One Woodward Avenue

Before the World Trade Center, there was this. One Woodward — born as the Michigan Consolidated Gas Company Building — was Minoru Yamasaki’s very first skyscraper, opened in March 1963 as the first high-rise downtown Detroit had seen in nearly thirty years. Nearly everything that later defined the Twin Towers got its dress rehearsal here: the precast concrete and white marble skin, the Gothic-leaning tracery, and the famously narrow windows — roughly a foot wide — which Yamasaki, no fan of heights himself, designed so the building would soothe acrophobia rather than trigger it. The details are pure delight: lobby lights with blue spheres evoking the gas company’s flame, a Giacomo Manzù sculpture at the Jefferson entrance, and a boiler room banished to the top floors so parking could hide underground. Even the loggia floor plays along — white marble cut in hexagons, flowing uninterrupted from the outside colonnade straight into the lobby.

It towers over Hart Plaza at the foot of Woodward, and a skybridge still ties it to the Guardian Building next door — Art Deco and mid-century modern, holding hands over Larned Street. The loggia and marble lobby are the public’s peek.