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 line of house, a chimney, a hallway, or a staircase. From other vantages, the project presents clear, and yet unfamiliar, architectural figures – thus soliciting projective association.  Up-close, the pavilion is meant to encourage physical interaction. Elements within the design suggest differing modes of occupation, such as seating, lounging and climbing. Constructed of bent steel tubing, foam and rubber, the pavilion is counter-intuitively soft to the touch, begging tactile engagement.

The relationship between the pavilion and its site is meant to lend definition to the otherwise unvariegated surrounding emptiness and vaguely recall the site’s history. Located in an empty field that was once divided into a series of residential lots, the project loosely describes the volume of the house that once sat in its place. The design of the ground plane further recalls the absent house, drawing the shape of its shadow in gravel surrounded by the painted profile of that cast by the new pavilion.  From within, the pavilion frames views out to historically important civic buildings. For example, traversing a passage carved under and through the pavilion, the project directs one’s view out to the empty shell of Detroit’s monumental Michigan Central Railroad Station.  From the opposite direction, the project frames a view of the Renaissance Center, General Motor’s headquarters in Detroit.

Scheduled to remain in place for a year, the relationship between the pavilion and its surrounding public will be documented in video and photography. Thus, the project’s successes and failures in soliciting a latent public will become part of the research.  The Empty Pavilion was funded by a Research Through Making grant from the University of Michigan Taubman College of Architecture.

Credits

McLain Clutter
Assistant Professor
University of Michigan Taubman College of Architecture
www.mclainclutter.com

McLain Clutter is an architect, writer and Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning. He is the principal of the design and research office MCRD, located in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Clutter received a Bachelors of Architecture at Syracuse University and an MED at the Yale School of Architecture, where he was awarded the Everett Victor Meeks Fellowship for academic excellence. He has worked in design offices in New York, Chicago, and New Haven, and his design work has been premiated and exhibited internationally. His recent essays have appeared in Grey Room and MONU, and he has forthcoming essays in collected volumes from Princeton Architectural Press and the University of Chicago Press, and the journal 306090. His research has been supported by the University of Michigan and the Graham Foundation for the Advancement of the Fine Arts.

Kyle Reynolds
Assistant Professor
University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee
School of Architecture and Urban Planning
www.is-office.us

Kyle Reynolds is an Assistant Professor and a co-founder of is-office, a design firm located in Chicago, IL. Reynolds was previously the Willard A. Oberdick Fellow at the University of Michigan Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, and an Adjunct Assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago School of Architecture. He received a Master of Architecture from Princeton University and a Bachelor of Science in Architecture with a Certificate of Urban Planning, Summa Cum Laude, from the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee. Reynolds was awarded the Skidmore, Owings and Merrill (SOM) Foundation Traveling Fellowship in 2003. His work has been published in On Farming: Bracket 1, The SANAA Studios 2006-2008: Learning From Japan: Single Story Urbanism, Pidgin Magazine, Interior Design Magazine, Calibrations, and Licensed Architect. Reynolds work has been exhibited at The University of Michigan, The Art Institute of Chicago, The Chicago History Museum, Princeton University, Daley Plaza in Chicago, Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design, and the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee.

Ariel Poliner
Graduate Student
University of Michigan Taubman College of Architecture

Michael Sanderson
Graduate Student
University of Michigan Taubman College of Architecture

Nathan Van Wylan
Graduate Student
University of Michigan Taubman College of Architecture

Photography: Sasha Topolnytska