The David Stott Building is an Art-deco skyscraper designed in 1921 by Donaldson and Meier, and built between 1928 and 1929, for a reported $3.50 million dollars, in Detroit, MI.
Its precise street address is 1150 Griswold Street, Detroit, MI. You can also find it on the map here.
The building underwent a major restoration between 2015 and 2018. The architect commissioned to undertake this restoration was Patrick Thompson Design, Kraemer Design Group.
Donaldson and Meier was the architecture firm in charge of the architectural design.
That being said, architecture is a complex discipline involving many professionals from different fields, without whom this building would have not been possible. We will surely be leaving out a lot of names here, but here is a list of the people we do know also played their part in making the David Stott Building a reality:
The David Stott Building can be categorized as an Art-deco building.
The Art Deco movement flourished during the 1920s and 1930s, with many historians marking the outbreak of World War II as its final decline. Even though a couple of decades might not seem as much, the Art Deco movement had a great impact on architecture, and it's widely represented in many American cities due to the development boom that happened during that time.
Art Deco marked the abandonment of traditional historicism and the embracement of modern living and the age of the machine. In architecture, that meant leaving behind the ornaments of Beux-Arts and Neo-Gothic buildings and instead favoring simplicity and visual impact through geometric shapes, clean lines, and symmetrical designs. Ornaments were still an important part of the design, but they became bold and lavish, and were often inspired by ancient cultures or industrial imagery, instead of nature.
The David Stott Building was completed in 1929, right when the Art Deco movement was at its peak, so it kind of went with the trend at that time.
The David Stott Building reaches an architectural height of 436ft (133m), 453ft (138m) if you count the antenna, with the last accesible floor being 433ft (132m) off the gorund. It has a total of 41 floors, 38 above ground and 3 basements, served by 6 elevators. In total, it has a built-up area of 229,002 sqf (21,275m2) offering 202,189 sqf (18,784m2) of usable space.
When it opened its doors to the public in 1929, the David Stott Building was primarily used as Commercial space. That however, is no longer the case, and today it mainly provides Residential space, with other complementary uses such as commercial space.
The David Stott Building has a total of 107 residential units throughout its 38 floors.
The David Stott Building uses a frame structure made of steel columns and concrete slabs.
A frame structure uses a combination of beams and columns to sustain the building's weight. The walls in this case are non-load bearing, which allows for more flexibility when distributing the interior spaces.
The facade is a non-load bearing masonry facade. This type of facade became common during the period when buildings, especially taller ones, transitioned from load-bearing wall systems to frame structures.
Frame structures allowed facades to be independent from the building's frame, enabling the use of lighter materials and larger openings. However, it took some time for architects to incorporate these new posibilities into their designs, and so for a while they simply replicated the look and feel fo buildings people where used to seeing.
From an aesthetic point of view, the facade features a pink-veined marble covering the first three levels above street, which then transition into a red-orange colored brick, with some traces of limestone used to empathise the setbacks of the building. The spandrels beneath the window are highly decorative. The main entrance is an arch that spans two stories tall, enclosing a recessed lattice cladded in dark wood. From the thrid flroor until the top of the building, pillars of different withs create a sense of rythm at the same time that they empathise the verticality of the building.
Other materials found at the David Stott Building include, white marble, used on the lobby's walls, and bronze , seen on elevators doors, entrance doors frames and concierge window.
