No matter real or imagined, historical or futuristic, the frontier is an enchanting and oft-repeated concept in American culture. For decades images and narratives about the American West have been central to a unique identity combining civility and wilderness. It is held that the pioneer helped shaped American Democracy with each advance westward, and that to settle in the un-populated territories of the frontier, despite the risks, defined progress.
Today, frontierism exists in a multitude of locations, scales, and forms. As a progressive force the frontier motivates persons towards certain actions and destinations. Our site will be an unsettled middle zone between two burgeoning development fronts, the North Cass neighborhood and the Stadium District. We tried to examine and identify ‘frontiers’; prove and disprove a frontier’s embedded-ness in culture; and then construct an aesthetic repertoire for the frontier which shall be applied to the design of a façade, the details, and other aspects of a housing project. In addition, the promise of what it means to ‘live’ the frontier life will be examined and applied to configuring the conditions for living via building massing, planning, secondary programing, and dwelling unit design. Lastly, the imagined or constructed frontier will be overlaid on an actual urban frontier located in Detroit.