Detroit
Skidmore Owings & Merrill

SOM’s radical renovation in Detroit, the G.M Renaissance Center, raises hopes for John Portman’s famous icon of the 1970s

	Photo © Justin Maconochie

Age-related maladies account for a lot of renovations after 25 or so years. These only partly explain why Skidmore, Owings & Merrill’s Chicago office undertook a radical makeover of John Portman’s Renaissance Center (RenCen), which opened in 1977. Ironically, much of SOM’s work on the office, hotel, and retail complex corrected serious urbanistic and architectural flaws already recognized when the $337 million complex was brand-new. Bruce Wright, an architect and writer, pointed out these problems in 1978 in Progressive Architecture: The mixed-use complex was divorced from the city by its placement on a 14-acre concrete podium between the 10-lane Jefferson Avenue and the Detroit River. Two large concrete berms containing HVAC equipment further blockaded it from Jefferson Avenue and the rest of downtown. Elevated roads girdled the complex on the east, west, and south. Inside, the visitors got lost among a disorienting array of ramps, escalators, and elevators created by a repetitive circular geometry of the poured-in-place concrete atrium and hotel. Views of the water were obstructed from inside the atrium: Only by taking the glass elevator up the outside of the hotel shaft to the revolving restaurant could visitors be fully aware of the Detroit River.

These criticisms didn’t seem to worry city boosters at the time. However, by the 1980s, optimism about the ability of this icon of possibilities to revive downtown had palled, and RenCen was no longer hailed as the poster child of urban salvation. Portman’s project hadn’t been able to stanch the flow of the middle classes to the suburbs in the 1970s and ’80s, which left an eroded tax base downtown. Meanwhile, the Detroit auto industry suffered from severe competition from Japan, and layoffs proceeded at a massive rate. As John Gallagher, an architecture critic, has noted, Detroit in the 1980s was clearly a “Rust Belt City in decline.” Hotels and department stores began to close, leaving RenCen, which had absorbed most of the office demand downtown, marooned on the river—an inward-turning fortress with no connection to the real city all around it.

By the time General Motors bought the complex in 1996 and hired SOM/Chicago, headed by consulting design partner Adrian Smith, to address its problems, Smith’s list of ills far exceeded those Wright had detailed. By then, Detroit’s people mover skimmed by the complex, but its elevated light-rail lines, installed in 1987 along Jefferson Avenue, obscured the main entrance. The ring office towers, numbered 100 to 400—which G.M. planned to occupy—were not directly connected to each other, and access to the office towers through the shopping mall was hard for business visitors to navigate.

Naturally, age added to the slew of problems. The glass-fiber-reinforced concrete had not weathered well; it was already falling off in places. A 1988 remodeling of the entrance by SmithGroup now looked dated. Between 1996 and 2004, SOM made major alterations to the building, while RenCen continued to operate as a hotel and office complex. “It’s like rewiring a 747 while you’re flying it,” says Matthew Cullen, the general manager of economic development and enterprise services for G.M.

Who knows the future of RenCen’s renovation and G.M.’s involvement? Nevertheless, the drastic changes have definitely improved the building and its linkage to the city. (It’s too bad the speedy approval process in 1972 ignored the obvious flaws that finally were addressed.) SOM’s interventions—such as the entrance pavilion, the lobby, the glass circulation ring, and the Cesar Pelli-ish Wintergarden—do make RenCen noticeably more welcoming, if a bit eclectic stylistically. Yet the ungainly exterior walls of the complex and (now dingy) interior concrete remain, along with the irksomeness of not being able to cross the atrium space in a straight line. The basic DNA is the same, and you still feel as if you are wandering through a Piranesian parking garage. Perhaps another $500 million could fix that.

Want the full story? Read the entire article in our February 2006 issue.
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the People Owner Riverfront Holdings, Inc. Architect Skidmore Owings & Merrill LLP 224 South Michigan Avenue Chicago, Illinois 60604 Ph. (312) 554-9090 Fax (312) 360-4545 www.som.com Design Partner: Adrian D. Smith, FAIA Partners: Richard F. Tomlinson, FAIA, Thomas P. Kerwin, AIA Partner in charge of urban design & planning: Philip Enquist, FAIA Design Team: William N. Larson, FAIA, Anwar Hakim, AIA, Jonathan Orlove, AIA, Timothy A. Poell, AIA, NCARB, Todd D. Halamka, AIA Project Team: Donald M. Stark, AIA, Eric Zachrison, RA, Lin Kim, Jorge Soler, Douglas J. Voigt, AICP, Toni L. Griffin, AIA, Si Wu, J.T. Hsu, G. Beard Interior designer Skidmore Owings & Merrill LLP Jaime Velez, IIDA, NCIDQ, Principal, Nada Andric, Donna M. Palicka, Daniel Bell www.som.com BBGM (Hotel) www.bbg-bbgm Engineer(s) Structural and Civil: Skidmore Owings & Merrill LLP William F. Baker, P.E., S.E., Partner, Stan Korista, Charles Besjak AIA, S.E., P.E., John Viise, P.E., S.E., Al Khoshaba, S.E., Dane Rankin, P.E., S.E., James Pawlikowski, P.E., Andrew Murray, P.E., S.E., Wilfred Yang, P.E., Mike Fink, P.E. MEP and Fire Protection: Skidmore Owings & Merrill LLP Raymond J. Clark, P.E., Consulting Partner, Gil DiIorio, P.E., Philip Sawyer, P.E., Luke Leung, P.E., Stefanos Peroustianis, Marion Wnuk, P.E., J. Roukis, Bob Blohm, R. Brunet BEI (Hotel) www.bei-us.com Consultant(s) Landscape: Hamilton Anderson www.hamilton-anderson.com Lighting: Fisher Marantz Stone www.fmsp.com Acoustical: – Shiner + Associates www.shineracoustics.com – Shen Milsom Wilke www.smwinc.com Security: Sako www.rjagroup.com/sako/ Code/Life Safety: The RJA Group, Inc. www.rjagroup.com Transportation/Guideway: Gannett Fleming www.gannettfleming.com Signage and Wayfinding: The Douglas Group Gannett Fleming Vertical Transportation: Persohn/Hahn Associates, Inc. www.phahou.com Food Service: Thomas Ricca & Assoc. General contractor Turner www.turnerconstruction.com Photographer(s) Justin Maconochie (248) 547-7383 Renderer(s) Michael McCann Associates Limited

the Products Wintergarden: MERO Structures, Inc. Circulation Ring: MERO Structures, Inc. Entrance Pavilion: MERO Structures, Inc. www.mero.com Glass Sculpture: – Contractor: Haran Glass www.haranglass.com – Artist: Danny Lane www.dannylane.co.uk