History

The Book family were among the handful of Detroit families who had accumulated significant capital before the automobile era and managed to multiply it in the automobile boom. Their real estate interests on Washington Boulevard and in the downtown core produced a series of commissions for Louis Kamper, a Detroit-born architect of Italian origin who had studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and built a practice in Michigan that ranged from private residences to commercial blocks. The Book Building (1917) occupied the southern portion of the site; the tower was the northern and final element of the Book family’s Washington Boulevard programme.

Kamper’s design for the tower occupies an interesting moment in the history of American skyscraper ornament: 1926 was late enough for the Déco geometric vocabulary to be visible in the upper setbacks and the simplified colonnade of the upper floors, but early enough for the neo-Gothic tradition — the gargoyles, the pointed arches, the foliated terra-cotta of the middle floors — to remain the dominant decorative register. The result is a building that reads differently at different heights: Gothic at the middle stories, increasingly abstract and Déco in the stepped upper crown.

The building operated as offices until 1981, when it closed and remained vacant for nearly four decades. Its emptiness made it a subject of the “ruin photography” that defined a particular genre of Detroit documentary in the 2000s and 2010s: the Book Tower appeared in countless architectural journals and photography books as a symbol of urban abandonment, its ornate limestone facade intact but its interiors progressively deteriorating. The acquisition by Bedrock Detroit — the same company that had taken on the Fisher Building — initiated a restoration that the Michigan Historic Preservation Office oversaw as one of the largest rehabilitation projects in the state’s history. The Roost Hotel opened in the building in 2022.