I Did It My Way |Undergraduate Thesis
This project was made in collaboration with Aaron Miranda and was selected for the Pratt UA Degree Project Awards Review 2021.
Detroit has too much land for too few people.
The project is a design mechanism that invigorates bottom-up urban development as a way to retool Detroit’s deteriorating urban fabric that uses the city’s overabundance of land and unclaimed material as a basis for expansion and new construction.
What we are proposing is a program for community growth that corresponds to the desire of the individuals that compose it, and involves their own labor in order to push forth a generative economy. Thus our proposal emerges from the voluntary investment of the community’s own labor and its enthusiasm and ambition to improve their urban conditions and lives.
The people of Detroit don’t have the economic means to invest in their own communities and homes. Economic activity and potential growth are stopped in their tracks by the lack of capital investment the average people of the city can provide. But the city can provide access to its vast collection of foreclosed parcels, homes, factories, and commercial spaces.
By transforming these assets from a collection of unused and deteriorating spaces hoarded by the municipal government into a set of public materials that can be commandeered by the citizens of the city, a new informal system of labor and exchange can emerge if this land can be distributed to individuals.
Considering the entirety of American urban history, communities of color have mostly been fenced into newly redlined but pre constructed urban cores. there is no well-established architectural vernacular of what a prosperous, culturally expressive populous is.
Architects and architectural photographers alike have sparked an emergent trend of representing embedded fiction within the real. y leveraging the power of the digital, mythical thought now takes precedence over scientific reasoning. We now live in age surrounded by imagery created purely for affect and spectacle; the wow factor fuels the ego of the creator and the naïve without proposing a concrete solution to the very problem at hand.
The project proposes an architecture that articulates a new meaning with regard to the spaces and people it serves. It operates between the lines of fiction and veracity (doubt and value) within the context of urban, cultural and spatial decay. Not as a means to deceive and manipulate but rather to solidify crafted speculation and surreal juxtaposition for the sake of manifesting a novel cultural order.
