Lee Plaza Building

The Lee Plaza Building is an Art-deco skyscraper designed by Charles Noble, and built between 1927 and 1929 in Detroit, MI.

Lee Plaza 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 Lee Plaza Building is also known, or has been known as, Lee Plaza Hotel, or Lee Plaza Apartments.

Its precise street address is 2234-2242 West Grand Boulevard, Detroit, MI. You can also find it on the map here.

The Lee Plaza Building 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 Art Deco style. Because of that, the Lee Plaza Building was officially included in the National Register of Historic Places on November 5^th 1981.

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 1980 and 2024.

Charles Noble 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 Lee Plaza Building a reality:

• Ralph T. Lee as the Main Developer
• Corrado Parducci as the collaborating Artist

The Lee Plaza Building can be categorized as an Art-deco building.

The Lee Plaza 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 Lee Plaza 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 terracotta on the base of the building and on the decorative bands and spandrels.

Other materials found at the Lee Plaza Building include, walnut wood, used in the panels that cover the walls of the dining areas, italian marble, found on floors, walls and ornamental ceilings, wrought iron , used on accessories and decotation, bronze, used for the elevator doors and lighting elements, and mirrors, decorating the walls of the ballrooms.