History

Detroit in 1928 was the fourth-largest city in the United States and the center of the global automobile industry. Ford, General Motors, and Chrysler — the Big Three that dominated world automotive production — were all headquartered in the Detroit metropolitan area, and the banks that financed them were competing for the identity of the city’s dominant financial institution. Union Trust Company, one of the city’s largest banks, commissioned a new headquarters tower on Griswold Street that would visually assert its standing in the Detroit skyline. The commission went to Wirt C. Rowland, a senior designer at Smith, Hinchman & Grylls who had been developing an approach to Art Deco ornament centered on ceramic tile — specifically the handmade tiles of Pewabic Pottery and Rookwood Pottery — that had no precedent at skyscraper scale anywhere in America.

What Rowland built in 1928–1929 was the most ambitious use of ceramic tile as a primary architectural material in American skyscraper history. The exterior is clad in a polychrome combination of orange brick and blue-green, cream, and white Pewabic and Rookwood tiles that give the building a visual distinctiveness unmatched by any contemporaneous tower. The three-story banking hall in the lobby continues the ceramic program into the interior with a vaulted ceiling surfaced entirely in Pewabic tile — the largest single Pewabic tile commission ever executed — while the banking hall’s hand-painted canvas ceiling, murals by New York artist Ezra Winter, and entrance Tiffany clock complete an interior that the critics immediately recognized as something without precedent in American commercial architecture. The building opened in 1929, the year of the stock market crash; Union Trust merged to become Union Guardian Trust, and eventually the renamed Guardian Detroit Bank gave the building its permanent name.