Requiem for Detroit's Fugliest Building

[Lowell]

Everyone has his or her ugliest building nominee and this one was mine. The DPS building on the SE corner of Baltimore and Third had all the charm of a Soviet era apartment block. It’s fortressed first floor walled it off from pedestrian contact and its boring upper floors were not worthy of a yawn.

Behold the offspring of the Albert Kahn Detroit factory style via the Gospel according to Bauhaus that retangularized the world's urban face in the 20th Century.


One of the issues of modernist-no-longer-modern architecture is that it served as a convenient cover for going cheap on the aesthetics of buildings -- no carved stone gargoyles or archways. Just assemble a stoic box of repeating rectangles with the least amount of details with the cheapest materials and, presto, you had an in-style flashy new building.

Yes, I understand the aesthetics of minimalism, that totality conveys a beauty of its own, but it didn't in this case.

Today they litter the landscape and, with their fad long gone, they are monuments to blandness. If I were making a film about despair and alienation, the DPS building would surely provide the backdrop.

Birth of the Modern. Kahn's Packard Plant in Detroit -- unwitting father of my late ugliest buidling choice? The old man hobbles on into his 102nd year.