That's why I was happy when my friend Lisa and her fiance Ben presented me with a reason to do some exploring in Detroit today. A company called Pure Detroit does free tours of the city's iconic skyscrapers, and we decided to go check out the Guardian building and the Fisher building.
The Guardian Building
The Guardian Building sits at 500 Griswold St. in the Financial District of Detroit. It was designed by architect Wirt Rowland, and it was finished in 1929. It is an awesome mix of Art Deco and what they call "Mayan Revival." I was pretty much blown away as soon as I entered the building.
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| The lighted clock in the lobby gate was made by Tiffany. |
The colors, in any other setting, would clash horribly. But for some reason, in this building, they totally worked. There were almost too many places to look; my brain was overloaded. Not in a bad way, but in the kind of way where you wish you had more time to explore the building.
I was surprised (and a little sad) to find out that the building is only about 50% occupied with tenants. The building has had several owners over the years. I believe it was originally built for the Union Trust Company, which had the motto "safety and security." This motto is reflected in several metal sculptures showing warriors holding a sword and a key. You can see two of these warriors standing guard on either side of the metal gate in the above photo.
Currently the building is owned by Wayne County, and it uses the building as its headquarters.
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| Michigan mural thingy on the wall! |
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| The three of us split it...I swear! |
The Fisher Building
Next we were off to the Fisher building, which is in the New Center area of Detroit. Even though we were trying our best to get there on time, we still arrived a few minutes late, and we accidentally hit the tour guide with the building's main revolving door.
The Fisher building is another breathtaking example of Art Deco extravagance. It was designed by Albert Kahn, the same guy who did the amazing William L. Clements Library (and many other buildings) on the UM campus. The construction of the building was financed by the Fisher family, who made an INCREDIBLE amount of money selling the Fisher body to GM. It was finished in 1928.
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| Love this view. |
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| Gold relief elevators? We got that. |
A huge perk to the Fisher building tour is that you get to go to the 26th floor and see a 360-degree view of Detroit from the office space windows. The Fisher also has some amazing mosaic tile work on the main floor, and we all know how much I <3 mosaic tile works!
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| Mmm...tiles.... |
I'm glad that these buildings were built when they were. If the timing had been just a bit off, the events of late 1929 might have prevented these amazing building from being what they are today.
Now, in the exercise of editing myself, I only included my favorite photos in this blog. If you are interested in seeing more that we took today, check out the following albums:
