History

The seven Fisher Brothers — Frederick, Charles, William, Alfred, Howard, Lawrence, and Edward — had founded the Fisher Body Company in 1908 to manufacture closed carriage bodies for the automobile industry. Their contracts with General Motors made them extraordinarily wealthy, and in 1919 General Motors acquired Fisher Body in a transaction that made the brothers among the richest men in the country. Their decision, in the mid-1920s, to commission a commercial building in Detroit worthy of their position produced one of the great private architectural commissions of the American Gilded Age’s last extension into the industrial era.

Albert Kahn — the Detroit architect who had built much of the industrial infrastructure of the American automobile industry, including GM’s factories and Ford’s River Rouge plant — was the natural choice for the commission. Kahn’s design for the Fisher Building brought to a commercial tower the same principles of structural rationality and programmatic clarity that defined his industrial work, but applied them in a context where material richness and ornamental elaboration were not only permitted but expected. The result was a building in which every surface visible to visitors — floors, walls, ceilings, door surrounds, elevator lobbies — was treated as an occasion for applied art.

The Fisher Building opened in 1928 to immediate recognition as one of the finest commercial buildings in the United States. It anchored the New Center development north of downtown Detroit, which the Fisher Brothers and General Motors conceived as a second commercial district for the city. The building’s National Historic Landmark designation, achieved in recognition of both its architectural merit and its importance to Detroit’s cultural heritage, reflects a consensus that persists in the twenty-first century: the Fisher Building remains the most complete surviving expression of Art Deco civic aspiration in the American Midwest.