A hundred years ago, architect Albert Kahn made one of his regular visits to New York City to meet with architectural sculptors. Kahn had big commissions from the University of Michigan and General Motors, and in light of the time-consuming train trips, bringing back a sculptor seemed smart.
He lured Corrado Parducci — who had apprenticed with American sculptor Ulysses Ricci — to work on the First State Bank building in downtown Detroit. From this starting point, Parducci spent the rest of his career carving up Detroit like no other town.
“He came here in 1924 and he was really doing work up until he died in 1981,” documentary filmmaker Jennifer Baross told The Huffington Post. “He thought he was going to be here for only two months, but he was so flooded with work, he called his wife in New York and said, ‘You’re going to pack up the house; I can’t come get you.’ ”
Parducci established a studio on Cass Avenue and became almost as prolific as Kahn, creating adornments for about 600 buildings. Besides Detroit, his work is found in at least 11 Michigan cities, from Marquette to Ypsilanti and from Saginaw to Grand Rapids. He worked in every style from Romanesque to Art Deco.
An early effort in Detroit was the interior of the Masonic Temple. At first, he collaborated as a studio assistant with the New York master Anthony DiLorenzo, but then took over the job.
Downtown, he adorned the Buhl, Penobscot, and Guardian buildings as well as the U.S. District Court. He did newspaper offices for the Detroit Free Press, Ann Arbor News, and Kalamazoo Gazette. There were corporate headquarters and factory buildings, but also houses for Frank Couzens and Edsel and Eleanor Ford.
Parducci and his artisans spent six months executing the carved-plaster ceiling of the Christopher Wren Dining Room at Meadow Brook Hall for Alfred and Matilda Dodge-Wilson, now part of Oakland University in Rochester Hills. He sculpted the Horace Rackham Memorial Fountain, a.k.a. the Bear Fountain, at the Detroit Zoo in 1939.
Corrado Giuseppe Parducci was born in Italy in 1900. At 4 years old, he immigrated with his family to New York City’s Greenwich Village. Dale A. Carlson, co-author of “Corrado Parducci: A Field Guide to Detroit’s Architectural Sculptor,” says their MacDougal Alley neighborhood was a fertile center for sculptors, led by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney; her studio was a community point of pride.
“She was a sculptor in a time when it was dominated by men, so that makes her extra notable,” Carlson says. “She tried to find kids in the public schools and get them involved in extra art activities.” Young Parducci — later called Joe — merited special attention by drawing playful decorative sketches on the classroom chalkboard. With Whitney’s support, he received thorough training.
Parducci fascinated later artists like Detroit sculptor Sergio De Giusti, who curated “Patrimonio: 100 years of Italian Art in Michigan” at Wayne State University in 1996. “I once went … all around the city to find his works,” De Giusti says. He sees an extraordinary accomplishment in Parducci’s efforts at the National Shrine of the Little Flower in Royal Oak. “The Stations of the Cross (there) will rival anything in the Renaissance. He was capable of creating great works as a sculptor, but his dedication was to architectural sculpture.”
A problem was the emergence of the International Style after World War II. Instead of adornments like columns and arches, the new style outwardly expressed the internal structure of a building.
Minoru Yamasaki’s One Woodward Avenue is an example. Commissioned in 1958, its welded steel gridwork and precast concrete panels left no opportunity for ornamentation, and was said to make sculptors curse when passing by.
Will the old embellishments ever come back?
“I don’t think so,” De Giusti says. “I don’t see it.”
