United States Post Office Flint, Michigan

Text courtesy of the National Register of Historic Places, a program of the National Parks Service. Minor transcription errors or changes in formatting may have occurred; please see the Nomination Form PDF for official text. Some information may have become outdated since the property was nominated for the Register.

The design of the United States Post Office represents the transition to the classical moderne style in design elements and materials. Its appearance expresses the persistence of Beaux-Arts design principles and traditional classical elements, as well as the influence in materials, forms, and overall impression of the modernistic style of architecture now known as the art deco. The formal, three-part fac;ade incorporates a central section with a colonnade, where the classical language of architecture prevails, flanked by ranges of bays where bold piers separate stacked window openings that have a vertical emphasis and modern feeling. The yellow Kasota limestone walls and polychrome terra cotta have links both to the art deco interest in color and the stone material that would become firmly identified with federal buildings during the 1930s. The designer of the Post Office in Flint merged several stylistic design elements to produce a building that has the grandeur and formality associated with a large post office building, and yet is firmly situated in the modernistic architecture of the late 1920s. The Post Office in Flint represents the standardized design period of U.S. Treasury Department buildings , and a transition to modernized classicism that would dominate during the 1930s. It has an iconographic program in polychrome terra cotta that uses symbols of the nation and power. The building is one of the major civic buildings in Flint and is representative of the city's buildings erected during the late 1920s and early 1930s that reflect the influence of the modernistic architecture style. One of only a few large post office/federal buildings built in Michigan during the early 1930s, it is an architecturally outstanding example of the type in state for the period.