The ‘Paris of Midwest’, the ‘Motor City’ Detroit of Michigan, USA was founded in the year 1706 by the French trader Antoine de la Mothe. Due to its rapid industrialization in the automotive industry, it is very uncommon knowledge that Detroit was esteemed as the ‘City of Design’ by UNESCO in 2015.
The city has been a boon to the whole world today as it invented urban freeways, road lines, and the three-coloured traffic signal. Owing to its massive cultural history, Detroit is a repository for architecture and design.
With its discernible skyline of buildings from gothic to art deco style of architecture, Detroit has a colossal bevy of 19th and 20th-century buildings and is a splendid magnet for architects.
Here are the 15 places you should visit in Detroit:
1. GM Renaissance Centre | Places to visit in Detroit
Designed by Josh Portman, the Renaissance Center is a cluster of seven connected skyscrapers, of which six are 39-story offices while the seventh is a 73-story hotel rising from the centre.
The complex portrays brutalist interiors (of concrete) and modern architectural style exteriors (of glass). The Renaissance centre’s cylindrically designed hotel is linked to the other towers with ringed glass walkways. Albeit its renovation in 2004, it majestically defines Detroit’s skyline.
2. Fox Theatre
Built in 1928 in the glorious art deco style architecture, this performing arts theatre with a seating capacity of around 5000 is one of the biggest in the world through time. The intricate ornate ornamentation combined with the mechanical services made this theatre stand out as an instance of advancement.
Also, the theatre has the most extensive clear-span balcony in the world. The Fox theatre exemplifies the late-twentieth-century opulence and grandeur.
3. Campus Martius Park | Places to visit in Detroit
When the 1805 fire destroyed much of Detroit, Campus Martius was designated as the origin point for all new roads and lots. With bleak urbanization, Campus Martius Park was envisioned as a point of revitalization in 1999. The 1.6-acre park features grassy lawns, gravel walkways, and informal seating for over 2,000 people along walls, benches, steps, and moveable chairs.
With retractable stages, ice-skating rinks, and cafes, the Campus Martius Park attracts people all time of the year and is a dominant node for the city.
4. Fisher Building
Designed to accommodate a house office and retail space by Albert Kahn and Associates, the Fisher building is an ornate skyscraper of Detroit. The Art Deco style building known as ‘Detroit’s Largest Object’ is decked to the nines in fancy marbles, mosaics, soaring, painted ceilings, and a whole lot of brass and bronze.
Its wall surfaces were recessed to break the monotonous window façade. The Fisher Building is decked marvellously with more than 40 kinds of marble from all around the world with colours ranging from white and pink to black.
5. The Guardian Building | Places to visit in Detroit
Another dauntless example of art-deco architecture, the Guardian building was deemed as a National Historic Landmark in 1929. Sheathed in tangerine-coloured Guardian Bricks, the building’s interior is contrastingly ornate as compared to the building’s exterior.
The three-storeyed vaulted lobby clad in geometrical patterns of travertine and marble has an excellent acoustical sound absorbing space. The stained glasses and golden leaf adorned arches engender the rays of the sunbursts to spread from the centre of the ceiling down along the columns.
6. Detroit Opera House
Been designed three times earlier, and the fourth time in the 1990s, the Detroit Opera House is one of the most acoustically perfect theatres built. Fashioned in the Italian renaissance style, the theatre’s interior is laden with an imposing promenade, large crystal chandeliers, a grand marble staircase, lavish carpeting, walls adorned with elegant murals, and original oil paintings.
As for the building’s exterior, architect Crane designed two facades in the same style but with different materials. The dominant façade on the busier Broadway street is in the Beaux-Arts style and is embellished with white glazed terra cotta alongside colossal Corinthian columns. The other façade on Madison street is bedecked with red brick and terracotta trim.
7. The Masonic Temple
The temple’s classically Gothic architecture and Indiana limestone bedecked facade offer it the impression of massive medieval castles from the old world. The spaces in the building have been grouped into three major divisions: the ritualistic tower, the auditorium, and the Shrine Club.
The Masonic Temple houses ten Blue Lodge rooms all of them have distinct accentuated treatments, with motifs derived from Egyptian, Doric, Ionic, Corinthian, Italian Renaissance, Byzantine, Gothic, and Romanesque architecture. The composite has not been used in either of these rooms, which are all true to the period.
All of the artwork in the building, notably the ornately decorated ceilings, was developed under the supervision of well-known Italian artists.
8. The Detroit Athletic Club | Places to visit in Detroit
Modelled after the inspiration from Roman palazzos, the seven-storeyed edifice of the Detroit Athletic Club was designed by the renowned architect Albert Kahn. The impact of this century-old structure’s exterior is wholly reliant on the window and door openings, the material used (Bedford limestone), and the potent cut stone cornice.
There are three distinct sections to the club: The grand entrance hall, billiard room, and lounging room used for social events on the first and second floors. The third and fourth floors were constituted with athletics in mind, and the fourth-floor swimming pool was the first of its kind when it was built, and it is still in use today.
The top floors were originally intended to be residential, but they now house a cigar room, meeting rooms, a cafe. Also, the rooftop plaza of the club provides a view of the thriving metropolitan area.
9. Penobscot building
With an Art Deco influence, the Penobscot building was a potent symbol of Detroit’s industrial paramount. The most visually striking but culturally divergent elements are pulled together to fulfil the notions of Indianness in a generic “Indian” theme of the building.
A four-storeyed entrance archway with an Indian motif on top, renders the building imposing. Many of the friezes and other high-quality decorations in granite pay homage to the Penobscot Indians, after whom the structure is named.
10. Wayne County Building | Places to visit in Detroit
Listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1975, the Wayne County Courthouse is with a significant indication of Roman Baroque architecture, with a melange of Beaux-Arts and neoclassical architectural elements. The large rectangular plan of the building is punctured with two rectangular courtyards that provide light and ventilation to the structure. Sedentary atop a two-story base of rusticated Eastern granite, the courthouse is fashioned of Berea sandstone.
Smoother and darker in appearance, the sandstone contrasts with the lighter colour and rougher texture of the granite at the base. A detailed cornice and balustrade between the fourth and fifth floors distinguish the shaft of the building from the entablature.
