Industrial Building

The Industrial Building is a Neogothic skyscraper designed by Louis Kamper, and built between 1926 and 1928, for a reported $2.00 million dollars, in Detroit, MI.

Industrial Building is not the only name you might know this building by though. It is common for companies to want to attach their names to iconic buildings when they move in, or for the general public to come up with nicknames, and this one is no exception. The Industrial Building is also known, or has been known as, Industrial Apartments, Industrial Bank Building, Louis Kamper Building, or Park Palace Apartments.

Its precise street address is 1410 Washington Boulevard, Detroit, MI. You can also find it on the map here.

The building has been restored 2 times over the years to ensure its conservation and adaptation to the pass of time. The main restoration works happened in 1981 and 2019.

Louis Kamper was the architecture firm in charge of the architectural design.

The Industrial Building can be categorized as a Neogothic building.

The Industrial Building was completed in 1928. These were the late days of the Neogothic movement, which had been around for almost 200 years at the time.

Art-deco would soon take over US architecture, and therefore, even though Louis Kamper didn't venture into what was cutting edge in terms of style at the time, and took instead a more conservative approach to the design of the Industrial Building, it is possible that the design already started showing some traits that would later become characteristic of the art-deco movement.

The Industrial 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 ornaments in the spandrels of the windows up to the fifth floor, and a striking limestone crown design adorning the top of the building.