engineering

Harmonie Centre

Harmonie Centre is a engineering topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Harmonie Centre rather than just read about it. In short: The Harmonie Centre, also known as the Breitmeyer–Tobin Building, is an eight-story commercial building located at 1308 Broadway Street (at the corner of Broadway and Gratiot) in Downtown Detroit. It is part of the Broadway Avenue Historic District.

Key takeaways

Harmonie Centre belongs to engineering; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Harmonie Centre to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Harmonie Centre from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

The Harmonie Centre, also known as the Breitmeyer–Tobin Building, is an eight-story commercial building located at 1308 Broadway Street (at the corner of Broadway and Gratiot) in Downtown Detroit. It is part of the Broadway Avenue Historic District. It is also known as the Tobin Building. The building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1980. The east necklace of downtown links Grand Circus and the stadium area to Greektown along Broadway. The east necklace contains a sub-district sometimes called the Harmonie Park District, which has taken on the renowned legacy of Detroit's music from the 1930s through the 1950s and into the present.

History

The Breitmeyer–Tobin Building was built in 1906 for John Breitmeyer Sons, Florists, who were at the time the leading florists in Detroit. The firm's president, Philip Breitmeyer, served as the mayor of Detroit from 1909 to 1911. In 1926, the ownership of the building was transferred to the Peninsular Bank Company, and the building was renamed the Peninsular Bank Building. The bank failed, and ten years later, in the depths of the Great Depression, the building was 75% unoccupied; the main tenant was the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, who occupied the top floor. Metropolitan was notable for its willingness to write small insurance policies for African Americans. At around the same time, the owners of the building opened up office space to rental by African Americans; the building was one of the first downtown to do so. In 1944, Benjamin Tobin acquired the building, renamed it the Breitmeyer–Tobin Building, and marketed the office space to black professionals. Notable African American firms had offices in the building, including the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (the largest Black union in America at the time); the law firm of Loomis, Jones, Piper and Colden; attorney Harold Bledsoe; optometrists William H. and Lloyd Lawson; and future judges Damon Keith and Hobart Taylor Jr. The building has recently been refurbished, with commercial space on the first floor and various offices in the upper floors.

Description The eight-story building, designed by the architectural firm of Raseman & Fischer, is an unusual Beaux-Arts building from the turn of the century. It includes glazed terra cotta elements.

See also Harmonie Club (Detroit, Michigan) Music of Detroit

References

Illustrations

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Harmonie Centre

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Harmonie Centre claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In engineering, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Harmonie Centre before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Harmonie Centre ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Harmonie Centre

In research: Harmonie Centre appears in engineering research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Harmonie Centre in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Harmonie Centre is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics 1906 establishments in Michigan, African-American history in Detroit, Beaux-Arts architecture in Michigan, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Harmonie Centre outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Harmonie Centre in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Harmonie Centre means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Harmonie Centre out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Harmonie Centre in simple terms?

Why does Harmonie Centre matter?

Because it connects several engineering ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Harmonie Centre?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Harmonie Centre.