Follow this tag to curate your own personalized Activity Stream and email alerts.
Ford Motor Co. of Dearborn has brought on New York City-based EverGreene Architectural Arts, one of the largest specialty contractors in the U.S., to revive the grandest areas of Michigan Central Station, including the main waiting area, arcade, ticket lobby, and restaurant. The company specializes in restoring historic buildings. — DBusiness Magazine
Ford purchased Detroit's historic but long-vacant Michigan Central Station in 2018 with plans to redevelop the hulking structure as the shining centerpiece of the company's new 30-acre Corktown mobility innovation district. PAU was brought on as the lead architect and strategic planner, and in... View full entry
At a community meeting this week, Ford Motor Company revealed the site plan for Michigan Central, a new walkable mobility innovation district in Corktown, Detroit’s oldest neighborhood, as well as designs for some of the district’s first buildings. Ford’s multiyear development, including the... View full entry
This all makes what is happening now all the more remarkable. Last summer, Ford Motor Company announced it had bought the building, with plans to invest $740million to transform it into a world-leading research centre for ‘future mobility’. The very industry that signed the station’s death warrant in the first place is now set on resuscitating it as a beacon of sustainable transport. — The RIBA Journal
Oliver Wainwright pens a piece on the upcoming renovation of the Michigan Central Station, which was a celebrated icon of Detroit when it first opened in 1913. After the station closed in 1988 and was abandoned, it became the epitome of the city's ruin porn. After buying the building last summer... 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
More details on Ford's adaptive reuse of Michigan Central Station reveal that Snøhetta has been commissioned as the lead designer as part of Ford's $1 billion capital improvements project. Tasked with re-envisioning the company's Headquarters and Research Campus in Dearborn, Michigan, the firm... 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
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
Self-Driving Coalition for Safer Streets, a lobbying group with the express purpose of advocating autonomous driving. [...]
"Self-driving vehicle technology will make America's roadways safer and less congested," [David Strickland, a former administrator of the NHTSA] said [...]
"The best path for this innovation is to have one clear set of federal standards, and the Coalition will work with policymakers to find the right solutions that will facilitate the deployment of self-driving vehicles."
— theverge.com
Lyft has also been in talks with General Motors (which is not a part of the Self-Driving Coalition) to put out its own group of autonomous for-hire vehicles. Models for Google's vehicles include both bespoke prototypes and Lexus SUVs, and Uber is developing its own testing grounds for self-driving... View full entry
The Landmarks Preservation Commission is set to consider a proposed $190 million renovation to the Ford Foundation...Although many aspects of the building have long been outdated...it is health and safety, not aesthetics or technology, that initially drove the foundation’s plans. The city has given Ford until 2019 to bring the building up to code for fire safety and handicapped accessibility... — Curbed
“...But since they had to scratch the building’s surfaces, Ford Foundation president Darren Walker and his staff decided to go further, upgrading not just by adding sprinklers to the ceilings and greater access to the atrium, but new security, new lighting and mechanicals, and a new spatial... View full entry
As the person in charge of design for Ford's entire vehicle porfolio, Mays looks at architecture a lot. And he's ever mindful of buildings and how they're designed whenever he sets about creating a new car or truck for Ford.
What he's learned — and what he likes— about architecture, and Chicago architecture in particular, will be his focus when he joins the panel discussion "Big Ideas in Small Places" on Thursday at the Chicago Architecture Foundation.
— bizjournals.com
