Project Description

Detroit built things here. Big things. For a long time.

The Russell Industrial Complex on Milwaukee Avenue is one of the largest collections of industrial buildings in Detroit — a sprawling multi-building campus that once hummed with manufacturing and now stands as one of the city’s most compelling examples of adaptive reuse in progress. This interior courtyard tells the story in a single frame. Bands of factory windows stacked floor to floor, brick and concrete worn to the kind of patina that only decades of honest work can produce, and that water tower presiding over everything like a rusted crown.

Albert Kahn’s fingerprints are all over buildings like this — daylit factory floors designed to maximize productivity through light and air, industrial architecture that was revolutionary in its time and irreplaceable in ours. The Russell complex is now home to artists, makers, and small businesses — a different kind of production happening inside walls that were built to last.

The water tower isn’t going anywhere. Neither is this place.