Architect
Wirt C. Rowland, architect of the Penobscot Building, Guardian Building, and the Buhl Building was born and raised in Clinton, Michigan. In 1901, he landed a job as an office boy for the Detroit firm of Rogers & MacFarlane, quickly moving on to the prestigious George D. Mason firm. In 1909, he joined the office of Albert Kahn, who had also apprenticed under Mason. In 1910, with the encouragement of both Mason and Kahn, Rowland attended the Harvard Graduate School of Design in Cambridge, MA for a year.
The combination of Rowland's natural design talent, Harvard education, and Detroit's healthy economy positioned him to make major contributions to the city's architecture. Rowland is a case study in design attribution. In 1911, in the office of Kahn, he and Ernest Wilby are said have been primarily responsible for the Hill Auditorium at the University of Michigan. Through 1915 Rowland worked for the local firm of Malcomson & Higginbotham. He then returned to Kahn's office, contributing to the firm's classic projects, namely the Hatcher Graduate Library at the University of Michigan, the Detroit News Building, the First National Building (1922), and the General Motors Building (1922) renamed Cadillac Place.
Rowland's career peaked as Head Designer (1922–1930) of Smith Hinchman & Grylls (SmithGroup). There, he designed a dozen major structures in downtown Detroit; among these, are a number of the city's most accomplished and evocative buildings. To a large extent, Rowland helped define Detroit's architectural genre. For the Guardian Building, he had assembled a multitude of artisans, mosaicists, sculptors, painters, and tile manufacturers including Corrado Parducci, muralist Ezra Winter, and tile from the Rookwood and Pewabic pottery companies. He thus recreated the architectural synthesis of a medieval cathedral. Hence, Rowland had reached a climax, when his Union Trust/Guardian Building became known as "the Cathedral of Finance."
The Guardian Building opened in 1930. With the onset of the Great Depression, Rowland was laid off from Smith Hinchman & Grylls so formed his own office where his work decreased to a small number of churches, schools, and construction projects. Late in life, he returned to a purer, Gothic idiom for his last few projects, notably the Kirk in the Hills church which was finished after he died in 1946. During World War II, the Guardian Building would serve as headquarters for war time production when Detroit was called, the "Arsenal of Democracy."
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Famous quotes containing the word architect:
“An architect should live as little in cities as a painter. Send him to our hills, and let him study there what nature understands by a buttress, and what by a dome.”
—John Ruskin (1819–1900)
“... there is no way of measuring the damage to a society when a whole texture of humanity is kept from realizing its own power, when the woman architect who might have reinvented our cities sits barely literate in a semilegal sweatshop on the Texas- Mexican border, when women who should be founding colleges must work their entire lives as domestics ...”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“Some violent bitter man, some powerful man
Called architect and artist in, that they,
Bitter and violent men, might rear in stone
The sweetness that all longed for night and day,
The gentleness none there had ever known....”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)