Ford Auditorium, Hart Plaza, Detroit

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About Ford Auditorium, Hart Plaza, Detroit

This group is intended as a site to lodge documents and photos about the Ford Auditorium in Hart Plaza, Detroit, by O’Dell, Hewlett and Luckenbach, with Crane, Kiehler and Kellogg 1955. The City has announced that it would like to demolish this modernist gem with its smoothly curving blue black granite screen in May 2011. This might be a place to show why the building is beautiful, what makes the place exceptional.

The building looks battered, but the meat of its shell is terrific. C. Howard Crane produced some of Detroit’s greatest buildings and theatres, including Orchestra Hall, what is now the Detroit Opera House, portions of the DIA, the State Theatre (now the Filmore), the beautiful but battered United Artists Theatre, and perhaps best of all, the Fox Theatre. His architecture firm continued as Crane, Kiehler and Kellogg who were involved in shaping this project with O’Dell, Hewlett and Luckenbach.

And typical of Detroit, the architecture was innovative, experimental and lushly crafted with expensive materials detailed with great care and expense. The Ford incorporates fine materials that would be financially impossible to duplicate today. The severely simple modernist form was softened with a curve that predicts the Danish modernist interest that would sweep America. Its smooth surfaces are ornamented by a blue-black granite screen imported from Sweden – the basket-woven stonework is a unique and subtly beautiful form. Interiors were ornamented with sculpture of nickel, aluminum, stainless steel and gilded brass by one of Detroit’s great artists, Marshall Fredericks, whose “Spirit of Detroit” sculpture is one of the city’s landmarks. And the cost of the building, roughly $4,500,000 incorporated a gift of $1,500,000 to the city by the Ford Family Fund, $1,000,000 from the National Association of Ford, Lincoln and Mercury Dealers and $2,400,000 financed by the City of Detroit – this total was an enormous amount of money in 1955.

The Ford was the embodiment of Eliel and Eero Saarinen's plan for the eastern end of Hart Plaza, mapped out in the late 1940's. This building in tandem with the Noguchi fountain and sculpture in that area of Hart Plaza anchors the plaza with an almost Danish modernist form. Brazilia is recognized for its cultural landscape of this type and Toronto's City Hall is similarly beloved for its strange fluidity.

Arguments for its demolition include references to the poor acoustics, the lack of a use, it being an eyesore within the context of the City's most vibrant square, Hart Plaza, the cost to maintain the unused structure, and the desire for an amphitheatre in that location. All of these arguments are valid, particularly within a city that has few extra resources to throw at yet another abandoned building.

But in considering a building of this caliber, it would be useful to think through other options for the site. The quality of built acoustics doesn’t really matter in auditoriums anymore. In Toronto, one of the spaces most renowned as being acoustically perfect is the Eaton Auditorium at the Carlu. Even this space was acoustically deadened with soft sound absorbent materials in the last renovation in order to accommodate current standards of digitally controlled sound. All buildings can now be made into well functioning acoustical instruments through buffering materials and sound systems that control the delivery, and the Ford Auditorium is no exception.

And a building is a flexible tool that could be altered to be repurposed - the alteration and reuse of this building would mean that whatever architectural value exists would still be part of the resources that Detroit has in its favour. The building does not have a use, but perhaps the building needs to radically change to accommodate a new use. As a large marble and granite box, it could be altered to repurpose the building, incorporating some or many of the character defining features into a new use. This could be as radical a change as demolishing a portion of the existing structure and incorporating the screen into a new structure, opening the roof and perhaps one side to the sky and plaza while weatherproofing the interior surfaces, or carving up the interior and opening the sides to allow for a completely different programme to occur. Completely demolishing the Ford would erase any potential it might have to add its finely crafted elements to the beauty of the city.

Culturally the building has great value to the people of Detroit. Malcolm X gave his last speech outside of New York here on the day his home in Queens had been firebombed, only a week before he was gunned down at the Audubon Ballroom in New York. This building was a gift from the family that became so wealthy because of the people of Detroit, in recognition of their hard labour in building this great city. This was the platform for a number of Martin Luther King Jr speeches, who first delivered his "I have a dream" speech next door – the later one that everyone remembers was just a repackaged version of the passionate delivery in Detroit. And however flawed the acoustics, the site hosted great concerts attended by everyone, even we your Canadian cousins across the way.

Detroit is at a tipping point right now. Despite the economic turmoil that the city has suffered through over the last few years, and the vast scale of demolitions that occurred in the past the city still retains enough of what made it architecturally great, an architectural powerhouse that led the nation in innovation and design. There are enough of these great but abandoned elements remaining in the city that could form the starting points in laying out schemes like improvements to the waterfront that would take Detroit to the next level, to show America how to rebuild from ashes incorporating the best of what already exists into a new better city.

But these architecturally great elements, with their fine materials, their exquisite craftsmanship and their histories, are a finite resource. With every Cooley High, every University Club, every Ford Auditorium that is scheduled to be demolished and replaced by a value engineered lower budget landscape, this potential is eroded. The city is moving in the right direction in trying to make its citizens safer and able to feel proud of their space. But in a time of fiscal constraint, perhaps some further consideration could be given to how to retain and incorporate the great elements that already exist, since there will be little money available to achieve those refined results in the present economic climate. This and the other great buildings of Detroit are a large part of what makes the city unique and memorable, and should be viewed as tools to assist in the reinvention process as part of what could make the place truly exceptional.

By O’Dell, Hewlett and Luckenbach, with Crane, Kiehler and Kellogg
1955