The story of the Hart Plaza pylon
And what Hart Plaza and the doomed Kmart HQ have in common
Hart Plaza, designed by Isamu Noguchi in the early 1970s, is Detroit heritage. But it began as an aggressively modern work, a monument to the future.
Noguchi won a bid in 1971 to create a $2 million fountain as a memorial to automotive baron Horace Dodge, 40 years dead by this time. It was a lot of money and Noguchi wanted to make something worthy of it, but he ignored the family’s wishes to build a replica of a classical-style fountain in Barcelona.
Instead, he made a weird, wonderful, very space-age marvel of modern technology, inspired by car engines but also jets and rockets. It was three years after the Moon landing, six years before the launch of the Voyager probes. Noguchi did some of his own coding for the computer programming that ran the fountain’s light and water shows. I couldn’t stop talking about this when I was working on this recent history of the Dodge Fountain for The Detroit News. Why has this thing been broken for so long? What will it take to get it started again? Don’t you people know that Noguchi did his own computer programming????
A control panel in the Dodge Fountain pump room, less space age than I’d imagined.
It took about a decade for this fountain to be built, in part because the scope of the project expanded early on to include the entire plaza, which is why we have Hart Plaza. Terrific for us. But Noguchi knew that some people were going to be impatient to see progress on the site.
So Noguchi gave the city a little nudge, in the form of an additional sculptural feature of the plaza, a twisting 120-foot tower of aluminum and steel, a visual marker for the city's threshold. It was the first element of the plaza to be completed — Noguchi’s way of “getting things going,” he said later.
Noguchi described the pylon as “a basic thing … It’s so basic it’s beyond design,” and compared it to “the spiral of life, the double helix on which all life is based.”
A personal plea to the Detroit Parks and Recreation Department: This is too many trash cans.
Mayor Coleman Young, at the pylon's dedication on Aug. 28, 1974, called it a “symbol of the city’s forward movement” and “another evidence of the vitality of our city.” But that was true of the entire plaza project and the whole Civic Center — the Renaissance Center, most obviously, but also the modernist buildings along Jefferson Avenue and the lately renamed Huntington Place. (I’ve somehow gotten over calling it Cobo, but am not over calling it TCF Center?)
The fountain did become, at least briefly, an icon of the city’s optimism. Before it was even built, it was adopted as the logo of the city’s bicentennial celebrations. I love this thing:
But the pylon has never really been an icon of Detroit. Maybe that’s a testament to the graceful, elemental design — you kind of forget it's there. I try to take it in, now, when I see it.
A footnote: At the pylon ceremony, a memorial to Robert F. Hastings was mounted on the base of the pylon. Hastings was an architect and engineer who had spent his entire career with Detroit-based Smith, Hinchman & Grylls, becoming its president in 1960. Hastings expanded the firm, opening offices in Toronto and Buenos Aires, and reinvigorated the sometimes stodgy ways of doing business in architecture offices at the time, reorganizing departments and relocating the firm’s headquarters into a wildly reimagined warehouse building downtown (at a time, no less, when many Detroit-based firms were relocating to the suburbs). He, too, loved computers!
Hastings had chaired the all-star committee that had selected Noguchi’s concept for the plaza, and Smith Hinchman & Grylls was the local firm of record on the project. But he didn’t live to see the plaza finished: He died in December, 1973, on the sidewalk outside of his office, of a heart attack, at 59 years old.
The First Federal Building, or maybe you know it as 1001 Woodward, in Detroit.
Smith, Hinchman & Grylls projects of the Hastings era include some of metro Detroit’s most notable works of modern design, including the GM Technical Center in Warren (1956), the First Federal Building in downtown Detroit (1963) and — one of my personal faves — the absolutely goliath Kmart Headquarters campus in Troy (1969), now doomed. (Back when I was at Crain’s, I wrote about what happened to all of the art that used to be there.)
A historical marker for the S.S. Kresge Company peeks out behind the demolition fencing at the old Kmart HQ in Troy. What will happen to it? And all the beautiful trees on this campus? I imagine this will be my last look at this building before it’s torn down. Farewell sweet enormous prince.
Upcoming events
October 8: I’m leading Preservation Detroit’s tour of Elmwood Cemetery, a fall tradition for I’ve lost count of how many years. More info and tickets here!
October 23: I’ll be giving a free talk about Hart Plaza and the Dodge Fountain at a virtual event hosted by the Jefferson Branch of the Detroit Public Library on October 23. You can RSVP here.