Detroit is the most written-about city in America, and most of the writing is wrong. The narrative of ruin and decline, of a great city destroyed by deindustrialization and white flight, is not false, but it is incomplete. It ignores the city that existed before the decline, the extraordinary concentration of architectural talent and civic ambition that produced the Detroit of the early twentieth century.
The Guardian Building, completed in 1929, is one of the great skyscrapers in American architectural history. Designed by Wirt Rowland, it is a masterpiece of Art Deco design, with a facade of Pewabic tile, Monel metal, and Mankato stone that is unlike anything else in the country. It is still standing, still occupied, and still magnificent.
The Ruins
The abandoned buildings of Detroit have attracted a genre of photography — ruin porn, its critics call it — that focuses on decay and neglect while ignoring the people who still live in the city. The Michigan Central Station, the Packard Plant, the Heidelberg Project — these are real places, and their abandonment is a real loss. But they are not the whole story.
Ruin photography tells the truth about what was lost. It lies about what remains.
The Michigan Central Station has been purchased by Ford Motor Company and is being restored as a technology campus. This is a complicated development — the restoration is genuine, but the transformation of a public building into a corporate campus raises questions about who the city is being rebuilt for. These are the questions that matter, and they are harder to photograph than ruins.