By any measure, the year just ending will go into the books as Detroit’s most significant year in architecture and design in many years.

Here are the highlights:

Hudson’s project

Without a doubt the design for the new skyscraper businessman Dan Gilbert is building on the old Hudson’s site downtown marks Detroit’s most notable work of new architecture since the Renaissance Center in the 1970s.

The work by SHoP architects of New York with Hamilton Anderson Associates of Detroit is really two buildings – a “platform” of about nine stories with a variety of civic and commercial uses and an 800-foot residential tower topped with an observation deck – a skyscraper that will become Detroit’s tallest new building when it opens.

I’ve heard some complaints that the shimmering glass-and-steel design fails to connect with Detroit’s past because it’s not a “classic” look. But that, to my mind, is the virtue of the design. Detroit’s downtown architecture has long seemed stuck in the era of the 1920s. This work boldly looks ahead to Detroit’s 21st century identity.

The still-unnamed projects looks a good bet to become Detroit’s new postcard image on the skyline.

Workers break ground for tallest skyscraper in Detroit at former Hudson's site

Monroe Block

Gilbert also unveiled his plans for the Monroe Block, facing Campus Martius. Although a bit more subdued than the Hudson’s site project, this one, too, features a modernist glass-and-steel tower facing the park, backed by a series of retail and residential structures of diminishing heights faced with various materials. The design team includes Neumann-Smith of Detroit and Schmidt Hammer Lassen of Copenhagen, Denmark.

When completed, the Monroe Block will create greater density in the downtown skyline and complement its taller and more ambitious Hudson’s site project not far away.

Monroe Block project starting next year

Foundation Hotel

Detroit’s latest boutique hotel opened in 2017 in the city’s old Fire Department headquarters near Cobo Center. With a renovation design by McIntosh Poris Associates of Detroit and interiors by Simeone Deary Design of Chicago, the Foundation Hotel offers a near perfect blend of old and new, a mix of historic materials retained from the fire station days with exciting new furniture, fabrics, artwork, and light fixtures crafted by dozens of local artisans.

And the profession has taken notice. The Foundation Hotel recently won the Gold Key Award for Excellence in Hospitality Design one of, the industry’s oldest and most prestigious awards programs, which is sponsored by Boutique Design magazine.

Michelin-starred Thomas Lents ups the ante at Foundation Hotel with Chef's Table concept

Little Caesars Arena

It’s difficult to make a sports and events arena look like something other what it is it – a big steel-and-concrete bowl. But the Ilitch family’s Olympia Development and its design team led by well-known stadium designers HOK architects managed to tuck the new Little Caesars Arena into the streetscape on the northern edge of downtown as if it belonged there.

The main trick was to surround the exterior of the arena bowl with outer buildings scaled to nearby buildings and to bring those new buildings out to the sidewalk. The result: An arena appears to fit in with the local street grid; it doesn’t plop itself amid acres of sterile concrete like, say, the soon-to-be-gone Pontiac Silverdome.

Little Caesars Arena: Everything you need to know

By the Book

Detroit’s architecture scene is being enlivened by several new books on the city’s historic buildings and designers.

Wayne State University Press in early 2018 will publish new biographies of Detroit architects Albert Kahn and Alexander Girard.

“Building the Modern World: Albert Kahn in Detroit,” is authored by Detroit News staff writer Michael H. Hodges. And “Alexander Girard, Architect: Creating Midcentury Modern Masterpieces,” is the work of local art historian Deborah Lubera Kawsky.

Released by WSU Press in 2017: “Greetings from Detroit: Historic Postcards from the Motor City,” by local architectural writer Dan Austin, and “Designing Detroit: Wirt Rowland and the Rise of Modern American Architecture,” by Michael G. Smith.

And Yale University Press has just published “Minoru Yamasaki: Humanist Architecture for a Modernist World,” by Dale Allen Gyure, a professor of architecture at Lawrence Technological University.

This outpouring of books testifies to the growing interest for architecture in Detroit, particularly in the city’s legacy of great design.

MDOT moving ahead with plan to rip out I-375 freeway, restore surface street

Soccer stadium vision falls into Unbuilt Detroit archive but don't mourn the loss

Walkable urbanism

If I had to name a designer of the year in Detroit, it might be none other than Jane Jacobs, the 1960s-era journalist whose landmark book, “The Death and Life of Great American Cities,” has done more to inform current thinking on urban planning that perhaps any other.

Jacobs pleaded with urban planners of her day to stop demolishing viable neighborhoods in New York to build new expressways. A couple of generations later, planners like Maurice Cox, head of Detroit’s planning department, take those lessons to heart in projects like the Fitzgerald neighborhood on Detroit’s northwest side.

Instead of bulldozing more empty buildings in Fitzgerald, the city will build new infill housing on many of the vacant lots in the district while also turning other lots into community gardens and recreational greenways. It’s part of the innovative “greening” vision that has seen Detroit, and many other cities, embrace open space and vacant lot planning in new and creative ways.

To put it in simple terms, walkable urbanism is hot right now. In fact, it informs almost every decision made now in the city, from the expansion of the RiverWalk to the creation of new bicycle lanes and the Spirit Plaza at Jefferson and Woodward.

Mobility, yes!

And let’s not forget that the new Qline streetcar and MoGo bike sharing network both launched service this year, bringing new splashes of color and movement to the downtown scene.

And looking ahead …

With so much work already in the pipeline, the upsurge in design of merit is likely to continue in metro Detroit in 2018. That’s a welcome development for a city with a rich heritage of great architecture.

Contact John Gallagher: 313-222-5173 or gallagher@freepress.com. Follow him on Sunday @jgallagherfreep.