Life of many of Detroit’s vacant buildings began over a hundred years ago when it was a booming auto capital. Once a city of nearly 2 million, there are many unoccupied buildings in Detroit. In taking in the visual landscape of Detroit, one of the first things one notices are the impressive amount and diversity of its built environment and the overwhelming number of vacancies. The issue is a complicated and one that has many answers; adaptive reuse, preservation, and demolition. In summer 2016 it was announced in a press release that the City of Detroit had demolished 10,000 blighted structures costing $125 million of state and national funding.
Last month, the United States entry to the Venice Biennale, Architectural Imagination, returned to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Detroit. For the exhibition twelve design firms from across the U.S. created fantastical new buildings for Detroit shown in impressive models and drawings. Along with the buildings architects also imagined who or what would be occupying them; (a percentage) of America’s refugees, a new school, a center for ecology. One of the sites for the projects is the iconic Packard Plant a vacant industrial site. This site in particular gave architects the opportunity to address an issue that is so critical to the future of Detroit and other post-industrial cities. How can we best utilize vacant buildings as designers?
T+E+A+M’s entry, Reassembly Plant is one answer to the question. One issue that real world developers have with the site is that it is too expensive to take down the Packard Plant. T+E+A+M instead imagines a factory for repurposing materials from blighted industrial structures. The recycled bricks and concrete from the Packard Plant are combined with plastics to create a new composite material that can be used to make new architecture. The architecture and the material itself because an export for Detroit. Reassembly Plant is a hub of for recycling blighted structure from former industrial sites in the region and a center for material science and experimentation. The economic model envisioned in the project one surrounding the reuse and redevelopment of Detroit’s building stock is already a trend today.
Our most recent challenge partner Reclaim Detroit employs community members in the deconstruction for blighted housing and sells the wood to builders and wholesale in a warehouse. Reclaim changes the word “blight” from the city’s fateful flaw to a promising opportunity. The built environment can be one of Detroit’s best “natural” resource.