in New York, home to the first architectural school in the country to accept women. She flourished there, helping to start the sorority movement in addition to earning her degree.
Upon returning to Detroit, Butterfield entered practice with her father, first as an apprentice, then as a partner. Butterfield & Butterfield specialized in schools, homes, and churches, as both were devout Methodists: “Before we can build stately buildings, we must have stately souls,” she liked to say. The Butterfields designed two dozen churches, including Trinity United Methodist in Highland Park and First United Methodist in Farmington, innovative in that they were more like community centers than just places to pray.
Architecture was a man’s game, and Butterfield found herself walking downtown alone, seeing the men lunching in saloons and restaurants. “I was lonesome for speaking acquaintances with business women while pattering up and down the avenue at the noon hour looking for a place where a lone woman might eat,” she said. So she and other like-minded professional women created the Detroit Woman’s Business Club in 1912, the first of its kind in the nation.
Emily took over the firm when her father ran for mayor of Farmington. Her best-known residential project is a charming storybook Tudor cottage in the Oaklands subdivision of Farmington Hills (luckily owned today by devoted preservationists).
“I am a person who makes my own path,” she wrote to a friend. “At an early age, I decided to build entirely after my own ideals of happiness and service. To some this may sound selfish, yet I am truly content with my life. … I did things my way!” She lived her later years as postmaster of Neebish Island near Sault Ste. Marie.
Butterfield no doubt crossed paths with Mary Chase Perry Stratton, co-founder of Detroit’s own Pewabic Pottery, one of the longest-running potteries in the nation. You can’t wander Detroit without coming across Pewabic tile, including at the People Mover and QLine stations, Cranbrook House & Gardens, Detroit Institute of Arts, and Detroit Public Library.
In 1903, Perry was living in Brush Park next door to Horace Caulkins, a dental supplier who developed a portable kiln for firing porcelain teeth and dentures. It worked like a charm for ceramics as well, and the two set up shop in a garage. Pewabic Pottery turned out vases and vessels in Perry’s custom iridescent glazes, and her architectural tiles became popular for adorning new buildings in the Detroit area. For the Guardian Building, she worked with Wirt Rowland, making tiles from his pencil sketches.
In 1906, Perry commissioned architect William Stratton to design a Tudor revival headquarters for Pewabic on East Jefferson Avenue. They later married.
Helen Eugenia Parker was arguably the first Black woman to work as an architect in Detroit. She was born in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, and may have attended Howard University. She taught math in Little Rock before coming to Detroit in the 1930s and found work teaching young people drafting through the Works Progress Administration. On the side, she drew plans for Donald White, Michigan’s first licensed Black architect, and in the late ’30s she was associate architect for Trinity Hospital, a facility for Black patients on East Vernor Highway (it closed in 1962).
Today, there are many more women of color in architecture, though the percentage remains tiny. Kimberly Dowdell is a Detroit-born, Chicago-based architect who became the first Black woman to lead the American Institute of Architects last December, its 100th president. She decided to study architecture as a young girl upon seeing the old, boarded-up J.L. Hudson department store — and the equally sad people living around it. As she told the Detroit Free Press, she recalls thinking, “‘I would like to fix this building.’… I felt if I could do that, I could heal the people around it.”
The Urban Oasis
If Mad Men is your favorite TV show, chances are Lafayette Park is your favorite Detroit neighborhood. German modernist Ludwig Mies van der Rohe designed this enclave in his spare International Style, marked by steel boxes and lots of glass. It still epitomizes midcentury design — he coined the phrase “less is more,” after all.
After World War II, the Housing Act of 1949 paid cities to pull down “slums” and replace them with middle-class housing. Lafayette Park, built in 1959, was the first development to come out of “urban renewal.” The Detroit Free Press called the community “an urban oasis … designed to offset the magnetic attraction of the suburbs,” but along with a freeway, it came at the cost of Black Bottom, a predominantly Black neighborhood on downtown Detroit’s eastern fringes.
In the 1930s, Mies van der Rohe (a name he made up) headed the Bauhaus, the legendary Berlin design school that championed simple geometric shapes and functional designs. Out went Italianate frills and classical motifs; in came steel beams and sheets of light-filled glass. In 1929, he unveiled the Barcelona Chair, one of the 20th century’s most iconic objects. Mies immigrated to Chicago to head the Illinois Institute of Technology’s architecture school and quickly began to put his “skin and bones” imprint on the Windy City’s skyline. (Even Frank Lloyd Wright, who didn’t like other architects, adored his talents.)
Using a master plan by urban planner Ludwig Hilberseimer, Mies designed The Pavilion, a stark, glass-skinned 22-story high-rise apartment building in Lafayette Park, along with two-story townhouses and one-story court houses, all air-conditioned and verdantly landscaped by Alfred Caldwell. In the 1960s, the neighborhood grew, and two more apartment buildings (Lafayette Towers East and West), a shopping center, and Chrysler Elementary School were added by Mies and other architects. Today, Lafayette Park boasts the largest collection of Mies van der Rohe structures in the world.
The Black Modernists
The legendary Aretha Franklin grew up in Detroit, singing in the gospel choir at the New Bethel Baptist Church, where her father, Clarence LaVaughn Franklin, was minister from 1946 to 1979. In 1961, the city knocked down the congregation’s 10-year-old church for the Chrysler Freeway, and the congregation — 4,000 strong — moved into two old theaters.
In 1963, C.L. Franklin hired a young architect named Nathan Johnson to remodel the Oriole Theater into a gleaming new church in his signature futuristic style. New Bethel was one of 40 churches that Johnson designed for Black congregations, which now had the means to leave their storefront churches behind. The churches rose majestically from their sidewalk frontages, a testament to economical and original design.
“At one time, Black architects had only one major client: churches and maybe funeral homes,” architect Howard Sims said in 1982. “It wasn’t until the mid- to late ’60s that Black people entered the decision-making process so far as what might be built and where, and how it should look.”
For example, the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History, designed by Sims and his partner Harold Varner and opened in 1997, takes its design cues from African culture.
Johnson’s churches were a massive departure for Detroit. They evoked not medieval Europe but midcentury Jetsons, with saucerlike bodies and floating roofs as well as swooping towers that resembled the bow of a Viking ship. Inspired by the space-age coffee shops of Los Angeles, this so-called Googie style became Johnson’s trademark, and he applied it to his commercial jobs as well, most notably Stanley’s Mannia Café in Milwaukee Junction, a restaurant owned by Chinese immigrant Stanley Hong, and the Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church, Berry Gordy’s church.
Born in Kansas, Johnson was artistically gifted, and a teacher steered him toward architecture. Unable to secure work in white firms, he moved to Detroit after meeting Donald White at a fraternity convention.
He started his own firm in the mid-1950s as the civil rights era gained steam. He got some commissions from white clients, such as the Eastland Center mall, but for Johnson and other Black architects, municipal jobs were hard to come by.
It took the city’s first Black mayor to change that. Coleman Young made sure that Black firms received their fair share of jobs, and when he awarded Johnson the contract for 14 People Mover
stations in the early 1980s, Johnson then engaged other Black architects in the project, including Roger Margerum, Aubrey Agee, and Sims-Varner & Associates (currently SDG Associates).
When Johnson passed away in 2021 at the age of 96, Mayor Mike Duggan tweeted a tribute: “Nathan Johnson broke down barriers to establish himself as one of the nation’s leading Black architects. When discrimination left him struggling to find opportunity, he created his own.”
Michigan Central’s Time is Now
It used to be that buildings were unveiled with ribbon cuttings and fancy speeches. Michigan Central Station’s grand opening this past June featured a rock concert with Detroit’s greatest musical artists, including Diana Ross and Eminem.
It was a fitting Motor City tribute to the 1913 station’s 21st-century rebirth, thanks to Ford’s epic billion-dollar restoration of the 640,000-square-foot Beaux-Arts structure, performed by 3,000 dedicated craftspeople.
The biggest challenges were water damage and replacing materials and ornamentation scavenged over the decades, says Angela Wyrembelski, the preservation architect with Quinn Evans who oversaw the restoration.
The firm went to heroic lengths for historical accuracy, reproducing light fixtures from photographs, re-creating plaster ornaments in polymer resin through 3D printing, and even reopening a quarry in Indiana to secure the same limestone used for carved features more than a century ago. The 18-story office tower will house tech offices as well as restaurants, public spaces, and potentially a luxury hotel. (Two rail lines were maintained, just in case light rail becomes a reality someday.)
The firm left remnants of the ruined station, including graffitied walls, “just to pause and think and reflect,” Wyrembelski says. “It was important to tell the full story — not only celebrate how grand it was in 1913 … but that also it had a really rough history.”
Wyrembelski sees this restoration as part of a larger trend of repurposing ruined manufacturing buildings into elegant downtown hotels, including Marriott’s Element Detroit at the Metropolitan and The Siren Hotel in the old Wurlitzer Building. And it bodes well for other magnificent structures awaiting their next act, like the Old Wayne County Building on Randolph Street.
Besides, she adds, bringing historic buildings back to life is environmentally friendly: “Our firm mantra has always been ‘The greenest building is the one that’s already built.’”
This story originally appeared in the September 2024 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 Sept. 6.
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