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Billionaire mortgage mogul and real estate maven Dan Gilbert's skyscraper slated for downtown Detroit may grow by more than 100 feet to 912 feet tall, Crain's has learned.
While the final height has not yet been determined, Joe Guziewicz, vice president of construction for Gilbert's Bedrock LLC, confirmed that it will be taller than the 800 feet that was previously announced as the company looks to get "the most flexibility for how we use it and how we program it."
— Crain's Detroit Business
Designed by Hamilton Anderson Associates and SHoP Architects, the massive Hudson's Site mixed-use development broke ground in 2017 and occupies the long-vacant site of the iconic J.L. Hudson's department store in downtown Detroit—in its heydays, the world's tallest department store but... View full entry
The 100-foot-long skybridge connecting two of Detroit's most iconic buildings has been brought back to life with the colorful, site-specific work of Phillip K. Smith III, who has transformed the abandoned passageway into a floating bar of light hovering above the streets of downtown Detroit... View full entry
If Michigan isn’t the first place that comes to mind when considering [the Modern era] — unlike, say, Germany or France in the 1920s — it should be. The presence of Ford in the city and Booth in the country was enough to make Michigan ground zero for the Modernist experiment [...] making the state home to perhaps the most diverse and best-preserved collection of early Modernist experiments in the world. — The New York Times
A look at Michigan's history in the Modernist movement and the story it tells for our future. M.H. Miller traces three main convergences in the state: Henry Ford's first Model T factory, the Cranbrook school's presence, and numerous influential architects most notably Albert Kahn and Minoru... View full entry
In 2016, the Berlin-based US artist Ryan Mendoza and Rhea McCauley, the niece of Rosa Parks, teamed up to save the civil rights activist’s Detroit home from demolition. Now, the structure is heading to another block: the New York auction house Guernsey’s, where it is due to be auctioned tomorrow (26 July) with an estimate of $1m-$3m. — theartnewspaper.com
Park's house is part of the 700-lot of African American Historic & Cultural Treasures up for sale at the New York auction house Guernsey’s. McCauley initially bought the house for just $500 back in 2016 reaching out to Mendoza to help preserve the house. In 2017 the structure was safely... View full entry
Maurice Cox grew up in Brooklyn, a borough whose name has since become a global shorthand for gentrification. An urban designer, architectural educator, and former mayor of the City of Charlottesville, VA, in 2015 Cox became head of the planning department of Detroit, where he hopes to prevent the forces that have reshaped his childhood home from taking over the Motor City. [...] Cox is using design to catalyze growth that’s incremental and closely in line with the city’s strong sense of self. — Urban Omnibus
Urban Omnibus presents an insightful conversation between Maurice Cox, Director of Planning and Development for the City of Detroit, and Marc Norman, founder of the consulting firm “Ideas and Action” and Associate Professor of Practice at UMich's Taubman School of Architecture and Urban... View full entry
Yesterday, Ford Motor Company announced its long-rumored plan to buy the abandoned Michigan Central Station and restore it as hub for its future mobility ventures. The news quickly created a sense of awe across metro Detroit. [...]
On Tuesday morning, Ford laid out the details and made the purchase official in a public ceremony.
— The Verge
Rumors about Ford's intentions to purchase the iconic but dilapidated Michigan Central Station first surfaced in March, and now it's official: the automaker ('scuse me, mobility company) celebrated the announcement with a festive party on its new property hosting performers and city officials... View full entry
Cranbrook, known worldwide as an architectural set piece, is getting a new gem in its diadem — a Frank Lloyd Wright house.
The house was built in 1950 by Sara and Melvyn Maxwell Smith. The donation came from the Towbes Foundation.
“The Smith family always said they didn’t want this to just pass to another set of homeowners,” said Gregory Wittkopp, director of the Cranbrook Center for Collections and Research. “The phrase they used was they wanted it to be ‘an educational resource.’ ”
— The Detroit News
The donation by the Towbes Foundation was a gift "that other design schools would kill for," The Detroit News reports and tells the legendary tale of A. Alfred Taubman donating a substantial portion of the windows to the cash-strapped Smith family to get the FLW-designed house finished before... View full entry
Ford Motor Co. is in discussions to purchase the dilapidated Michigan Central Station in Detroit's Corktown neighborhood just outside of downtown, Crain's has learned from multiple sources familiar with the negotiations. — Crain's Detroit Business
"A redevelopment of the depot, which has been abandoned and blighted for three decades since Amtrak stopped service in 1988, would be one of the most expensive and complex local undertakings in recent history," Crain's reports. View full entry
Making the case that infrastructure itself can be exclusionary is hardly straightforward. Many of the worst decisions in US planning were made decades ago to intentionally disenfranchise, marginalise and separate communities; policies such as redlining and “blight clearing” are well-documented embarrassments. But many decisions that segregated communities were unintentional. The stop sign and one-way street might seem benign, but they shape our lives in ways we sometimes don’t even realise. — The Guardian
Through focusing in on 5 case studies where communities have been obliterated by infrastructure decisions, the direct impact of highways and walls take on greater levels of meaning and urgency. The power of city planning also comes into greater consideration presently as the US takes on a massive... View full entry
Gentrification. It is a word that we hear with increasing frequency in contemporary discussions about American cities. But what does that word really mean? And, even more importantly, what does it mean in the context of the region that I live in and love – the Rust Belt? [...]
It is important to be clear about the meaning of this increasingly ambiguous term, because what needs to happen in the vast majority of urban neighborhoods in the legacy cities of the Rust Belt is far less ambiguous.
— City Observatory
"Many critics of Rust Belt gentrification are holding cities to an unreasonable standard, and placing them in an impossible situation. If much of the city remains poor and run-down, this is proof that the city does not care, and is not trying hard enough. If, on the other hand, parts of the city... View full entry
It’s said that there are two kinds of architects: those who will only live in vernacular homes and those who would only live in a home of their own design. Now I know why. My partner Laura and I ignored both options and bought a townhouse designed by Mies van der Rohe. With my colleagues at Dash Marshall, made limited renovations after devouring all of the books about Lafayette Park, looking for clues as to what Mies would do if given a do-over. — Medium
Bryan Boyer writes about renovating a Mies Van Der Rohe townhouse in Lafayette Park, Detroit. "First, the original condition of these houses was not actually that nice when you got down to the small details like closet hardware, appliances, and lighting. Bathrooms and kitchens from the 1950s were... View full entry
An 800-foot-tall centerpiece is coming to Detroit's resurgent downtown as the city continues to build momentum about three years after exiting the largest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history. — Chicago Tribune
Detroit continues its steep climb back to normalcy and growth. As one of America's hardest-hit areas by the Great Recession, Detroit unemployment was running nearly three times as high as the national average in 2009 at a staggering 28 percent — and the city was bleeding population, losing... View full entry
“I try to be the face that I was looking for growing up,” Brown said. “So if I go into a room or an auditorium and just one person is interested in architecture, then I’ve accomplished my mission.”
The name comes from a milestone this past August, when the 400th African-American woman became licensed as an architect. There are 110,000 licensed architects in the country.
— Michigan Radio
Raised in Detroit, architectural designer Tiffany Brown won a 2017 Knight Arts Challenge grant for her project “400 Forward”, which aims to bring in more black girls and women into the field of architecture and urban planning. According to Brown, only 0.3 percent of U.S. architects are black... View full entry
Detroit was the first North American city to obtain such a designation, which joined it to UNESCO's Creative Cities Network — a group 22 international cities whose aim is "to promote cooperation with and among cities that have identified creativity as a strategic factor for sustainable urban development. — Detroit Metro Times
Earlier this week, president Trump announced the U.S's withdrawal from UNESCO, citing anti-Israel bias and mounting arrears. The decision could affect Detroit's 'City of Design' designation, earlier awarded to the Detroit Creative Corridor, a non-profit initiative to strengthen Detroit's... View full entry
Architecture is a creative media that analyzes what is, while imagining what could and should be. Located in Los Angeles’ Art District, A+D Museum's current exhibit, The Architectural Imagination, is a showcase of re-imagining and rebuilding the outdated industrial urbanscape of Detroit... View full entry