Detroit Free Press Building

The Detroit Free Press Building is an Art-deco skyscraper designed by Albert Kahn Associates, and built between 1924 and 1925, for a reported $6.00 million dollars, in Detroit, MI.

Detroit Free Press Building is not the only name you might know this building by though. Between 2020 and 0 it was also known as The Press/321.

Its precise street address is 321 W. Lafayette Boulevard, Detroit, MI. You can also find it on the map here.

The building underwent a major restoration between 2016 and 2020. The architect commissioned to undertake this restoration was Kraemer Design Group.

Albert Kahn Associates 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 Detroit Free Press Building a reality:

• Spencer, White & Prentice as the Main Contractor
• Ulysses A. Ricci as the collaborating Artist

The Detroit Free Press Building can be categorized as an Art-deco building.

The Detroit Free Press Building was completed in 1925, right when the Art Deco movement was at its peak, so it kind of went with the trend at that time.

The Detroit Free Press 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 Indiana limestone for the most part. The arched front entrance is adorned with relief figures around it.

Other materials found at the Detroit Free Press Building include, marble, found on the lobby's walls, cast iron, used around elevators and storefronts in the lobby, and wood, found in in friezes that are displayed on the walls along the corridors.