Penobscot Building

The Penobscot Building is an Art-deco skyscraper designed by Smith, Hinchman & Grylls, and built between 1927 and 1928, for a reported $5.00 million dollars, in Detroit, MI.

Penobscot 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 Penobscot Building is also known, or has been known as, Greater Penobscot Building, or City National Bank Building.

Its precise street address is 645 Griswold Street, Detroit, MI. You can also find it on the map here.

At the time of its completion in 1928 the Penobscot Building incorporated solutions that were quite advanced at the time, these included a 3.33m diameter red orb, which was placed at the end of the antenna that lights up at night and served as a beacon for aviation.

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 Donaldson and Meier.

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 Penobscot Building a reality:

• Murphy Company as the Main Developer
• Corrado Parducci as the collaborating Artist

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

The Penobscot Building was completed in 1928, right when the Art Deco movement was at its peak, so it kind of went with the trend at that time.

The Penobscot 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 a gray granite base with an Indiana limestone cladding above it. The main entrance is accentuated by a four-story high arch and bronce gates. The entrance area also has travertine decorations.

Another material found at the Penobscot Building is metal, used in the elevators doors and frames of the main-floor lobby doors.