MGM Grand Bets on Detroit
Luxury hotelier chooses the Motor City for its first city center hotel and casino

by Zach Mortice
Associate Editor

Summary: SmithGroup and Hamilton Anderson’s MGM Grand Detroit balances the need for eye-catching casino spectacle and staid and respectful architecture appropriate to an economically depressed Midwestern city by designing a Neo-Art Deco hotel tower that references Detroit’s history with clean detailing and polished vibrancy. The hotel and casino (which is MGM’s first hotel resort in any major city center) is just one project in the $1.5 billion gambling resort boom in Detroit, and a small part of the $15 billion reinvestment in the city’s downtown.

How do you . . . design a building whose programmatic needs are at odds with the popular aesthetic of its environment?

From the outset, the partnership between SmithGroup and Hamilton Anderson faced a paradox of great drama and consequence when designing the MGM Grand Detroit hotel and casino. The joint partnership of the two local Detroit firms wasn’t just concerned with fitting a large hotel and casino complex onto a downtown urban site. They were designing MGM Mirage’s first ever Las Vegas-style resort to be built in any city’s urban core—a 400-room, 1.1 million-square-foot, $800-million behemoth. And they weren’t building it in just any city. SmithGroup and Hamilton Anderson had to make this opulent luxury hotel find a cohesive balance with Detroit, a battered and impoverished city, more typically defined by blue collar grit and urban decay than Vegas spectacle.

“We put that paradox on the table right at the beginning,” says Tom Sherry, AIA, design principal with Hamilton Anderson. The solution the team came up with was a slick chrome and glass Neo-Art Deco 18-story hotel tower. The boomerang-shaped hotel is grounded in a pre-cast concrete base that simulates limestone and encompasses the sprawling casino complex. It’s sited in the northwest quadrant of downtown Detroit and faces the city center. “The Deco, early 20th century-style lines and detailing [bring] the energy and excitement of an entertainment property,” says Sherry.

Paul Tonti, AIA, of SmithGroup, says inspiration was drawn from Detroit’s early 20th century architectural character. “There is a significant amount of articulation and attention to detail on the façade,” he said in a press release. “This helps reduce the scale of the building at the presentation level as well as add a consistent overall aesthetic to the design.”

Sherry says MGM was sensitive to their site and sensibility dilemma, and were prepared to scale down their trademark Vegas Strip flamboyance enough to make the casino fit in a Midwestern downtown. “They were leading us and we were leading them,” he says. “Where we ended up was with something that does walk the line and is something that is not easily described. It’s not a theme building. It’s not a one-liner like a lot of the Vegas work.”

Rapid rise
Though the hotel tower is the complex’s signature element, it’s a small part of its total 25-acre footprint, which contains three restaurants, a high-end spa, and five night clubs that feature patron-generated visual confections, like an upside down simulated pool of water that ripples and quivers in response to sound from the bar below. All of this called an army of landscape architects, interiors specialists, engineers, and designers to Detroit. All parties had to work together quickly. The project went from sketch to reality in 23 months.

“It was kind of like the start of a marathon,” says Sherry.

Detroit bellies up to the table
Temporary casinos came to Detroit in 1999 in the hopes that the revenue they generated might fill the city’s empty coffers, and John Carroll, the director of the Detroit Regional Economic Partnership, says so far they have been a profitable investment for the city. Though it may not be able to compete with Las Vegas as a gaming destination, Carroll says the MGM Grand Detroit can pull in visitors from across the state and the Midwest.

The casino is just one stream among rivers of money that have been flowing back into downtown. Over the past decade, the central business district has absorbed more than $15 billion in investment money, according to the Hartford Courant. The recent construction of two large sports stadiums downtown are part of this revival, as was General Motors sentimental move to downtown in 1996.

The MGM Grand Detroit isn’t the only resort-style hotel casino coming to town. Detroit is already the nation’s fifth largest gambling market, and $1.5 billion are being spent to bring two more casinos on line, according to the Associated Press. The MotorCity Casino Hotel markets itself as “Detroit’s first high-performance casino” and has embraced the city’s automotive history with enthusiastic kitsch—light fixtures shaped like hubcaps and wall covering that resemble 1950s-style car upholstery.

Whose hotel is it?
Rooms at the MGM Grand Detroit start at $299 a night. An 80-minute massage at the spa is $210. With these prices, out-of-towners will be more than vital, since one third of Detroit’s population lives at or below the poverty level. Did MGM Mirage ever consider the social question of building an $800 million hotel resort in a community reeling from deindustrialization? We don’t know: they didn’t respond to repeated interview requests.

For his part, Carroll is glad for the tax revenue and 1,000 new jobs the development will create. “If [MGM] didn’t do it here, they would do it somewhere else,” he says.