Professional Plaza Tower

The Professional Plaza Tower is an International Style skyscraper designed by Crane & Gorwic, and built between 1964 and 1966 in Detroit, MI.

Professional Plaza Tower is not the only name you might know this building by though. Between 1980 and 2016 it was also known as Hammer and Nail Building.

Its precise street address is 3800 Woodward Avenue, Detroit, MI. You can also find it on the map here.

The Professional Plaza Tower 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 Professional Plaza Tower was officially included in the National Register of Historic Places on March 4^th 2016.

The building is also known as 'Hammer and Nail,' referencing two large neon signs, each consisting of three hammers and a nail, installed on the north and south facades of the penthouse in the 1980s by the Carpenter's Union, which occupied the top two floors. The signs were removed in 2016.

The building underwent a major restoration between 2016 and 2017. The architect commissioned to undertake this restoration was Quinn Evans Architects.

Crane & Gorwic was the architecture firm in charge of the architectural design.

The Professional Plaza Tower can be categorized as an International Style building.

The Professional Plaza Tower was completed in 1966. By 1966 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 Professional Plaza Tower was not well received by everyone at the time.

The Professional Plaza Tower uses a framed tube-in-tube structure , with concrete columns and beams.

A framed tube-in-tube structure uses a central core, known as inner tube, which usually holds stairs, lifts and installations, and a perimeter of columns around it, which form the exterior tube. The interior tube is tipically more massive (often made of reinforced concrete), and the exterior tube is "lighter" (made of steel or concrete columns). Both tubes are conencted via horizontal elements which make up the floors and also transmit any horizontal froces from the facade to the core.

The facade of the building is load bearing. This is a direct consequence of the integration of the exterior "tube" into the facade, something which most framed tube-in-tube buildings do in order to liberate the interior space from structural elements and achieve a more flexible interior.

So the facade of the builing is techinically load-bearing, yes, however, in between the load-bearing colums we find a curtain-wall type of facade, which by itself would not be cosnidered load-bearing.

From an aesthetic point of view, the facade features a glass and aluminum curtain wall. The tube-in-tube structure is supported by three slender concrete columns on each side, extending from street level to the top floor, and clad in prefabricated white concrete panels. These columns divide the facades into four bays. The outer bays have four windows each, while the two central bays have eight.

The facade on the ground floor and the tenth floor are set back from the rest of the floors, and on the 10th this setback creates the perfect transition for the crowning of the building, which is also in white concrete.