Detroit Modern

Civic Center/Financial District Walking Tour

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America welcomed a new era in architecture when the Museum of Modern Art in New York City held the ‘Modern Architecture: International Exhibition’ in 1932. Based on the work of the Bauhaus school in Germany, the International style was known for its clean lines, walls of glass, and lack of ornamentation. The Great Depression and the redirection of materials and manpower for the needs of World War II brought construction to a virtual standstill in most American cities. The innovative architecture could not be applied until after the war ended. By then, new building materials and pre-fabricated building techniques developed for the war effort were available to the private market. Promising young architects who had served in the military used the GI Bill to complete their education. They applied the lessons learned from fast-paced, creative war construction to rebuild America’s cities during the longest continuous period of economic growth in our nation’s history, 1950 to 1970.

The city of Detroit first hired Eliel Saarinen, an internationally known Finnish architect and city planner serving as a professor at the University of Michigan, to create a civic center and Veteran’s Memorial Hall in 1924. The poor economic climate during the depression caused the original plan to be shelved. As the economy improved, Saarinen and his Yale-trained son, Eero, revisited the plan in 1938 updating it by adding a 30-story government building. The plan was put on hold, this time due to the outbreak of World War II.

In 1943, to help the city’s planning department meet its post-war needs, members of the Detroit chapter of the American Institute of Architect’s (AIA) formed the Architects’ Urban Design Collaborative. The group consisted of some of Detroit’s prominent, young architects who provided advice on modernizing the city’s central business district, including the civic center.

The Detroit Common Council approved a third civic center plan in 1947 by Saarinen, Saarinen & Associates, which by then included architect J. Robert F. Swanson. Site plans were provided by the renowned landscape architect Dan Kiley. This new plan provided downtown Detroit with a significant feature: an opening to the Detroit River. It also included a memorial hall, an exhibition hall, a civic auditorium, a plaza with a waterfront promenade, underground parking, and municipal office towers. Construction began on Veterans Memorial Hall in 1947 and on the City-County Building (Coleman A. Young Municipal Center) in 1951. Eero Saarinen was again asked to revise the civic center plan in 1955. Though not all the elements of this final plan were carried out, much of the fundamental design can still be found in Detroit’s civic center.

Detroit fared well during World War II when the automobile industry ramped up production to create ‘the Arsenal of Democracy’ and thousands of workers poured into the region. Prosperity continued throughout the 1950s and 1960s as automobile consumption grew. During this golden era, Detroit rose to the status of a world financial leader, reflecting its affluence through its architecture, and the city became the home for a new generation of modern architects led by the internationally acclaimed Eero Saarinen and Minoru Yamasaki.