Renaissance Center / Has it lived up to it's promise ? what can be learned moving on

Hello all !

I thought this would be interesting to the forum .

If this has been addressed please feel free to add to the other thread .

I was doing some research on hipsters in Detroit and came across this interesting video on the Renaissance Center.
http://www.deadlinedetroit.com/artic...me=renaissance

And wonder , " Has the Renaissance Center lived up to it's promise ? and moving on what can be learned from and how should the city move on to Detroit's "new" Renaissance?
I have my ideas .

No doubt the Renaissance Center is an iconic building and is a important part of the city's fabric .
I think a lot of smaller great projects are the take away from this project .
any thoughts ?

I don't know if Fabric is the term I would use for it. It was originally a fortress designed to keep people out. Fabric connotates that it is woven into the City's fibres. If this was true, it would have been placed on Kern Block where Compuware now stands. Certainly having all of those jobs next to Hudson's and at the convergence of several bus lines would have done more to keep the retail climate downtown and the neighborhoods along Woodward, Gratiot, Michigan, and Grand River stablized.

That being said, it is worlds better than it was before. Starting with the addition of the Millender Bridge other links were established including the People Mover, and the Riverwalk. GM was a lifesaver for this place. It gave it the atrium and tore down the walls. It also wanted to take apart the blocks of parking to the East and establish that as housing and other uses, but that never came to fruition [[no doubt due to the public outcry over providing access through the I-375/Jefferson interchange).

As I mentioned earlier today on the Model Cities thread it is easy to look at this 20-30 years later and see the effects and postulate what would have happened.

I always thought the Rencen as being isolated from the rest of downtown. Then once you do cross 10 lanes of traffic, getting turned around and lost always made it ridiculous to navigate, especially if you were late or cutting it close to, say a movie, or worse an appointment. If you wanna really get someone lost, give them directions to either the RenCen or Joe Louis.

It's also isolated in another facet: parking. I was always one of those kids who ran around downtown on days off from school, weekends, etc. and parked for free because I had a few secret spots, and enjoyed [[gasp) walking. Walking, eating around Greektown, going to the Anchor, running into the Guardian lobby. Random shit I still enjoy. The Renaissance Center was out of the way, damn near blocked from the street view, and required effort.

Removing the berms out in front made the center more pleasing from Jefferson, and the Wintergarden has benefited exponentially from the riverfront being open to pedestrians, all of which was 30 years too late for me. It's still off of my radar, unless I'm on the Riverwalk, but even from Hart Plaza, it just never registers.

I agree GM has definitely done about as much as could be expected with this beautiful eyesore. Just having a food court and the car displays on the lower level gives visitors something to do on their way through to the riverwalk. I don't know how they expected the Wintergarden to lease those spaces with all the same location/parking/pedestrian traffic problems still apparent. Every time I'm there I think how bizarre these huge empty atrium spaces were to design just at the time the world was starting to worry about energy conservation.

The Real question is-what did GM DO with it's Old headquarters building?? THAT is some beautiful art deco

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Originally Posted by drpoundsign

The Real question is-what did GM DO with it's Old headquarters building?? THAT is some beautiful art deco

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Much of the complex has been repurposed thanks to the State of Michigan and CCS. Unfortunately in the game of musical chairs, I mean buildings it meant closing the State offices on 6th Street and at the corner of Woodward and the Blvd.

I think the design absolutely sucks, and represents the nadir of urban planning philosophy.

That said, I think GM has done an excellent job for what they've been given.

the ren cen is awful. why they decided to put it on the river front I do not know

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Originally Posted by Bham1982

I think the design absolutely sucks, and represents the nadir of urban planning philosophy.

That said, I think GM has done an excellent job for what they've been given.

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Spot on.

The original idea of the Ren Cen, so far as one can tell from the result, was to allow people to technically be in downtown Detroit without having to interact in any way with downtown Detroit.

In general, superblock projects utterly suck in downtowns of cities. There are rare exceptions. Downtown ought to be a place that, once you're there, you can walk to any kind of place you might want to visit. When you cut off areas from other areas with these massive, monolithic developments, you just suck the life out of the whole area.

It is what it is. It hasn't lived up to its promise because the promise was to save downtown which it didn't do.

Its impact on downtown is mixed. It sniped tenants from prewar buildings and without the ren cen more would have survived. On the other hand, it added higher quality office space and I do think that a lot of tenants would have moved to better buildings anyway, and I think the ren cen did provide a better alternative to suburban offices.

As far as urbanism issues go, I don't blame the ren cen too much. What was built was the 4 office towers, the hotel tower, and then the 2 smaller office towers to the east. The intention was to build 8 of those small office towers [[4 on each side. the tunnel would have been capped), and then the entire riverfront side of the complex would have been apartments. The roofs of the bases would be pedestrian areas, which is why beaubien in particular is so utilitarian. I think at that scale the ren cen would have had the critical mass to be its own neighborhood.

For too many years it was the only new construction in the Downtown and became what other States could relate as Detroit!

One of those towers once had a patio on top of it. I use to go on it with my girlfriend back in the 80s. What was the plan for the Wintergarden? Was it designed for retail on all levels and dining in the bottom middle such as a MarketPlace? How much of that complex is actually occupied by GM?

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Originally Posted by stasu1213

How much of that complex is actually occupied by GM?

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better to ask "GM and their suppliers and associates", because they beat Gilbert to the game of filling their available space with friendly co-horts who couldn't afford to say no, since they were in deep with the land-holder

that would be a great study...surely the occupancy of both the RenCen and all of Gilbert's buildings increased the overall average of downtown, but how much is parasitic versus productive, independent of the host.

GM famously forced all their biggest suppliers to open at least a small office in the RenCen in order to keep the company's travel costs down...which obviously could only work for the largest of corporations, but it was freaky how they threw their weight around on this. I guess teleconferencing just isn't enough!

This 'ancillary' use of space bumps the percentage of filled floorspace...but is the most fragile portion of the increase. The moment non-government leadership of GM notices that they are ultimately paying their suppliers to lease the space for a measure of convenience...I'd expect the practice to cease.

Some of the other 'loftier' plans for the reorganization of the executive suites seems to have been filed circularly...and I was looking forward to seeing how that would've upset global corporate structure.

GM would do well to fund their own technology initiative to compete and co-operate with the Gilbert initiatives...forget the term coined to use these forces together for economic growth, it might've been "co-opetition"...and fill every odd corner of the RenCen with geeks they can mine for ideas in the future. Add to the tech momentum in town! Talk about yer Renaissance...

LOL... Gannon... leave it to you to come up with a conspiracy theory about something as mundane as filling office space....

Most here on this forum don't care if suppliers and ancillary business owners had to be put onto the rack and tortured, in order to get them to relocate downtown! :)

I know, and you'd be one of the first to boast about the statistics improving...all I'm saying is there is a bit of a bubble in Class-A occupancies!

Don't be so quick to dismiss fringe thinking...LOL...