Lafayette Pavilion Apartments vs Coleman A. Young Municipal Center

Comparing the Lafayette Pavilion Apartments and the Coleman A. Young Municipal Center is interesting because they both stand in Detroit, MI, and were completed within 4 years of each other, but they were designed by different architects.

This offers a unique glimpse at how rival designers approached projects in the same city during the same era.

These two towers present an interesting contrast in their proportions. The Coleman A. Young Municipal Center rises higher at 318ft (97m), while the Lafayette Pavilion Apartments reaches 220ft (67m). However, the Lafayette Pavilion Apartments accommodates more floors with 22 levels above ground, compared to 19 floors in the Coleman A. Young Municipal Center.

This suggests different approaches to interior space design. The Coleman A. Young Municipal Center has an average floor-to-floor height of approximately 5.1m, while the Lafayette Pavilion Apartments has more compact floors averaging around 3m each. The taller building's more generous floor heights might indicate grander interior spaces, higher ceilings, or different programmatic requirements.

These different proportions likely reflect the specific needs each building was designed to serve, whether driven by zoning regulations, client requirements, or the intended use of the spaces within. The contrast shows how architects can achieve different spatial experiences even when working with similar overall building scales.

Both the Lafayette Pavilion Apartments and the Coleman A. Young Municipal Center were designed in line with the aesthetic conventions of the International Style style.

At the time, this style was at the height of its popularity. So both Mies van der Rohe and Harley, Ellington and Day followed what was in many ways expected of them, producing designs that fit comfortably within contemporary architectural norms, rather than breaking with convention.

The Lafayette Pavilion Apartments is primarily residential, while the Coleman A. Young Municipal Center is primarily governmental.

The Lafayette Pavilion Apartments offers 340 residential units.

These two towers illustrate the many possible ways to combine structure and enclosure in skyscraper design.