The architecturally stunning Guardian Building turns 80.
Excerpt:
The
Guardian Building, downtown Detroit's art deco "Cathedral of Finance,"
is celebrating its 80th birthday this year. Forty stories of
architectural delirium, the orange brick pile at Griswold and Congress
streets opened in the heady days just before the 1929 stock market
crash.
Yet the optimism surrounding its inauguration was
short-lived. Just 11 months later, the financial company that built it
-- the Union Trust -- would go down in flames, after the stubbornness
of one Henry Ford scuttled a government rescue package.
Of
Detroit's three great art deco skyscrapers from the late '20s,
architect Wirt Rowland's Guardian is neither the tallest -- that falls
to the Penobscot Building, also by Rowland -- nor as well-known as
Albert Kahn's Fisher Building.
The Guardian, however, trumps its
more subdued cousins in sheer visual extravagance, from the exterior
brick color -- matched to one of Rowland's drawing pencils -- to the
visual riot of Pewabic and Rookwood tile both outside and in. Take the
stairs up to the five-story upper lobby, passing through an "altar
screen" topped by a Tiffany clock, and you can't help feeling that
you've entered some glittering cathedral.
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