211 West Fort Street is a skyscraper in Detroit, Michigan. Standing at 27 stories, construction began in 1961 and it was occupied in 1963. The building stands at the southeast corner of Fort Street and Washington Boulevard. It was constructed adjacent to the Detroit Trust Company Building, designed by Albert Kahn in 1915, as offices for the Detroit Bank and Trust Company, later known as Comerica. The bank occupied space in the building until 1993, when it moved to One Detroit Center. In the courtyard between the two buildings is a sculpture based on the bank's logo at the time.
The building is designed in the international style, with dark-tinted windows set into precast concrete frames. The frames project from the facade giving the building a distinctive grid pattern. Mechanical equipment is located on floors 8 and 27th floors. Floor 27 is double-height and enclosed by a wall recessed from the grid to create a colonnade which is illuminated at night. The building's address "211" is displayed along the roof line. This replaced earlier signs for Detroit Bank and Trust and Comerica. On the eighth floor, louvers replace glass in the concrete frames giving a uniform appearance to the facade from floors 2 through 26.
The two-story lobby is enclosed by glass and is recessed on the north and west sides allowing for a covered arcade on two sides. Elevator banks and other interior walls are covered by black granite and floors are travertine. The site slopes from north to south allowing for a service entrance and parking garage at street level facing Congress Street.
The building currently houses offices for the Detroit Economic Club, Bankruptcy Court of the Eastern District of Michigan, the United States Attorney and several other tenants.
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211 West Fort Street, as seen from Windsor, between the Westin Book-Cadillac Hotel, on the left, and David Stott Building, on the right. Cobo Center and the Marquette Building are in the foreground.
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Sculpture and entrance plaza
Famous quotes containing the words west, fort and/or street:
“You in the West have a problem. You are unsure when you are being lied to, when you are being tricked. We do not suffer from this; and unlike you, we have acquired the skill of reading between the lines.”
—Zdenek Urbának (b. 1917)
“She was beautiful when she died—a hundred years ago.”
—Garrett Fort (1900–1945)
“If the street life, not the Whitechapel street life, but that of the common but so-called respectable part of town is in any city more gloomy, more ugly, more grimy, more cruel than in London, I certainly don’t care to see it. Sometimes it occurs to one that possibly all the failures of this generation, the world over, have been suddenly swept into London, for the streets are a restless, breathing, malodorous pageant of the seedy of all nations.”
—Willa Cather (1876–1947)