Detroit’s Forgotten Downtown Architects

Detroit’s Forgotten Downtown Architects

Walk up Griswold Street in Detroit and you’re walking through an open-air museum of early American skyscraper design — the “alphabet buildings,” so named for the light-and-air-maximizing floor plans that traced the shapes of letters long before air conditioning made such techniques unnecessary. Most Detroiters know Albert Kahn, the architectural titan who built an empire and left an indelible mark. Far fewer know the men who gave Detroit’s downtown its actual early 20th-century skyline, including Griswold Street and Washington Boulevard skyscrapers, and its enduring Woodward Avenue gems: Wirt Rowland, Louis Kamper, and Gordon W. Lloyd, along with the sculptor whose hands are on much of it, Corrado Parducci.

Wirt Rowland is the clearest case of a career hiding in plain sight. Over a 50-year run through four of the city’s top firms, Rowland drafted or designed an outsized share of Detroit’s defining buildings — yet he spent much of that career as someone else’s chief designer, working for both Kahn and George D. Mason, then at Smith, Hinchman & Grylls (now the Smith Group). It was only there, freed from Kahn’s insistence on classicism, that Rowland produced the work he’s now remembered for: the Buhl Building (1925), the Penobscot Building (1928), and his masterpiece, the Union Trust — now Guardian — Building (1929), an Art Deco cathedral of color still considered one of the finest bank lobbies in the country. Rowland never ran his own firm and never drove a car; he lived in a single rented room for over thirty years and put his money into clothes, travel, and the arts instead. He died in 1946, largely uncredited outside architectural circles, before recent scholarship began restoring his name to the buildings he shaped.

Louis Kamper arrived by a different route, emigrating from Germany and training in New York before setting up practice in Detroit, where his allegiance to French Renaissance ornament produced the Book Building and the Book-Cadillac Hotel — once the tallest hotel in the world — along with the enormous Roseland Park Mausoleum. He helped the Book Brothers transform Washington Boulevard into the “Fifth Avenue of Detroit.”

Gordon W. Lloyd, an English-born architect who opened his Detroit office in 1858, predates them both; his Gothic Revival churches and commercial blocks helped establish the city’s architectural ambitions before the skyscraper era even began. His Schwankovsky Temple of Music, later known as the Wright-Kay Building, is a historic 1891 Romanesque and Queen-Anne style building located at Woodward and John R in downtown Detroit.

And then there’s Parducci, the New York-trained Italian sculptor who was sent to Detroit to execute the decorative carving on buildings. He was so popular, he started his own firm in Detroit. Parducci ended up staying for the rest of his career, and his figures, friezes, and more appear on so many downtown facades — the Guardian, the Fisher Building, the Greater Penobscot, the Buhl — that he may be the most productive, least recognized artist in the city’s history. Rowland and Parducci partnered to reflect the country’s Native American heritage in their unique Detroit-based architectural masterpieces.

Detroit’s downtown survived the 20th century better than most American cities, in large part because these buildings were too well-built and too distinctive to tear down even during the leanest years. That the architects behind them remain obscure says less about the work than about how architectural credit gets handed out — usually to the name on the firm’s door, rarely to the person who actually held the pencil.

Sources: HistoricDetroit.org, city-photos.com (Rod Arroyo), A History Lover’s Guide to Detroit, History Press (Karin Risko, Rod Arroyo)