Michigan Bell and Western Electric Warehouse

The Michigan Bell and Western Electric Warehouse is an Art-deco skyscraper designed by Smith, Hinchman & Grylls, and built between 1929 and 1930 in Detroit, MI.

Michigan Bell and Western Electric Warehouse is not the only name you might know this building by though. The building is, or has also been known as NSO Bell Building.

Its precise street address is 882 Oakman Boulevard, Detroit, MI. You can also find it on the map here.

The Michigan Bell and Western Electric Warehouse 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 Michigan Bell and Western Electric Warehouse was officially included in the National Register of Historic Places on December 8^th 2009.

The building underwent a major restoration between 2009 and 2013.

Smith, Hinchman & Grylls was the architecture firm in charge of the architectural design. But there was also one other architect involved, as far as we know. We are talking about Bryant & Detwiler.

The Michigan Bell and Western Electric Warehouse can be categorized as an Art-deco building.

The Michigan Bell and Western Electric Warehouse was completed in 1930, right when the Art Deco movement was at its peak, so it kind of went with the trend at that time.

The Michigan Bell and Western Electric Warehouse 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 doble entrance doors located within a two story arched of limestone with decorative reliefs. The main door is sorrounded with aluminum plainted black. As we move higher up the building the facade is mostly made out of orange brick, with some light terraccotta details crowning the tower.

Other materials found at the Michigan Bell and Western Electric Warehouse include, marble, used at the entrance, lobby and first floor stairway, and cocrete, of which the walls of the garage and warehouse are made of.