The Ren Center on the Detroit River is home to the headquarters of General Motors. It is composed of a massive cylindrical hotel tower surrounded by high-rise office buildings.
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As GM will be moving to the Hudson’s building and demand for office space in Detroit is relatively low nowadays, there are plans to redevelop this fortress of a complex.
The two towers closest to the river will be demolished.
The five-tower, 5.5 million-square-foot “city within a city” would lose 1.25 million square feet from demolition of Towers 300 and 400 nearest the riverfront. The podium that consists of retail and showroom space on the ground floor around the towers would also be removed to improve accessibility to the site. The redevelopment would happen in phases over years.
The central tower would remain along with Towers 100 and 200, the two facing Jefferson Avenue. Towers 300 and 400 would be demolished to make room for the park that would connect to the Detroit Riverwalk. The park would seek to be something akin to Chicago’s Navy Pier or the area around the O2 Arena in London’s South Greenwich neighborhood with entertainment, dining and sightseeing attractions. Options could include sport and cultural programming, and Bonner said there’ve been productive conversations with an “internationally renowned automobile entertainment concept” that would be a fitting tribute to the site’s history.
The central tower, home to a Marriott International Inc. hotel, would continue to be a hotel but decrease to around 850 rooms from about 1,200 today. The top floors would be remodeled to create 200 high-end family apartments, Bonner said.
“The hospitality element, we recognize,” he said, “is really important to maintain and increase, in some respects, the viability of Detroit as a tourist town and to support the convention center.”
One of the remaining adjacent towers would convert to residential apartments with 300 to 400 units, the details of which are yet to be determined. The other tower also would be remodeled but still serve as office space, according to Bedrock.
Demolition could start within two years, Bonner said. Construction of an envisioned entertainment complex could probably begin toward the end of those two years. Refurbishment of the central tower and renovations for the multi-family housing might proceed for two and a half years to three years after that, aligning with the completion of the entertainment and public space portion.
The estimated $1.6 billion redevelopment cost includes the reimagined public walkway, public park, conference center, the new hotel, office tower and the multi-family tower, Bonner said, adding an adjacent project would need “a few more dollars” for the entertainment piece. There could be some other demolition or remodeling of parking decks in the area, as well.
Here is what the redeveloped complex may look like:
Obviously this would be a dramatic change in the Detroit skyline, as the basic image of the Ren Center with the hotel surrounded by the four towers is iconic for Detroit.
photo by David Guralnick (Detroit News)
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Each of the two towers to be demolished was completed in 1977 and is 522 feet in height. They are slightly taller than the Deutsche Bank building in lower Manhattan which was demolished after being damaged on September 11, 2001. They would become the ninth-tallest voluntarily razed buildings (fourth-tallest in the United States). They are currently the fifth-tallest buildings in Detroit.
List of tallest voluntarily demolished buildings - Wikipedia
