When the Roman Empire fell, their ruins remained. Time passed, and by the middle ages, people lived among them, sometimes even within them. They didn’t remember who built them, but they knew that they couldn’t build things like that anymore. Wood and straw huts stood inside the Coliseum.
Modern Detroit often feels that way, and the iconic art deco Guardian Building is the perfect example. Despite all of our technological advances, we live in the ruins of a greater civilization.
Yes, the building still stands. It’s not derelict and filled with sheep just yet. A flurry of esteemed tenants still occupies it, including Wayne County’s own executives and the Detroit Transportation Corporation. It isn’t quite a ruin.
Not literally, at least—but the current interior design of the building is a travesty. The poverty of our aesthetic sensibilities weigh down this grand old building.
The entrance hall, vaulted with Pewabic tiles to the roof, with the famed tiled glass and Monel metal clock, has old vending machines and a convenience store sticking out like a sore thumb in the corner. Corporate logos are stamped lower on the metal face of the clock’s metal wall, signs leading to the banking hall, which they now call the “retail promenade.”
The hall is incredibly ornate, like the rest of the building. It is tiled decoratively all the way up to the canvas ceiling, which has horsehair matted behind it to deaden the noise from the hundreds of bankers in the old days.
A mural of the state of Michigan covers the rear wall, emblazoned with sigils for its major industries: manufacturing, commerce, fishing, mining, timbering, and agriculture. These built the state in that era, and still do today.
It’s ironic, considering the building is now owned by the Wayne County government, and not commercial interests.
Inside the glorious banking hall you’ll find cheap plywood office furniture and tables, fake plants, gaudy shops and stalls, and glass cubicles. Novelty t-shirt shops, a coffee stand, a mexican food joint. Items and venues that belong in a cheap coffee shop or a strip mall food court.
It feels like a barnyard, compared to the elegance of the surroundings. It might as well be sheep living in the coliseum.
A hall built for bankers in three piece suits, with top hats, working from elaborate wooden desks with those iconic green lamps, is now a bunch of kitschy shops and cheap furniture.
The reality is, cheap cuisine and convenience stores all serve an important function. This isn’t an indictment of them. It’s an indictment of our modern societal priorities which have vanquished grandeur and replaced it with functional banality.
You see, grandeur requires that you stake your claim in reality, that you unashamedly stand for something. Our architecture reflects this. The Guardian Building reflects the values of its era.
The mural in the lobby, laid down by the building’s original owners, reads: “Founded on principles of faith and understating, this building is erected for the purpose of continuing and maintaining the ideals of financial services which promoted the organization of the institution”.
It was built to be a place of high commerce, laid down at the center of the financial district of one of the wealthiest cities in the world. It’s formed of solid brick, tile, metal alloys. It proudly exists. Even in its current humiliation, the aura of the building far exceeds that of modernity around it.
Compare that to Hudson’s Detroit, the city’s newest skyscraper complex. All airy reflective glass with the metal superstructure hidden away. It’s a building that isn’t a building at all, lighter than air, shining light back at you.
Modern architecture almost wishes it didn’t exist. The same is true of the businesses. Professionals once strutted boldly and proudly in grand brick halls. Now they are hidden away in mirrored office towers typing away at keyboards, eyes blearily staring at screens.
The bankers of old would have loved Microsoft Excel. Our society now is more technologically advanced than it was a century ago, and few among us would give that up to return to the old ways.
Technological advance, however, is but one metric we can use to measure the progress of a society. Aesthetic sensibility, beauty, grandeur—all of these are important too. What we’ve gained in our pursuit of technics, we’ve lost in our visual forms.
Perhaps our collective retreat into our screens leads us to care less about the world around us. No matter the greatness of this old building, fill it with cheap office furniture. One chair is as good as another for scrolling your phone on.
Or, perhaps, we have the bureaucrats to blame. No one in the history of America has ever said a county government had a good sense of style and aesthetics.
In the end, all we can do is stop and admire the craftsmanship and care of a civilization that far exceeded ours. We can learn the lesson that life requires us to stake our claim in this world with boldness.
We don’t need to start building everything with brick again. We don’t need to return to the old ways to make things beautiful. We do, however, need to find our own voice, whatever it is.
As a society, we’re missing that symbolic language or aesthetic movement that will tell later generations who we were and what we valued. We need to find it, or our history will simply vanish in the mirrored reflections of our endless glass screens and skyscrapers.
Bobby Mars is art director of Michigan Enjoyer. Follow him on X @bobby_on_mars.
