Prentis Building (Wayne State)

The Prentis Building is the quiet workhorse of Yamasaki’s Wayne State quartet — opened in January 1964 as the home of the university’s booming business school, and now on the National Register of Historic Places. Its best trick is generosity: Yamasaki lifted the building onto slender columns and cut a grand, arcaded passageway straight through the ground floor, deliberately framing the view of the University Auditorium floating in its courtyard beyond — the two buildings were designed as a pair, built simultaneously, and are still connected by an underground tunnel. Walk through the arcade from Cass Avenue and the campus unfolds exactly the way he choreographed it, all “serenity, surprise and delight,” as he put it.

It sits directly across Cass from the Detroit Public Library, at the exact seam where campus meets the city’s cultural district — which is no accident either; Yamasaki drew Wayne State’s whole 1958 master plan. The university’s current plans lean into it, too — the Prentis is slated to become more of a community-facing gateway, opening this corner of campus to the public the way its architect always intended. On our list as the opening stop of the campus’s Yamasaki walk.