Howard Crane

Howard Crane worked as a draftsman with Albert Kahn in Detroit in 1904 and opened his own office there in 1908, specializing in the design of large movie palaces. He designed six nearly identical theaters for 20th Century Fox, including Detroit (1928) and Saint Louis (1929), each with an arena seating nearly 5,000 and exotic interiors influenced by Moorish and Indian motifs. During his career, he built a total of about 250 movie theaters, 62 of them in the Detroit area.

Crane also designed the Detroit Olympia, which seated 13,375 and had standing room for another 3,300. The stadium, which was used by the Detroit Red Wings, was demolished in 1987. He also designed many office buildings. His masterpiece among office towers, however, was the 47-story, 170 m high Art Deco LeVeque Tower in Columbus, Ohio, with an attached movie theater and a 1,000-bed hotel.

As a result of the Great Depression, Crane left for London in 1930, disillusioned, but continued to run his Detroit office for many years. In Britain, he also designed many cinemas but far less lavishly than his American movie palaces. His most famous commission in Britain was the Earls Court Exhibition Centre, which opened in 1937. It closed in 2014 and was demolished a few years later. Crane returned to Detroit once or twice a year until World War II. He then remained in London, where he died and was buried in 1952.