DETROIT DENSE SPACE

CONTEXT
During the first half of the twentieth century, Detroit was among the fastest growing urban centers in America. Many of the city's leading residents felt threatened by the rapidly increasing density of life and construction, and by the loss of open space, trees, and community gathering places. In response to this threat, community organizations developed to preserve open space, to plant trees, and to counter the developing density of urban construction. Since World War II, an entirely new condition has developed in the city. Massive shifts in the U.S. industrial economy have moved jobs and manufacturing facilities out of Detroit. The process of increasing density has radically reversed, with people and buildings apparently vaporizing into empty space. Unprogrammed open space-full of gradually enveloping plants and trees-has appeared like a cancer throughout the city. Civic groups which had previously focused on planting trees and creating parks and vegetated breathing space have failed to recognize that an entirely new spatial condition needs to be confronted from an entirely new point of view.

This design proposal for a modest community gathering space in an inner city neighborhood of rapidly receding density confronts the issues of density, open space, and community gathering in a type of post-density spatial condition that similarly confronts many other industrial age cities. The project is designed as a community gathering place for an area of typical blocks in Detroit's inner east-side residential neighborhoods. A common pattern of disappearing buildings and uncontrolled vegetation has emerged in many of these blocks. A greatly reduced number of large single-family homes, small apartment blocks, and detached stores or small-scale fabrication shops remain scattered along blocks filled with vaguely defined lot-line divisions and evidence of past construction, yet currently left open with low grasses, stray trees and wild vegetation. Frequently there are recently burned, gutted, yet still intact buildings.

Covered in grass, there are stacks of brick, burned timber, and scattered building materials. Neat rectangles of empty basement foundations define the pattern of past occupation. There are broad, open vistas across the flat, building-dotted landscape, with the slightly faded towers of downtown Detroit visible in the near distance. Aside from the strangely looming towers, and the frequent small fires and pillars of smoke down the block, large sections of this area of inner Detroit feel almost (unsettlingly) rural.

CLIENT
It is possibly this rural image that has inspired some of the most interesting community responses to this new condition of burgeoning emptiness. Some of these blocks are being farmed. The farmers are urban activists ingeniously exploiting new ambiguities in the physical and legal landscape of these blocks. Maverick tractors-and even cows, pigs and chickens-are hidden away in abandoned houses and boarded-up grocery stores reoccupied as clandestine barns. Behind the trees and tall grass, fields of corn are being grown. Schools, learning gardens, ad hoc community museums, self-help institutions and radical social innovations are emerging. None of this is apparent to the casual observer, and none of it follows the expected patterns of land use and legal land ownership.

The main line civic organizations have themselves largely fled the city for the safety of the suburbs, and are frequently run by the very citizens who are involved in directing the flow of industrial production away from problematically organized northern labor centers such as Detroit to the fresh fields of newly industrial cities to the south. Turning a blind eye to the underlying forces of change, these groups have largely failed to recognize and engage with this new urban condition of physical and social density withering toward emptiness.

Alternative social forces have emerged, leading intriguing initiatives within the new emptiness. In collaboration with some of these social pioneers in the resettlement of Detroit's empty space, this community meeting place is proposed as a practical seed project to help generate a new social and physical approach to city building in Detroit's inner emptiness.

PROGRAM
In most blocks there is evidence of impromptu neighborhood gathering. It is not unusual to see an informal ring of bright orange plastic chairs ringed around the protective mass and spatial particularity of a stray shade tree on an otherwise empty and abandoned city block. These impromptu community centers facilitate a continued life in the unbuildinged but still populated community. Presumably, these natural tendencies toward the recondensation of clustered people may engender new ideas for the recondensation of an appropriate new architecture.

The program for this project is very simple. Following the concept of a massing of orange plastic chairs, a radically dense massing of material will be constructed as a natural gathering place in an otherwise frightening emptiness of urban space. Drawn to the density as to a campfire in the night, people will bring their chairs here, they will talk, and they will invent the new space that has been abandoned to them and they will invent a new way to inhabit it.

CONSTRUCTION
The pavilion is constructed from the scattered debris immediately available on the site. Although much material has been violently burned and vaporized as noxious gases floated off across the suburbs and onto the great plains, the burned and gutted previous construction of the site, and that of its immediate past neighbors, provide a mass of charred and sooty timbers and bricks, and twisted pastel yellow, pink, blue and white vinyl siding. The project is to gather this scattered material into a radical recondensation of constructed mass-a defiant density of material memory standing guard against the continued evaporation of a community.

The construction will follow this procedure: An existing concrete basement rectangle will be swept out and brushed clean. In successive 12" deep lifts, a mat of dense material will be carefully laid out on the concrete floor. Bricks; concrete curbs; steel lolly columns; lead, steel and copper pipe; heavy blackened timbers; blistered noodles of vinyl siding-all will be carefully laid in orderly, parallel rows regularly spaced with several inches between major materials. A gap of 12" will be left on all sides between the vertical concrete basement walls and the rising mat of material. After the first mat of parallel rows of stuff is completed, a second layer of material will be carefuly placed in rows perpendicular to the mat below. Successive mats are laid up in perpendicular levels, back and forth, until the first 12" depth is achieved.

A concrete mixer truck will then back up to the foundation wall, and the first 12" lift of an especially wet slump concrete will be directed into the center of the porous mat of material, oozing through and around the stacked materials, flowing towards but not quite reaching the edges of the mats.

This process of laying up orderly mats of heavy, odd-ball material cast into soupy lifts of concrete will be successively repeated until the heavy mass achieves a height equal to the top of the basement wall and the surrounding flat space of the site. The 12" gap between the mass and the foundation wall will be carefully retained all the way up to preserve a visual record of the construction method employed to create this carefully ordered, rectangular yet softly fuzzy and pastel-flecked mass of identifiable matter.

During this foundation mass phase, after the second 12" lift, a regular, closely spaced grid of vertical columns will be set into the mass, and built around. (The first two lifts of concrete and material will distribute the load and prevent the many legs from piercing through the basement floor once the full weight of the upper mass is stacked into the forest of legs. The legs themselves are built-up columns made from the collected 2x6 rafters of the previous buildings. These planks will be nailed up-with widely staggered laps and closely set 12d common nails-into 6x8 vertical columns, increasing in height as the project proceeds upward out of the basement hole and into the empty air of the community.

Once the foundation mass is even with the ground (this top level of material carefully laid as a milky terazzo of building matter and carefully troweled concrete bristling with a forest of thin black legs) a pavilion floor will have been achieved and construction on the dense mass above will begin.

The legs will continue to be lapped and nailed upward to the full anticipated height of the upper mass. Seven feet above the pavilion floor, the first row of double cross beams of charred timbers-parallel to the short ends and built-up studs of the pavilion-will be through-bolted onto the legs, the first row appearing to create a series of H-shaped football goal posts. Into this rack of beams, a new mass of charred studs, and thinner sticks of blackened wood will be carefully laid in closely set rows parallel with the long sides of the foundation. A gap of approximately 4" will be left between each stick of material. After the first mat of sticks is laid in place, a more widely spaced mat of 4x4 timbers is set on top and perpendicular. Several alternating mats are built up to a height of two feet. At that point, another set of cross-beams is bolted onto the legs-to distribute the increasing vertical weight back onto the column grid-and the process of stacking up the alternating mats of airily massive black densities continues. The process of stacking studs and bolting cross-beams, lapping and extending legs, is continued until the mass of blackened sticks achieves a height just less than double the depth of the foundation hole, roughly equal in mass to the former house.

Having begun as a shaky forest of skinny legs, the massive weight and internal friction of the material stacked within the bolted frames creates a stiff, shear-resistant volume hovering weightily above the yet greater foundation mass set neatly into the ground. The pavilion will be neat, regular and orderly in its repetitive construction process, yet slight variations in the repetitive hand labor and roughly abused material will render the volume slightly hazy in its appearance. The massive black volume of charred sticks will absorb all light when viewed from certain angles, but, viewed from other angles, light will stream directly through the porous construction, like unexpected rays of light piercing through a thundercloud.

ARCHITECTURE OF RESISTANCE

For more than a century, American cities have been used as the raw material for ideological agendas. Cities have been molded to represent a single social philosophy, or to serve a single industry, or to perform a single dominant function. This overlay has suppressed the role of cities as venues for social and political freedom, and has collided with the intrinsically multifarious nature of urban life and construction. Schisms have formed in which wealthy urban enclaves exist in tandem with zones of large-scale calculated abandonment.

Architects have often served the bureaucrat-capitalist agents of urban crisis, helping to conceive and implement the projects that have destroyed vital cities. As a result of this misalliance, art and architecture have forfeited their constructive civic role, and the public has been denied the emancipating potential of urban space. Now architects must forge a new role for themselves. By enmeshing art and architecture into the political and social life of cities, by creating works in concert with the imagination and aspirations of communities, and by working against the deceptive logic of monolithic plans, they can create a new architecture of resistance.

An architecture of resistance works at the root of cities, within the varied and viable strands of existing communities. An architecture of resistance views cities as an ecosystem rather than a machine-an orchestration of a fluid and organic infrastructure. In this view, new projects are seen as catalysts rather than as ends in themselves. Art and architecture function as conduits for public imagination, allowing communities to create their own social and public space. An architecture of resistance promotes an urbanism that is liberating. It returns the maintenance and advancement of democracy to where it began: in the city.

Detroit demonstrates the terminal stages of twentieth century urbanism. Here, the city became factory, its workers brought in and housed like parts for the automobiles they assembled. Then, like a factory, Detroit became obsolete and was discarded in the perpetual and illusory American search for unsullied land and an unsullied work force. While Detroit starkly prefigures other cities now enjoying the fruits of economic expansion, it also potentially holds the future hope of urbanism. Detroit-a city whose scale of urban abandonment is unparalleled, a city which serves as a poster child for the legacy of slash and burn industrial production-is the city in which an architecture of resistance may logically emerge.