Town Apartments

The Town Apartments is an Art-deco skyscraper designed by Smith, Hinchman & Grylls, and built between 1928 and 1953 in Detroit, MI.

Town Apartments 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 Town Apartments is also known, or has been known as, Pontchartrain Club, Town Residences, or Town House Apartments.

Its precise street address is 1511 First Street, Detroit, MI. You can also find it on the map here.

The Town Apartments 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 Town Apartments was officially included in the National Register of Historic Places on March 4^th 2016.

The building underwent a major restoration between 2014 and 2016.

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 Fridy, Gauker, Truscott & Fridy.

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 at the very least we know that there was one other part involved, that was Fridy, Gauker, Truscott & Fridy in charge of Structural Engineering.

The Town Apartments can be categorized as an Art-deco building.

The Town Apartments was completed in 1953, significantly after what could be considered the end of the Art-Deco movement. It was clearly inspired by the movement, but because it doesen't really fit into the movement's timeline it would be considered as a post-movement or neo-movement.

Especially during modern times, there are less imposed rules when it comes to design. Variety and experimentation are welcome, and architects are given the freedom to take inspiration from a wide range of sources.

Looking at the past for inspiration can be a great starting point for an architectural project, and something which Smith, Hinchman & Grylls clearly took advantage of to design the Town Apartments. Architects may choose to look to the past for multiple reasons. It could be that they want the building to merge with an older surounding, give it the feeling of having been there for longer than it actualy has, personal preference or it might even be a requieremnt from the client.

The Town Apartments 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 light colored bricks with some terracotta details in the upper part of the tower.