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The Gallery

Check out some photos from Detroit on the Gallery Page

5 WAYS WE BENEFITED FROM THE DETROIT SITE VISIT

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Junior, Andrew Rivera, and senior, Marta Goraczniak, look out their window during
one of the class' many car tours. These drive throughs were utilized when the
weather did not cooperate with the class' site visits.

The Studio

The Tireman Street Neighborhood, one of the areas under study. Basemap generated by Detroit Collaborative Design Center.

Detroit Praxis Studio is structured around a site visit to African American neighborhoods in Detroit, particularly the Tireman, Nardin Park and Russell Woods neighborhoods. The studio will engage directly with local community groups, city agencies, the Detroit Design Collaborative and the National Park Service, among others. The photos, videos, interviews and other information collected from the site visit, along with other documentation collected during the course of the semester (maps, historic timelines) will be used to produce a series of maps, collages and digital videos that represent the historic and current condition of these neighborhoods and the communities that form them. 

Through the Years

Breathing Out Beauty by Samantha Dreher

Detroit has always been a home for resilience, a place where people flock to for freedom and prosperity. Even as opportunities left, and much was taken from the African American community left behind, resilience remained. From left to right, this is Detroit’s process of experiencing trauma, resisting it, and creating the resulting beauty that nurtures the community there. The strength of the city becomes as if immaterial. 

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Built Model of Detroit by Eden Cohen and Sarah Cheung

We realized on our trip that rebuilding Detroit relies heavily on remembering the past. This includes the racial segregation that occurred because to build over the past without acknowledging the history, is to invite the repetition of mistakes. There’s a realness to the memories and how vital they are for Detroit’s future. That’s why we chose to represent the physical buildings on the map of Detroit as well as include the photographs of particular places in this city.

Our model has three distinct areas: Suburbs, Midtown, and Downtown. Each symbolize Detroit’s three layers: the past, the present, and the future-- respectively. It encourages interaction and “walking” through the map which symbolizes Detroit’s present neighborhoods. Inside of the structures are the hidden events that reference the past and people that helped shape the spaces to what people see today. For example, Coleman Young was a seen as a civil rights mayor with ties to construction of the downtown areas of Detroit, but left the city after 20 years with still a great deal of social disarray. That is why his photo is in the downtown skyscraper.

We mapped the three areas, with Midtown extending from Downtown.  Many of the images in midtown are proposed developments, because this area has been targeted for improvement and development. There are new plans for a development of luxury rooms near Wayne State University and the University of Michigan. This area is also gaining a new streetcar line on Woodward Ave, while other parts of the city do not even have sidewalks. Conversely, the mapping of houses and photographs follows the statistical vacancy map and illustrates the parts of Detroit “left behind.”

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Detroit Layered by Sophie Harris

The history, structure, and layout of Detroit is expressed through my collage and three dimensional model. On the first base layer there is a map of Detroit overlaid with illustrated trace paper. Here, you can see the historically significant points, the Detroit River and highways, outlined with ink. There is a range of events spanning from 1701, when Fort Detroit was established, to the 1960s, when the demolition of Black Bottom neighborhood began. These events were chosen because of their significance to the urban development and racial history of Detroit. There are photographs and illustrations along with labels to visually display the events chosen. Images of iconic figures such as Joe Louis and Thornton Blackburn are located near where they lived.

On the next layer, large highways are shown in red. They are cut out and elevated above the lower map. The red color was chosen to symbolize that the highways are the main “arteries” of the city. They help to transport people quickly through the space and divide the community into sections, which is why it is seen drifting above the lower layer.

The top most layer of the collage is a transparent film with labels depicting where the class travelled to during the site visit in January. These were included to show the proximity of the class to the historical events that had occurred many years ago. With all three layers combined, there is a connection between historical places and current locations visited.

From the Outside Looking In

“Detroit” and Detroit by Kevin Chung and Edwin Gano

The video represents the juxtaposition between the media’s portrayal of Detroit and the reality of the city. It begins with a student searching Detroit on YouTube. What he sees and hears are the media’s cherry-picked ideas of Detroit: violence, dangers, crimes, riots, poverty, etc. This is followed by snippets of Twitter feeds representing how easy it is for miscommunication to occur between news outlets and the average person.

The next half of the video begins with students in front of a large abandoned building. These frames symbolize the intimidation or reluctance to enter a city labeled “dangerous”. The video proceeds and is presented as a simple home movie that takes a much slower pace compared to the fast graphical style of the journalistic display of information.

The tone becomes more conversational with the audios of Detroiters talking about their city. This brings a more light and personal relationship between the speaker and viewer. It transitions to a dialogue our class had with Sandra Turner-Handy and a video of her personal project that focuses on the youth of Detroit and empowering them to take back and redesign their communities. These last frames point towards a more hopeful future for the city.

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Detroit: Ripping Away the Facade by Marta Goraczniak

By ripping away the facade of an abandoned building in Nardin Park and unveiling cultural aspects of Detroit collected as we toured the city, I contrasted decay and creation. The Detroit presented to the public through the media differs strongly from the reality of the city. My perceptions of Detroit before our visit were really inaccurate; I expected to see only streets of abandoned and burned buildings, crime, and a place that people had given up on. Instead, we saw neighborhoods and talked to residents that turned my opinion of Detroit around completely. I learned that there is a lot more depth to Detroit than just abandoned buildings, and the city is filled with a lot of passion and years of culture.

DETROIT: RECAP