Archinect - News

A Motor City Missionary

2013-04-26T17:38:00-04:00

According to academics like Brent D. Ryan, author of “Design After Decline: How America Rebuilds Shrinking Cities," it is one of the most ambitious privately financed urban reclamation projects in American history.

Earlier this month David Segal traveled to Detroit to look into the efforts/urban boosterim of Dan Gilbert, chairman of Quicken Loans. Using his real estate company, Bedrock Real Estate Services, Mr. Segal is renovating properties, building apartments and wooing corporate tenants. The goal is to remake Detroit (or at least some of it's downtown) into a high-tech hub, full of the 'creative class', high culture and young entrepreneurs. Mr. Segal also explored the context and cause for the current crisis and interviewed some locals who worry about the creation of "two Detroits".

Editor's Picks #305

2013-03-05T11:42:00-05:00

vado retro summed up the design "a box within a box and one box the one inside, the inside box is at an angle. oh and there are trees" but Alex Gomez added "Although the facade is superficial, I feel it will succeed in attracting ‘qualitative and quantitative tourist flows in the area,’

News
Over at Bustler.net, Bernard Tschumi Architects unveiled the schematic design for the firm's first work in Italy: ANIMA, a new cultural center in the city of Grottammare. The project has been commissioned by the Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Ascoli Piceno and the Municipality of Grottammare and is expected to be completed by 2016.

In the description of the project, it states: “Could one design a facade without resorting to formal composition? Could one design a facade that would be neither abstract nor figurative, but formless, so to speak? Our motivation in raising these questions was both economic and cultural: At a time of economic crisis, to indulge in formal geometries made out of complex volumetric curves did not seem a responsible option. The time of ‘Iconism’ seemed to be over".

vado retro summed up the design "a box within a box and one box the one inside, the inside box is at an angle. oh and there are trees" but Alex Gomez added "Although the facade is s...

Editor's Picks #304

2013-02-26T13:39:00-05:00

For the latest edition of the ShowCase feature, Archinect published the first fire station designed by Pritzker Prize winner Álvaro Siza Veira. The project, Santo Tirso Fire Station is located in Quinta de Geão, Portugal "comprises a total gross area of 1173 m2 and lodges the support functions to the fire brigade...it is organized in 3 floors”.

Chris Moody's initial reaction was that "At first glance, it would be hard to picture this building as a fire station. But then again, that's probably the point. Nicely done! Alvaro." toasteroven added "that brick is yummy, the exterior is really nice - but - the interiors seem a little cold and off-putting. all shades of grey and white - like a bunker in Antarctica in the dead of winter”.

News

According to released figures the Architecture Billings Index (ABI) showed its strongest growth since November 2007. The American Institute of Architects (AIA) reported the January ABI score was 54.2, up sharply from a mark of 51.2* in Dec...

atelier WHY wins "Detroit Design 2102: Detroit Riverfront" with their entry "The Forest"

2012-12-12T17:16:00-05:00

Hyuntek Yoon and Soobum You, who go by atelier WHY, has sent us their 1st place entry for the Detroit Design 2102: Detroit Riverfront competition.

THE FOREST: Fairy tale between the City and the Forest

Many things fill the city and continue to do so. The act of “filling” is the virtue of urban development. For example, developers in the city of Detroit kept filling its voids. Many buildings and infrastructure have filled the city, and those became the symbol of Detroit. A rapid pace of growth is the result of such efforts to fill space. Downtown is represented by new businesses and the Renaissance of Detroit. Many skyscrapers filled the downtown Detroit area. However, the city needs space to breath. The city is far too compact to communicate with people and nature. Public spaces and nature are not enough. The site is located at the node of the radial street plan. The site needs to be filled in another way so that the city can breathe easily again. Currently, the site is filled...

Empty Pavilion in Detroit Solicits a Latent Public

2012-11-30T14:50:00-05:00

McLain Clutter, Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan Taubman College of Architecture and Kyle Reynolds, Assistant Professor at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee School of Architecture and Urban Planning, along with a team of students from the University of Michigan, have constructed the Empty Pavilion in a vacant lot in Detroit.

The Empty Pavilion is a meditation on Detroit’s evacuated urban context and an experiment in architecture’s ability to activate a latent public in the city. The project aspires to distribute just enough material across empty space – an element Detroit has in excess – to make that space legible and promote interaction. From a distance, the project engages the onlooker in a visual game of fleeting figuration. The pavilion is conceived as a collection of architectural figures drawn-in-space. From certain vantage points, and only momentarily, the project recalls familiar architectural elements that may entice memory – like the roof lin...

How Detroit Became the World Capital of Staring at Abandoned Old Buildings

2012-11-12T11:30:00-05:00

Ruins don’t encourage you to dwell on what they were like in their heyday,before they were ruins. The Colosseum in Rome or the amphitheater at Leptis Magna have never been anything but ruins. They’re eternal ruins. It’s the same here. This building could never have looked more magnificent than it does now, surrounded by its own silence. Ruins don’t make you think of the past, they direct you toward the future. The effect is almost prophetic. This is what the future will end up like...

"YOUR TEXT HERE" by Marcos Zotes

2012-11-07T20:26:00-05:00

You may recall Marcos Zotes from his Rafmögnuð Náttúra light installation in Iceland that we previously featured here on Archinect. He has just shared with us his latest project, "YOUR TEXT HERE"...

The city is constantly telling us what to do, what to think, and how to act. Using explicit visual language, a multiplicity of billboards, signs, images and symbols invade our public spaces in order to tell us something. YOUR TEXT HERE is a project that challenges this condition: Citizens are given the opportunity to change their role as receivers of information in order become the authors. The way it works is simple: you submit an anonymous text message in a website through your mobile phone, and in turn it is automatically projected at large scale onto the façade of a building.

"Public space is not something that is given or inherited, it must be fought for and defended constantly" says Marcos Zotes.

YOUR TEXT HERE is a participatory, site-specific light installation that...

Living in Mies van der Rohe's Lafayette Park

2012-10-04T15:45:00-04:00

The ability to observe the private lives of strangers from the windows of my home is one reason why I’ve chosen to reside within a dense urban fabric. I am not a voyeur: I do not receive sexual satisfaction from watching the daily lives of others. But I do like to imagine the many meaningful “relationships” I have created with people that I will never meet or even recognize on the street.

When architect Melissa Dittmer moved from New York City to Detroit, her reaction was a "year-long panic attack." Where, she wondered, were the people? "Where was the density, the sense of connection with strangers?" But then Dittmer and her family bought a townhouse in Lafayette Park, the modernist development created in the early '60 by Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig Hilberseimer and Alfred Caldwell — a place where the design itself encourages "a shared sense of intimacy that fosters community." On Places, she writes about how the architecture and landscape design of Lafayette Park conspire to create a sense of ordered exhibitionism, in a chapter from the new book Thanks for the View, Mr. Mies.

You Can Buy Mies Van Der Rohe's Detroit Towers at a Foreclosure Auction — But There's a Catch

2012-07-03T17:01:00-04:00

... the buyer will be contractually obligated to shell out over $10 million to execute a detailed, 80-page list of renovations, ranging from a handful of new peepholes to a sweeping overhaul of the buildings’ bathtubs. On top of that, the buyer must deposit just over $2.5 million into an escrow account that HUD can access in the event that repairs are not on schedule, as evidenced in the illustrated quarterly progress reports the buyer will be required to send.

In Detroit, half the street lights could go dark

2012-05-25T14:02:00-04:00

The city is deep in debt; it's got a state-appointed board managing its finances, so it's gotta cut services it can't afford. Services that it can't afford in part because it's a city built for two million people that's now home to just over 713,000. So street lights could be a luxury Detroit can't completely afford.

The Last Pedestrians: Albert Kahn, Edsel Ford, Diego Rivera

2012-04-10T17:12:00-04:00

The story of the automobile — like the story of the city of Detroit — is a tale of unwitting eternal returns. At every turn the inventors of modern life — of its machines, its aspirations — seemed unable or unwilling to grasp the meaning of what they were in the process of creating and unleashing, and what they were thus undoing and destroying.

On Places, historian Jerry Herron traces the intersecting lives of architect Albert Kahn, industrialist Edsel Ford, and artist Diego Rivera and examines their roles in shaping the mythology of Detroit as an industrial powerhouse.

Mies van der Rohe's Towers at Lafayette Park, Detroit

2012-04-05T19:47:00-04:00

In 2009 and 2010, we visited residents of Lafayette Park with photographer Corine Vermeulen while researching our forthcoming book Thanks for the View, Mr. Mies. Vermeulen’s portraits of townhouse owners in their homes appeared in the New York Times. Here we present the corollary to that series: tenants of the Pavilion and the Lafayette Towers in their apartments. Vermeulen’s portraits are accompanied by Lana Cavar’s photos of the views from each apartment window and by excerpts from interviews

On Detroit and Ruin

2012-01-12T15:53:00-05:00

The truth I’m trying to present is one about site-specific forgetting. If our history is a history of forgetting how to remember the past, as I am arguing, then the city of Detroit is the engine of our conflicted deliverance. It’s the machinery we’ve used for particular acts of forgetting, each connected to the place and time where the forgetting got done.

This week on Places, two features by Detroit residents contextualize the city's ruins.

In "The Forgetting Machine: Notes Toward a History of Detroit," Jerry Herron reflects on the decline of Hudson's and the improbable hopefulness of the retrofitted car park in the Michigan theater. He critiques two recent books of ruin photography and offers an alternate reading of the city as a machine for forgetting.

In "Detroit Re-Photography," Dave Jordano presents a slideshow of Detroit buildings and landscapes photographed in the early 1970s and in 2010. Photo editor Aaron Rothman notes that Jordano's then-and-now images "implicate us in the changes they depict," and work as a kind of antidote to the cool aestheticism of ruin porn.

Mayor Dave Bing picks 3 neighborhoods to test reshaping of Detroit

2011-07-27T15:40:04-04:00

Bing's citywide plan calls for dividing Detroit into three categories based on a neighborhood's health — steady, transitional and distressed — and then concentrating certain services in those areas. For example, building demolitions would be more common in "distressed" and "transitional" areas, while the healthier "steady" neighborhoods would get more code enforcement and illegal dumping clean-ups.

Living With Mies

2011-06-06T17:13:39-04:00

A few blocks east of Detroit’s downtown, just across Interstate 375, sits Lafayette Park, an enclave of single- and two-story modernist townhouses set amid a forest of locust trees. Like hundreds of developments nationwide, they were the result of postwar urban renewal; unlike almost all of them, it had a trio of world-class designers behind it: Ludwig Hilbersheimer as urban planner, Alfred Caldwell as landscape designer and Mies van der Rohe as architect.