Favourite architecture

Tenochtitlan said:

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Mirc said:

Moscow is so absolutely amazing (together with Sankt Petersburg, in different style, but equal in "epichood"). I'd really love to go there so much... Ever since my father showed me his old photos from there I've been dying to see that.
Will I ever have time to see even just a noticeable part of what I want to see, in this lifetime?

Rhetorical question, as I can't know the answer, but still... I wonder.

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From my hotel room in Windsor, Canada, the skyline of downtown Detroit actually looked pretty: the skyscrapers—old and new (Philip Johnson's neo-Gothic Comerica Tower is in the center)—the broad Detroit River, a cruise ship moored at a waterfront park, and a monorail, the People Mover, periodically tootling through the scene. An orderly, neat thriving city, one might say. One would be wrong.

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The day before I arrived, the frozen body of a man was found in the elevator shaft of an abandoned warehouse; only the feet were visible, the rest of the body being entirely encased in ice. The homeless men living in the warehouse, treating the corpse as unremarkable, ignored it for a month, and when a journalist finally called 911, it took the police two days to arrive on the scene. (It was later determined that the man died from a cocaine overdose.) The warehouse is next door to one of Detroit's most fabulous ruins, Michigan Central Station (right). The railroad terminal and the attached 18-story office building, which opened in 1914 and have stood empty since 1988, are the work of New York architects Warren & Wetmore, who also designed Grand Central terminal and the New York Yacht Club on 44th Street.

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Empty buildings are not unusual in the Rust Belt. Cities like Cleveland and Indianapolis, for example, have many abandoned factories, breweries, and industrial buildings—so do Philadelphia and Baltimore. What makes Detroit unusual is that there are so many of these abandoned hulks, that they are so large, and that they are generally surrounded by open land, since their neighbors have long since been demolished. The result is a curiously suburban landscape.

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Between 1910 and 1920, Detroit doubled in size and became America's fourth-largest city. Thanks to the auto industry, it was a prosperous place, which is evident in the quality of the architecture. When the city of Highland Park, where Ford built the first assembly line, needed a library, for example, it commissioned New Yorker Edward Lippincott Tilton, who built libraries in Washington, D.C.; Wilmington, Del.; Springfield, Mass.; and Manchester, N.H. Tilton apprenticed with McKim, Mead, & White and trained at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and in most cities, his delicate brand of American Renaissance would be considered an architectural treasure; this building has been boarded up since 2002.

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Perhaps the most bizarre ruin in Detroit is the Michigan Theater, designed in 1926 by Rapp & Rapp, a Chicago architectural firm that specialized in theaters and movie palaces and built the globe-topped Paramount Building on Times Square. The Paramount originally included a 3,600-seat theater, later turned into office space. The Michigan Theater was converted, too … into a parking garage. I was chased out of the building by a scolding security guard, but not before seeing the lines of cars anomalously parked beneath a richly decorated plaster-relief ceiling.

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Detroit's residential neighborhoods are likewise distinguished by the quality of their homes, the numbers of vacant lots, and especially by the intimate adjacency of abandoned, empty, and often burned-out houses and inhabited dwellings. It's like Berlin or Warsaw in 1945. Just as in post-World War II photos of those ruined cities, the most shocking thing is to see people carrying on their everyday lives in the midst of so much physical destruction.

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Another striking building (this one still occupied) is the original General Motors headquarters building, designed in 1919-23 by Detroit's premier architect, German-born Albert Kahn. Kahn, who pioneered the use of reinforced concrete construction in assembly plants for Packard and Ford, and even built industrial buildings in the Soviet Union in the 1930s, was considered a pioneer of Modernism by European architects. But only Kahn's factories look like factories. The massive GM Building exhibits the relentless planning logic of a Bauhausler, but it is executed with all the delicacy of Kahn's friend Henry Bacon, who designed the Lincoln Memorial.

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Kahn's premier work in Detroit is undoubtedly the Fisher Building, a 30-story downtown office tower built in 1928 in the stripped-down American Art Deco style that was popular at the time. As Raymond Hood would do at Rockefeller Center, Kahn emphasized the vertical thrust of the building and made it stylish, ornamented, and entirely modern all at once.

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Perhaps the oddest thing about the ruins of Detroit is that they are so close to downtown, and downtown Detroit is not so different from many other Midwestern cities: a mixture of solid buildings from the 1920s, utilitarian steel-and-glass towers from a later era, parking garages (since all the office workers live in the suburbs). The omnipresent Renaissance Center, still the tallest building in the city, is a weird sci-fi outer-galactic space colony designed by John Portman in the 1970s. There are even a few reminders of the old days, like Jacoby's "German Biergarten since 1904," where I had lunch. Its fuggy, convivial atmosphere was a reminder of the big city this once had been.

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Detroit is not disappearing anytime soon. At 1.03 million residents, it is the 11th-largest city in the country, larger than San Francisco, Boston, or Seattle. The current downturn in the fortunes of the automobile industry is a hard blow, of course, and it's difficult to be sanguine about a comeback for the city, unless you are the sort of urban booster who sees the construction of casinos as a harbinger of urban renaissance—I'm not. On the other hand, some of the large empty downtown buildings are being refurbished, like the old Fort Shelby Hotel (right), a 1916 building, with a high-rise extension by Kahn, which was reopened last year after standing empty for 30 years. Also, here and there, one sees smaller examples of urban enterprise: a renovated storefront, a club, a restaurant. Not exactly a hotbed of the creative class (which prefers warm climates, anyway) but something. If cities were movie characters, Detroit would be Mickey Rourke's Randy "The Ram" Robinson. Down, but not out.

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Supr49er said:

Frank Lloyd Wright - Fallingwater

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Annex said:

Those statues do make it look pretty surreal.
Was that whole thing made in the mid 1800s? It looks way ahead of its time.

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raketooy said:

The current station was designed in 1909.

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