Lafayette Apartment Towers

The Lafayette Apartment Towers is an International Style skyscraper designed by Mies van der Rohe, and built in 1963 in Detroit, MI.

Its precise street address is 1321 Orleans Street(West), 1301 Orleans Street(East), Detroit, MI. You can also find it on the map here.

The Lafayette Apartment Towers is a structure of significant importance both for the city of Detroit and the United States as a nation. The building embodies the distinctive characteristic features of the time in which it was built and the International Style style. Because of that, the Lafayette Apartment Towers was officially included in the National Register of Historic Places in 1996.

Lafayette Tower Apartments, East and West, are two identical towers that are part of the four towers Mies developed in Lafayette Park. The others are the Windsor Tower and Lafayette Pavilion Apartments.

The four towers were added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1996, along with all the buildings designed by Mies van der Rohe for Lafayette Park .

Mies van der Rohe was the architecture firm in charge of the architectural design.

The Lafayette Apartment Towers can be categorized as an International Style building.

The Lafayette Apartment Towers was completed in 1963. By 1963 the International Style movement had already left its early days behind and could be considered a mature movement, which does not mean it was loved and accepted by everyone, on the contrary. The International Style was accepted by the architecture community way before it was by the general public, and it is therefore likely that the Lafayette Apartment Towers was not well received by everyone at the time.

The Lafayette Apartment Towers uses a frame structure made of reinforced concrete columns and beams.

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 uses a non-load bearing window wall system.

Window wall systems are installed between floor slabs, allowing the edge of the slabs to be visible from the exterior (unlike curtain walls).

Window walls are easier to install than curtain walls, often resulting in reduced construction time and cost. However, the exposed edge of the slabs are weak points in terms of thermal insulation and needs to be carefully detailed to avoid thermal bridging and potential condensation issues

From an aesthetic point of view, the facade features a window wall with gray-tinted glass and aluminum frames, that spans from the second level until the top of the building. Each window has two distinct sections, a large fixed glass pane on top and a smaller gid section beneath it, which allows the AC units to exchange air with the outside.

At ground level, a double-height, 4,88m tall, recessed glass wall houses the lobby and some other support spaces, while the space between this glass wall and the perimeter columns serves as a transition space between the outside and the inside..

Other materials found at the Lafayette Apartment Towers include, green marble, found in the elevator cores, and terrazzo, used in lobby and terraces floors .