This is the first of a bunch of posts that will be about the recently-concluded APT conference in Detroit, both about the conference itself and about me playing tourist in Detroit, where I had not visited in a very long time. I’m going to start with a building that is simultaneously familiar and new to me: the Detroit Savings Bank Building at 1212 Griswold Street. That’s my picture from last Saturday above. The stippling you see in front of the dark stone and windows is not evidence of a bad photo: it was snowing lightly when I took the shot. The twelve-story building was completed in 1895 and is one of the first skyscrapers in Detroit. Here’s a view from between 1900 and 1910, with the building on the left:
Based on this picture, and all the other old block and white photos I’d seen, I had assumed that the brick-clad upper floors were nearly as dark as the stone-clad lower floors. My photo at the top show that not to be the case. Also, note the large water-table projecting between the 4th and 5th floors, which is no longer present. I researched this building for The Structure of Skyscrapers, and since it’s in a city that I did not visit for archival research I was looking for information anywhere I could get it. My certainty that this building has a skeleton frame comes from various documents, including a Sunburn map. This photo from construction also shows a bit:
Note the large brackets for the water-table. If the floor count seems funny, it is: the facade was modified at some point, largely by removal of ornament to simplify it, and there’s some kind of mezzanine that throws off counting floors.
The biggest change in the appearance of the building is the infill of the deep light-court on the State Street faced, turning the upper floor plans from U-shapes to rectangles. The glass facade for that addition actually sort-of addresses good preservation practice, in that it clearly distinguishes new from old, although I wish the new was a bit better detailed. I addressed the structural implications of exactly this kind of alteration in chapter 7 of Structure.
It’s not a remarkable building by any standard: it’s not particularly tall for its year of construction, neither its structure nor its architecture is particularly daring, and it’s been altered over the years. But those issues are, to me, reasons to like it. A well-built building, and certainly one as big as a skyscraper (of any era) should be in use in its second century. We should all look so good at 127 years.
The title of this post comes from “Living for the City” by Stevie Wonder. As I was wandering around playing tourist, I found myself saying “Wow, New York Detroit, just like I pictured it. Skyscrapers and everything.”
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