Detroit Skyline

Detroit's 1920s towers — the Guardian Building, the Penobscot, the Fisher — are among the finest Art Deco commercial architecture in the country, and a large part of the reason they still stand is economic decline. The city never went through the demolition wave that cleared pre-war stock from many American downtowns, because there was no money and no demand to build anything in their place.

What was a symptom of decades of hardship left Detroit with an unusually intact 1920s skyline. Those ornamented setback crowns are the oldest layer in the silhouette and the most distinctive thing in it.

The Renaissance Center opened in 1977: seven towers on the riverfront, a 73-storey hotel cylinder ringed by four office towers, built as a statement of recovery. It was also designed defensively — raised berms, few street entrances, an interior so disorienting that colour-coded signage had to be added later.

That tension is the honest story of the Detroit silhouette. Delicate, ornamented 1920s towers inland, and a sealed modernist cluster on the water, built in a different era for a different reason. The model keeps both, because leaving either one out gives a false picture of the city.

The Renaissance Center dominates the riverfront: a central 73-storey cylinder ringed by four octagonal towers, with two later additions behind. It is the newest major element and the one that reads first.

Inland the skyline is older and far more ornamented. The Guardian Building is the orange-brick Art Deco tower with a stepped crown, finished in 1929 and sometimes called the Cathedral of Finance. The Penobscot carries a red beacon at its peak that has been lit since 1928. One Detroit Center's neo-Gothic spires were designed deliberately to echo them, which is unusual for a 1993 building and makes the composition cohere better than it has any right to.