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Here is a Home: Vernacular residential architecture in Detroit. Analysis of case study homes based upon average housing stock in Detroit neighborhoods and recommended treatments for blighted homes.

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Vernacular architecture expresses the economic conditions, social influences, and values of a city or country. It is a written history, scratched on the fields and plains where we build, leaving a three dimensional story of our society’s values and ideals in the imperfect forms we leave behind.

With the current conditions of Detroit’s housing market and population, it is absurd and irresponsible to suggest that every built structure should be restored and preserved. In fact, much of Detroit’s housing stock was never intended to be completely permanent, built quickly and cheaply to house workers and to increase home ownership in the city. But as blight spreads throughout neighborhoods like cancer, is demolition always the best solution?

Both the presence and removal of blighted homes in Detroit’s neighborhoods disrupts the built fabric and rhythm of the street. Under the presence of blight and removal, a street previously tight and continuous with neighbors, trees and homes, becomes isolating. Current residents of Detroit remark how distant they feel from their neighbors. Driving through Detroit, a strange quiet, almost a pastoral, countryside loneliness, fills up the large swaths of empty lots on Detroit’s streets. When you pass, people wave slowly from their porches, as if deep in the Georgian countryside, while Detroit’s Gothic skyline is dusty in the background.

If we simply remove Detroit’s homes, what do we put in their place?

In the following pages I analyze five typologies of typical housing stock in Detroit. By documenting the historical, sociological, economic and architectural innovations expressed in each typology, the ideas present in each decaying home can be preserved. Following the brief contextual overview, I propose an idea of intervention to preserve the ideas wrapped up in each typology and preserve the rhythm and “completeness” of a street.

I do not argue for preservation of these homes, but as citizens of Detroit, we must consider the preservation of our history, messy and sometimes disappointing, broken and battered, but rich and hopeful. We must create a condition in our neighborhood that eliminates blight, but does not eliminate tight communities. By repairing the visual density of a street– even without building new housing– we can begin to repair the sense of loneliness and abandonment in our neighborhoods.

Here is a home.