University Auditorium (formerly DeRoy Auditorium)

University Auditorium — known for six decades as the Helen L. DeRoy Auditorium before a 2025 renaming — is Minoru Yamasaki’s last and most sculptural contribution to Wayne State’s campus, completed in 1964 alongside the adjacent Prentis Building. Yamasaki was already famous by the time he designed it, juggling this commission alongside the U.S. Science Pavilion for Seattle’s 1962 World’s Fair and, soon after, the World Trade Center.

The building itself is nearly windowless, wrapped in gray cast-concrete panels with vertical ribs that deepen as they rise and terminate in pointed Gothic arches — a striking contrast to the boxy Prentis Building next door, connected underground by a short tunnel. It originally sat inside a shallow, moat-like reflecting pool with its two entrances built to resemble bridges, echoing the same water-as-design-element approach Yamasaki used at McGregor a few years earlier.

On our radar for the most unusual single building in Yamasaki’s Wayne State cluster, or for seeing the design instincts that would later show up, at a much larger scale, in his most famous skyscraper.