Have you ever walked into a skyscraper lobby and felt transported? Felt like you've traveled back in time, or across the oceans to somewhere else? That's probably intentional as modern skyscrapers have much more in common with medieval cathedrals than you might ordinarily think. This is particularly true in - of all places - Detroit, Michigan.
The 1920s witnessed a building boom in Detroit, spurred by the rapidly expanding auto industry. The city was awash with cash and its population swelled - growing from about 466,000 people in 1910 to nearly 1.6 million just 20 years later. The city's downtown groaned under the strain and new spaces were needed to accommodate the city's workers. So, as they did in other cities at the same time, they built upwards.
Albert Kahn is one of the best-known names among those architects, and rightfully so. His influence can still be felt across the city, having designed the River Rouge Ford manufacturing complex, the magnificent Fisher building and the Detroit Free Press building, among many others. But he's most important to understanding "medieval" Detroit because of those he patronized and supported - specifically the sculptor Corrado Parducci, and architect Wirt C. Rowland.
Parducci was born in Italy but moved to New York with his father when quite young. His talent for sculpture was spotted early and by 1924 he was persuaded by Kahn to move to Detroit permanently to continue their collaboration. Rowland followed much the same path. At 19, he found a job in Kahn's architectural firm but rose to become the firm's chief designer by 1918. But Rowland had left Kahn's firm by 1922 because he felt constrained by Kahn's style, which (Rowland thought) looked backwards rather than forwards.
In 1975, in an interview with the Smithsonian, Parducci would recall:
"I liked Wirt Rowland [best] because Wirt Rowland, he reached out, rather than looking back, you know. A lot of architects, their work... referred to something. Well, Wirt Rowland was departing... and he was a revolutionary in his ideas and his effort."
What's really interesting here is that Rowland wanted to to do something new and he did so by looking to the Middle Ages.
The new book by Michael G. Smith, Designing Detroit: Wirt Rowland and the Rise of Modern American Architecture does an excellent job of uncovering what Rowland was trying to do. In a piece written for the Detroit News after the opening of the Guardian building in 1929, Rowland himself explained his preference for the medieval because that period understood how the arts - architecture, music, etc. - could express ideas in ways that words couldn't.
The point with Rowlands' skyscrapers, ornamented extensively by Parducci, was to feel. The sheer size of the building awed you with its presence, but his insistence on color, as well as the prominent use of sculpture throughout ensured that you knew that something was different inside than it was outside.
And that's precisely how churches - particularly those constructed in the European Middle Ages - worked. By passing through its entryway, past its sculpted elements, under its arches and expansive height, through its imposing doors, you entered into another world. You entered into sacred space, a space closer to God and one fundamentally different from the one you left.
This transition wasn't conveyed by text. It was through art. It was through visual cues. You felt it.
Certainly, Rowland wasn't trying to say that his skyscrapers were sacred spaces (even if his Guardian building has been called a "cathedral of finance"). Still, even today in the middle of a now bustling downtown Detroit, as you pass that threshold and enter one of Rowland's designs, you pause, you look, you feel and you understand.
And you do these things because Rowland knew that nostalgia would work for him. He was counting on his audience's minds connecting past and present, seeing the new grafted onto the old and feeling comforted and secure. This "new/ different" thing (skyscraper) reminds me of this "old/ familiar" thing (church).
Rowland was working at a moment when nostalgia for the Middle Ages was particularly powerful in the United States. In addition to Rowland's work, the Medieval Academy of America was founded in 1925 and the 2nd incarnation of the KKK began to flourish with its pseudo-chivalric imagery. In fact, the pull of the Middle Ages was so powerful at this time that some rich individuals bought and literally moved several medieval buildings across the Atlantic to American shores.
But what's important here is to realize that, in all these instances, nostalgia is more about the future than the past. As Parducci said, Rowland used the Middle Ages as a point of departure, to do something new. For him, the medieval didn't conjure the "dark ages" and something to escape from; instead, medieval arts and humanities were the foundation on which to build a modern America.
