Stalking Detroit

GEORGIA DASKALAKIS, CHARLES WALDHEIM AND JASON YOUNG, editors

Foreword: A Dedication

We dedicate this book, with great sadness, but also joy, to the memory of Ignasi de Sola-Morales. At the moment of his untimely death, he was thoughtfully, generously, and enthusiastically initiating the foreword for this publication. As we complete the final work for this project, we find ourselves grappling not only with this great personal loss, but equally with a deep regret for the common void created by his absence and shared by all of us who form part of the discipline of architecture. Ignasi himself referred, in his book Differences, Topographies of Contemporary Architecture, to the impression made upon him by the death of Deleuze, who was clearly an intellectual stimulus. Likewise, Ignasi, with his intense creative energy, has served and continues to serve, using Deleuze's own term, as a "mediator" for many of us. With great ability to "construct intellectually mobile concepts," he forms part of that series of thinkers, events, or things, that open the possibility for each of us to express ourselves with that same spirit of creativity.

Beyond the obvious and immediate inspiration for our research found in his essay, Terrain Vague, he continuously generated multiple and fertile grounds of meaningful inquiry, always with an abundance of profound insights into the rhythms and flows of contemporaneity. He had a unique capacity to trace beautiful and powerful, open and liberating, contours of thought captured by others and projected in multiple and unforeseeable directions. He was a profoundly generous thinker, architect, teacher, mentor, and friend. The great body of work he leaves behind offers endless opportunities for resonance, exchange, dispute, and creative projection. Many of us will continue to talk to Ignasi through his work, to play with it, to engage the force of its freedom, and perhaps to ask of it strange and new questions never imagined by Ignasi himself.

Introduction: Committee Work

Detroit is the most thoroughly modern city in the world. Modern, not of course for its great works of architecture or its progressive social advancements, but modern in the sense that this city has exemplified the assumptions of enlightened modernity like no other. Among those assumptions was a tacit belief that technological advances stemming from empirical knowledge of the world could necessarily lead to social progress. From our perspective at the turn of the century, Detroit, rather than corroborating modernity's faith in progress through technology, affords an extraordinarily legible example of post-Fordist urbanism and its attendant forms of human subjectivity as shaped by the city's continuously and rapidly transforming economic, social, and operational conditions.

For much of the twentieth century, Detroit served as an international model for the development of techniques of optimizing profit from speculative capital through industrialized production. The urban results of this particularly modern obsession were certainly coincidental to the city's primary objective in extracting profit from the precisely articulated relation of surplus labor, natural resources, and venture capital. Detroit's urban conditions are, however, among the most prescient examples of what can now be understood as increasingly global tendencies in the infrastructural, spatial, and material development of cities internationally. The exportation of these techniques of urban arrangement in service of mobile capital, temporary employment, and free trade suggest that Detroit's influence as a global model for urbanism has grown while its population receded.

Fueled by a singular devotion to the imperatives of the automobile industry, Detroit continuously refashioned its own image according to the most recent production patterns, the newest paradigms of industrial operation. Not only did Detroit's urban mirror local developments in industrial production, but the very project of modernist urbanism itself was shaped by fundamentally Fordist agendas regarding the role of urban arrangement as an analog to patterns of production. This fact alone renders Detroit unique in the world as a site for the study of twentieth century urbanism. Detroit's reliance upon the economic monoculture of automobile production virtually ensured the city's nearly complete planned obsolescence as experienced half a century later. As the automobile made mobility more likely, due both to the wealth it created and to the availability of cars to a newly created consumer class, the city physically demonstrated the consequences of its own production. While similar conditions can be found in many post-industrial cities in the Americas and Europe, Detroit recommends itself for particular attention by virtue of the legibility, scale, and enormous social impact of these remarkable transformations.

Detroit's explosive growth in the first half of the twentieth century, and the malleability of its forms of urban arrangement in the second half, are equally illustrative of the city's conception of modernist urbanism. Detroit's expansion and contraction were both planned results of three quite rational intentions of what might be called mature Fordist urbanism. These intentions included the innovation and implementation of techniques of mass production, the fabrication of desire and demand for consumption in mass markets, and the decentralization of both production and consumption through transportation and communications infrastructures. Detroit at the end of the twentieth century is an extreme, and therefore clearly legible, case of these conditions. Mobile

capital rendered the city impermanent, and produced the material reality of Detroit in the 1990's documented here.

What was once Detroitism, as applied to the development of the modern city, can now be extrapolated to refer to the ongoing and unprecedented explosion of urbanization internationally in the context of economic globalization. Detroit is typical yet extreme: at once paradigmatic of the processes of modernization in the formation of twentieth century urbanism and indicative of contemporary trends in metropolitan urban centers developed by increasingly mobile capital in the context of a global economy. In both instances, Detroit was the first of the world's largest urban centers to tangibly evidence these processes in physical form.

Stalking Detroit has been conceived as an anthology of essays, images, and projects, each offering a purchase from the urban milieu of Detroit during the decade of the 1990's. What began with a strictly architectural inquiry into the material remnants of Detroit quickly led to research into the economic, political, and cultural conditions underpinning the city's particular urban formation and the extreme urbanism that it fostered. The multi-disciplinary nature of the anthology followed a similar arc. Beginning with a disciplinary assumption regarding the centrality of architecture's role in understanding the city, the work ultimately demanded multiple disciplinary frames of reference. The anthology places into relation a complex array of photographs, essays, design projects, and critical assessments, affording multiple lenses on this necessarily multifaceted subject. Of particular interest has been a collective desire to resist the increasing annexation of the architectural discipline by sociologically based models of research. The increasing reliance upon sociological models of scholarship has tended to force contemporary discourse on American urbanism through the single dimension of sociological description based on empirical quantification and recuperation of social conditions through planning. Rather, the Committee's interest has been to reassert the relative role and value of design and criticism as legitimate forms of knowledge affording unique insights while offering subtle and telling descriptions of complex urban conditions. While design alone can certainly not hope to explain the contemporary city any more than any single disciplinary frame might, the goal of the anthology is to layer multiple, even contradictory, disciplinary frames of description. The diversity of the collection, established both by the inter-practical nature of the group of contributors and by the various issues put in play by the topic of Detroit, guarantees that the anthology inscribes a robust understanding of analogous situations in contemporary cities internationally. The work included ranges from architectural inquiries that take departure from specific locations in the city to writings that attempt to frame the relationship between the idea of the city and its material permutations. Taken together, the work in this anthology attempts to understand Detroit through the messy conditions that have been posited by and for it; plotting an itinerary through both the idea of the city, and the arena within which that idea is advanced, critiqued, and remade.

The media, cultural commentators, academics, social workers, evangelists, venture capitalists, real estate speculators, political interests, and design professionals are variously poised to save, to solve, or to spin Detroit. Our position has been to stalk Detroit: to lavish it with unwanted

attention. This activity required equal parts persistence and ambivalence. It manifest itself as an obsessive, self-indulgent, yet ultimately indifferent interest in recording the conditions of urbanism in Detroit in lieu of providing engineering solutions, putting forth nostalgic lament, or providing snap judgements.

The Committee for Urban Thinking: Detroit was established in 1994 as a vehicle to conduct research on the conditional nature of Detroit's urbanism. Since that time, the Committee has been stalking the city: pursuing it by keeping track of it in a quiet, stealthy manner. Never intending to save it, solve it, or spin it, the Committee has effectively operated by rejecting the problem-solving posture that pervades many established modes of urban inquiry. The Committee's tactics explicate the mode of urbanism at work in Detroit and simultaneously implicate the terms of its own involvement with the city. Stalking Detroit can be seen as a book about the city or as a book about the disciplines that try to make sense of it.

Of seminal importance to this anthology, the photographs of Jordi Bernado and Monica Rosello construct documentary evidence of the material and spatial conditions of Detroit in the 1990's. These photographs capture the fantastic, poetic, factual, and sober reality of the city and infuse the primary essays with visual openings onto the city itself. The three primary essays place the study of Detroit in a larger historical and theoretical context. They work the thesis of the collection from multiple station points and ground the work in scholarly foundations. Jerry Herron's essay problematizes the touristic appropriation of Detroit's ruins and offers critical positions for the engagement of Detroit as a cultural product. Dan Hoffman relates the material history of the city to historical models of production and chronicles the exhaustion of the cycle of modernity. Patrik Schumacher and Christian Rogner articulate the relationship between Fordism and Modernism, and speculate on Detroit's role in offering a glimpse of post-Fordist urbanism in other cities internationally.

Three photographic essays are included to draw particular attention to the exceptional and extraordinary architectural results of Detroit's peculiar urbanism while providing a scalar break between the larger urban projects. Kent Kleinman and Leslie van Duzer's documentation of the renovation of the Michigan Theater for use as a parking garage exemplifies the opportunistic invasion of the automobile into what had been the space of architecture in the city. Dan Hoffman's description of Detroit's demolition at the scale of the house and the city provides an index of the city's rapidly deteriorating material conditions. Bob Arens' description of the Heidelberg Project and Tyree Guyton's appropriation of abandoned houses as sites for cultural commentary illustrates the extraordinary cultural production attendant to the city's abandonment.

Three design projects respond to and are developed directly from the specific cultural, historic, and material conditions of Detroit in the 1990's. The primary intention in including this work has been to reveal those conditions by representing them using multiple means. An allied goal has been to offer an alternative to neo-traditional models of planning and urban design and their naive revisionist strategies for the recuperation of the pre-industrial city. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, we include this work to speculate on the role of architectural practice in the absence

of traditional urbanism. Not coincidentally, each of the three projects, in differing ways, posits the importance of landscape (in lieu of architecture) as the primary media for the conception and the construction of the contemporary city. Daskalakis and Perez's "Projecting Detroit" articulates the surface of the ground as a framework for new modes of experience, activity, and inhabitation at what had been Detroit's center. Waldheim and Santos-Munne's "Decamping Detroit" takes the city's proposal to abandon large portions of itself at face value and speculates on the future status of Detroit's newly depopulated landscapes. Young's "Line Frustration" delineates the political contrivance of the city's Federal Empowerment Zone boundary while gaming with those territories tangent to it.

Taken together, the projects are meant to be at once both critical and propositional. They can be read as critical urban propositions for Detroit's near future, as well as attempts to illuminate the conditions for practice in cities like it. Collectively, the three diverse strategies pose large questions about the nature of establishing a meaningful and useful practice in the contemporary city. The critical responses by Joan Roig, Jim Corner, and Santiago Colas are included to reflect on the strategies for practice implicated in the design projects and to thematize the issues raised by them in a broader theoretical and critical context. Alex MacLean's aerial photographs afford a rare synoptic view of Detroit's disappearance.

Increasingly, Detroit is more evident in broadcast reception than lived experience. The media, real estate, and business interests, as well as the city administration itself have invested in an urbanism of the simulacra: the ongoing myth of Detroit's resurgence. Despite a recurring history of recent attempts to solve or save Detroit, the city persists in a spontaneous evolution of aggressive dismantling. In spite of the most recent (and several historical) public relations campaigns designed to spin Detroit's long-awaited resuscitation as a site for destination entertainment and speculative investment, the ongoing annexation of the city by its own suburbs continues apace, obscuring the material fact of the city's ongoing demolition. Among the most recent public relations campaigns has been the expenditure of millions of dollars of public funds to augment the federal government's 2000 census count of the city's population in an attempt to recuperate Detroit's image nationally as a site for speculative investment. Developed with publicly subsidized tax incentives, new sports stadia and casinos serve the growing suburban populace by recasting the redundant city as an a-historical destination theme park banking on Detroit's historical name brand. These projects can be understood as tactically deployed coalitions between corporate culture, land speculators, the media, and various political players interested in declaring Detroit's recuperation. Only a block deep and intended for easy access from suburban highway systems, these superficial surfaces of urban refacement work to simultaneously erase both the guts and guilt of what had been one of the largest and wealthiest cities in the modern world. Behind these new public facades and their attendant media campaigns proclaiming Detroit is back, the city continues to disappear, leaving behind extraordinary landscapes and an increasingly indeterminate urbanism.

GEORGIA DASKALAKIS, CHARLES WALOHEIM AND JASON YOUNG, editors

Facts

From 1900 to 1950 the population of Detroit grew from under 285,700 to over 1.8 million.
From 1950 to 2000 the population of Detroit decreased from over 1.8 million to 951,270.
No building construction permits were issued in Detroit in 1988, then the 7th largest city in the U.S.
Between 1978 and 1998 only 9000 building permits were issued for new homes in Detroit, while over 108,000 demolition permits were issued.
In 1998, Detroit was the 11th largest city in the US.
In 1998, 79% of the population in Detroit was African American.
In 1998, 78% of the population in the surrounding suburbs was White.

8 In 1998, the average income in the city was 47% of that in the surrounding suburbs.

9 In the 1990’s, Detroit had the largest percentage of single-family homes in the U.S.

10 In the 1990’s, the city lost 1% of its housing stock each year to arson.

11 In 1990, the city spent $25 million on the removal of abandoned houses and other structures.

12 Between 1990 and 1992, the city spent $250 million on the removal of toxic waste on property the city was donating to Chrysler Corporation for the construction of a new Jeep Factory.

Sources:

2, 5 - 8. U.S. Census Bureau.
3, 9 - 12. Dan Hoffman, "The Best the World has to Offer," Public lecture at Union of International Architects Congress AIX, Barcelona, July 1996.
Sanford Kwinter and Daniela Fabricius, "Contract with America," Mutations, [Barcelona: ACTAR, 2000], p. 600.

Detroit downtown figure-ground diagrams, Richard Plunz, "Detroit is Everywhere," Architecture Magazine, April 1996, vol. 85, no. 4, pp. 55-61.

three meditations on the ruins of Detroit

First the Facts

Forget what you think you know about this place. Detroit is the most relevant city in the United States for the simple reason that it is the most unequivocally modern and therefore distinctive of our national culture: in other words, a total success. Nowhere else has American modernity so completely had its way with people and place alike. Reputedly "historic" towns, like Philadelphia, New Orleans, and San Francisco, merely seem by comparison. Others, such as New York, Los Angeles, and Miami, are not American at all, but more like small, poorly run foreign countries with insufficient fresh water and arable land. And Chicago, no less than its sun-belt reflux, Houston, has been forced to compensate with high-rise architecture for the general lack of autochthonous culture. This makes Detroit the revealed "Capital of the Twentieth Century," and likely the century ahead, because this is the place, more than any other, where the native history of modernity has been written. This same modernity has made Americans collectively, and globally, what we are all still becoming today, bringing along with us the rest of the so-called "developed" world.

The genius of this becoming was our genius (for those fortunate enough to live in Detroit): a native son. "Nothing original, yet everything new," as Terry Smith has characterized the modernity of Henry Ford:

Not one of thousands of engineering and other tooling discoveries that attended the success of the new processes was his creation. The inventive genius represented by his name was above all an organizational one: elements developed elsewhere were shaped into a productive system of incessantly self-refining functionality in which nothing was original except the system itself...'

What is lost to us now, perhaps, is the liberatory moment of Ford's systemic modernity, the perpetual making new, which has become conventional to reduce to a panoptic regime of idiotic, duplicable production, an "incessantly self-refining functionality."

But to stop there is to lapse into the worst kind of Foucauldian nostalgia: a longing for lost discipline that makes post-modern punishment seem a relief. That is to say, it is missing the

point. At least, it is missing a point that remained crucial to the emergent structure of feeling that made modernity seem desirable and therefore worth buying (at frequently exorbitant rates). The problem of the modernist subject now, at any rate, the problem invented by some aspiring post-historians of modernity, is the loss of that defining, historical Other: the time-bound we that all of us once knew ourselves really to be, as opposed to some modernist ideal. “The practical problem of urban design now,” Richard Sennett has written, for example, with reference to the plate-glass architecture inspired by Mies, “is how men and women can cope with the solitude imposed upon them by modernism.” One could make such a statement only in the absence of that lost collective Other of history. The question is for whom and to what extent Sennett’s once-upon-a-time Other has been dispersed.

An oppositional history was characteristic not only of the privileged subjects of modernist “high” culture, along with middle-class aspirants to simulacral entitlement; it seems to have defined the working-class subjects of “Fordism” as well. The modernity of their labor, looked back at now, consisted of the mechanical equivalent of Sennett’s isolation: the day spent in tasks so idiotically small as to refer to nothing outside their repetitive, mindless simplicity, with the necessary speed of the line executing a kind of noisy, mechanical “solitude imposed upon them by modernism.” “The man who places a part does not fasten it,” Ford decreed, “The man who puts in a bolt does not put on the nut; the man who puts on the nut does not tighten it.” Imagine it if you can,” a writer for Colliers magazine began his description of Henry Ford’s Highland Park assembly line in 1914 during the peak production years of the Model T:

…its endless rows of writhing machinery, its shrieking, hammering, and clatter, its smell of oil, its autumn haze of smoke, its savage-looking foreign population—to my mind it expressed but one thing, and that was delirium.

Seventy years later, Fredric Jameson would imagine he had discovered in post-modernity the “savage” self-fragmenting subjectivity described here, which he would dub the “hysterical subline.” Those two moments of hysterical projection share the same strategy, which, like Sennett’s, reduces to unintelligible ruin any subject position not precisely supervised by their own prescriptive nostalgias. Each yearning for a moment of historicist repression that may never have existed, at least not in those terms.

How Not To Visit Detroit

First the facts. Now a thesis. A ruin is not found, it is made: an anti-historical compound of nostalgia and merchandising. This collusion is suggested in the sociologist Dean MacCannell’s formulation, from his book, The Tourist (subtitled “A New Theory of the Leisure Class”): “The deep structure of modernity is a totalizing idea, a modern mentality that sets modern society in opposition both to its own past and to those societies of the present that are premodern or un(der) developed.” Elsewhere, MacCannell concludes, quite beautifully, in fact, “As a tourist, the individual may step out into the universal drama of modernity.” I would say he has things about right, except in reverse, rather like Fredric Jameson writing under the influence of his politically nostalgic unconscious. As a tourist, the individual does not step into, but out of the historically negotiated drama of modernity. The totalizing impulse MacCannell ascribes to modernity is, in other words, more nearly post-modern in its origins. With

post-modernity it shares an academic, institutionalizing urge to control history; reducing memory to sites of corporate supervision by merchandizing history as nostalgic ruin.

But to who does a ruin first appear as a ruin? Not to native inhabitants, surely, for whom history is not a holiday diversion, but a continuous, if haphazard, way of living. When did Romans, for example, first realize that they no longer lived in a city, but in a ruin? Perhaps not until English gentlemen, taking the Grand Tour, found themselves in need of souvenirs. What those souvenirs spoke to genteel collectors was not history, but the humiliation of history; not the "lessons" of the past, but the mastery of ownership, as if consumption had taken the place of self-knowledge, because in fact it had.

"A world ended in Detroit," Camilo José Vergara has declared, connoisseur-like, in Metropolis magazine, with his article serving both as advertisement for a recently published coffee-table book (The New American Ghetto), and a traveling exhibition of his photographs. Vergara has been dining out on Detroit for a number of years, as a matter of fact, in the pages of such journals as the Nation, the Washington Post, and the New York Times. He has devised a version of Detroit, that most classically representative of cities, which proves attractive to great numbers of middle-class Americans who share his urge to get over the responsibility of history by reducing its memory to nostalgic ruins. Vergara's "solution" to the problems of the city, and his nominal reason for writing his now much reproduced article in Metropolis magazine, was to propose that a large chunk of downtown Detroit be turned into a kind of dystopian theme park: "a dozen city blocks of pre-Depression skyscrapers be stabilized and left standing as ruins: an American Acropolis." "All I can do," Vergara confesses touristically, "is to record the fading splendor of the buildings and the disjointed and anguished cries of those who try to make a home among them." This high-mindedness is perhaps all well and good, liberal romanticism notwithstanding. It is the naive tourism implicit in Vergara's proposals that is both more consequential, and also representative of post-modern souvenir taking and the down-sizing nostalgias that reduce the cause-and-effect of history to the disjointed stuff of coffee-table publication.

"The tourists," MacCannell writes in his un-self-regarding characterization, "return home carrying souvenirs and talking of their experiences, spreading, wherever they go, a vicarious experience of the sight. Authentic experiences are believed to be available only to those moderns who try to break the bonds of their everyday existence and begin to live." "Just back from Detroit," the self-authenticating Vergara assures his readers, "which I visit every year. Its downtown moves me like no other place." Vergara acts out a vicarious self-authentication.

He is "moved" by the spectacular "ruin" of the city, which his own photographs translate into marketable souvenirs. These sights are offered for sale to the supposedly disauthenticated, post-modern populace for whom "the fading splendor of the buildings" and the "anguished cries of those who try to make a home among them" have alike been translated to aestheticized curioses. "As experience is increasingly mediated and abstracted," Susan Stewart points out in her description of souvenirs, "the lived relation of the body to the phenomenological world is replaced by a nostalgic myth of contact and presence." Vergara's sight-seeing, his vicarious "myth of contact and presence," replaces the reader/citizen's actual bodily visit to the city, and records (as souvenir trope) an abandonment of urban space, both real and imaginary, that is of great historical consequence.

As MacCannell suggests, it is the "authenticity of the self," Vergara's prototypical self, that is really the question. Vergara's concern with an aesthetic of feeling renders history not so much impossible as irrelevant: "All I can do is to record the fading splendor." Of course, that is not all he can do, but all he wants to do. He is shrewd, if not precisely original in his wish both to remember

Detroit, and at the same time to know nothing whatsoever about it: "[W]e could transform the nearly 100 troubled buildings [downtown] into a grand national historic park of play and wonder, an urban Monument Valley." Here, the potential for aesthetic "play and wonder" entitles the connoisseur to make an empty "ruin" of the place where a million people still live and work, many of them in conditions of enforced desperation. (Vergara's photographs, offered as souvenirs from a theme park that will probably never be built, rarely include human figures, regardless of his rhetorical sensitivity to the "anguished cries" of the invisible citizenry.) The historic "solitude" imposed by modernity, to which Richard Sennett refers, is not so much solved as it is thematized, Disneyified, as consumable entertainment. If "Detroit is everywhere," as Vergara proposes, then so too is his conveniently packaged "Disneyzone" anodyne, to use Michael Sorkin's dismissive term for a post-modern (and post-mortem) "urbanism without... a city." Vergara's is a perfectly un-historical space, wherein the politics of middle-class feeling take the place of understanding, responsibility, and action. That is a solution of sorts, I suppose, and one that has kept Vergara consistently in the news, as if to confirm the wish of Americans to generally escape the old modernist stand-offs: memory versus desire, history versus utopia. If we could only just get rid of the one, then we would be free to enjoy the other.

Meditation One: Do You Remember Hudson's?

Perhaps the greatest of all the "ruins" in Detroit is the now leveled structure that once housed the J. L. Hudson Company, Detroit's premier downtown retailer. At its completion in 1929, it was the world's largest department store. The building, demolished in 1998, represented an architectural consolidation undertaken in stages between 1924 and 1929 under the supervision of Smith, Hinchman, and Grylls. The structure was twenty-five stories, with four additional stories below ground; it encompassed 2.2 million square feet of floor space. There were 5,000 windows, 700 dressing rooms, and 51 passenger elevators each with their own white-gloved attendant. Hudson's had storage space for 83,000 furs. A seven-story flagpole topped the structure. This mercantile enormity displaced the former high points of civic culture: the church steeples and city hall tower. The lives of citizens would no longer be triangulated by those outmoded referents; instead, people were invited to discover themselves in relation to a commercial culture that they could buy and dispose of piecemeal, as they pleased. It was the modern way.

The enormous building was vacated in 1983, when Hudson's (by then a subsidiary of a Minneapolis retail chain) closed its doors in Detroit forever. Only downsized suburban outposts remain. The old downtown store was never too far out of the public mind, however. At holidays it served as a gigantic reminder of all the good times that people (who invariably no longer lived there) say they used to have in Detroit, but which the city (abandoned by more than half of its former residents) now seemingly makes impossible. The fact is that Hudson's was not a ruin of anything, except a sentimental wish to impose on someone else a kind of life that modernity has taught us all, collectively, to leave behind.

The suburbs did not kill Hudson's, in other words, we simply outgrew it, just as we were intended to. The J. L. Hudson Company built the first suburban shopping center in the United States (called Northland), and, along with other "downtown" interests, developed (at enormous profit) the housing and transportation routes required to make suburbia viable. Not incidentally, the year of Northland's completion (1954) was the same year that previously growing sales at the downtown store began an irreversible decline. And no surprise, Hudson's taught consum-

ers how to master and ultimately condescend to the many-storied plot that was once crucial to
the pedagogy of department-store consuming: the omniscient, commercial narrative that moved
shopper through the store and into lives defined in imitation of its disciplinary regime. Just as
labor unions ceased to script the enfranchisement of individual workers, centralized shopping
became anachronistic to the mature desires of fully individuated consumers who preferred the
come-as-you are populism of shopping mall entry. In both instances, "we" outgrew the master
narratives, those training wheels on our ideological bicycle, and now feel sufficiently confident to
go forward on our own. And that represents not a ruin of modernity, but its on-going vitality, a
vitality vouchafsed not only to those who have left the city behind.

"I am disappointed by the reaction against the ruins park," Vergara muses, in a state
of disingenuous incredulity. He seems unable to fathom the preference of homeless citizens, for
example, when they say they would prefer heat, shelter, and jobs, instead of his Motown
Acropolis which "would occupy only a minuscule fraction of the city's idle space." 17

Perhaps what is at stake is a native grasp of the danger implicit in his fantasy. All too
easily, the poor and disenfranchised are reduced to souvenir extras when "we" who are not poor
execute our nostalgic "contract" with America, as if history were subject to periodic renegotiation.
That opportunistic figuration simply cannot be sustained at ground level, surely not around the old
Hudson's store, in this city of desperate (if illegal) modernity. Here the illicit economy is, for some
cohorts of the population, the main employer, especially of young men. They seem not to require a
public monument to "our throwaway cities," to use Vergara's terminology. Their lives prove suf-
ficient reminders of where and who they are, and of the value yet to be discovered in a history
that others would prefer to blame on resident "indifference" and then simply leave behind.

Meditation Two: Horace Rackham's Doorknob

On both sides of Woodward Avenue, just north of Detroit's so-called New Center (a semi-successful
attempt to relocate the city's overcongested downtown in the 1920's) is a neighborhood that was
once home to some of the richest and most powerful men in the United States. Boston-Edison,
it is called, after two of its main streets. Henry Ford, then a recently minted billionaire, built
his first mansion here in the years just before the First World War. S. S. Kresge (founder of
K-Mart) lived in a great house, the grounds of which occupied a full city block. J. L. Hudson, who
created the Hudson's department store, lived only a street away. Ranged around them were the
less wealthy and elite of Detroit: retailers and car magnates and manufacturers. Even Ty Cobb
was a resident, if not precisely a neighbor. On Edison Avenue, just a couple of houses down from
where Ford would one day make his home, Horace Rackham built his house. Before he became
rich and philanthropic (endowing among other things the University of Michigan's graduate school)
Rackham was an attorney and investor who, along with a small group of Detroiters, loaned Henry
Ford the money he needed to build his first commercially successful car: the original Model A.
This was Ford's third try at auto manufacturing. The first two attempts having ended in financial
wreck, investors were hard to come by. "The horse is here to stay," a banker friend of Rackham's
advised, "the automobile is only a novelty—a fad." Nevertheless, Rackham bought 50 shares of
Ford stock, at a cost of $6,000. Between 1903 and 1919, he was paid $4,750,000 in dividends
on that investment. When Ford bought him out in 1919, taking the company private, Rackham's
shares were redeemed for $12,500,000. He became, on the spot, an immensely wealthy man.

Rackham's house still stands, like most of the houses in this district. It is a modest place,
by local standards, not nearly so fine as many of his neighbors'. I know the people who live there

now, a mathematician and an artist. The first time they invited me over, before ringing the bell, I put my hand on their front door knob, which appeared to be original. I imagined Rackham doing the same thing, then opening the door on that April afternoon, eighty years before, after he had collected his check from Henry Ford: "Honey, I'm home, and here's the 12.5 million." It is doubtful this little vignette ever got played out. Rackham was probably driven home, arriving not in front, but at the side or the rear, greeted by a servant. No wonder I get things wrong; it is hard for me to imagine his life, except as the wish-fulfilling fantasy, the retro-souvenir, of a West-Texas used-car dealer's son who grew up knowing very little about wealth, or servants, or porte cochères.

Not that my friends who own Rackham's house are any more knowledgeable about such things. Like virtually all the current residents in the neighborhood, they inhabit places (often near palaces) never intended for people like themselves. But then who could have guessed that one day, half the city's population and most of its wealth would just walk away? Before that happened, people of the class, or race, of the neighborhood's current homeowners would likely have been consigned to the back stairs, the third floors, the cottages of tradesmen and domestics. Sometimes present-day Detroiters buy the great houses as if to get even for their prior exclusion. They make a payment or two, strip out the doors and fixures and sell these to dealers; then they default on the mortgage loan. Many of the homes have been wasted that way, and then abandoned to the next stage in their devolution. Here impromptu recyclers ply their trade, day and night, with old shopping carts and rattletrap pick-ups, for the most part unmolested by the law, making their way up and down Detroit's un-maintained streets. Inevitably, these houses reach the final stage in this process of controlled decay, becoming yet another crumbling souvenir of the glory that was once Detroit. "The houses, mostly standing as they stood a half-century ago, are dismal structures," Russell McLauchlin wrote, for example, in a reminiscence of his own (even more dilapidated) childhood neighborhood, not far from Boston-Edison:

Some have night-blooming grocery stores in their front yards. Some have boarded windows.
All stand in bitter need of paint and repair. It is a desolate street; a scene of poverty and chop-fallen gloom; possibly of worse things. But once, within a clear middle-aged memory, Alfred Street was a lovely place.

McLauchlin's description was written at the end of the Second World War; the intervening years have only increased the local appetite for nostalgia. This nostalgic sighting of the past offers a retroactive justification for the very acts of abandonment that produced the "ruins" in the first place. These ruins are now made to appear, sui generis, as the result of some native deficiency of culture which those lucky enough to have escaped need to prevent from overtaking their new-found homes.

What is interesting is how little power such grand residences as existed on Alfred Street or, somewhat later, in Boston-Edison, held over the original owners, who abandoned them long before the neighborhoods got old. As E. P. Thompson has taught us with regard to social class, modernity is no less invisible, except when it is in motion. Such mobility is what made the Boston-Edison houses desirable as destinations, and then antiquated them almost as fast. Because money, especially when newly made, is expressive only on the go, when it is buying something new. Detroit's "substantial families," as R. D. McKenzie called them in his 1933 study (dealing with the years 1900-1930), had always been moving away from the past and the central city, out toward, and then into, the suburbs. What McKenzie discovered is that this pattern of migration was much faster for Detroit's richest citizens than for similar citizens in New York, Los Angeles, or Chicago. In those cities the population of "notables"

in fact increased between 1910 and 1930. In Detroit, that population declined because people who had "made it" considered getting out of the city to be a necessary imprimatur of success.

McKenzie's conclusion, in his quaintly snobbish sociology, was that the preponderance of heavy industry and working class immigrants were responsible for the elite's evacuation of Detroit. But that is to mistake the cause for the effect. Detroit had so many mobile rich people, many of whom started out as working-class immigrants, because it was and is a place given over entirely to industrial modernity. That is what created Boston-Edison, and that is what made it available, almost immediately, to somebody else on the way up. "Nothing original, yet everything new," as Terry Smith remarked of Henry Ford's modernity. Ford himself, a farmboy turned mechanic, only stayed in his house at 66 Edison Avenue a couple of years before building Fair Lane in suburban Dearborn, where he moved in 1916. The Boston-Edison houses, even the ones that have been truly ruined by predation, are not souvenirs of lost elegance, failed culture, depopulation, or something else. Souvenirs are something you bring back from a trip after it is over. For the people who live here, the trip is far from done, so these historic houses keep getting moved into, and used, because for somebody they still represent "everything new," no matter how old it may be.

Meditation Three: Romance of the Road

Perhaps the most important historic site in Detroit goes entirely unnoted because it is not marked. A state commemorative plaque is located not at the site itself, but in an historic neighborhood some distance removed. The stretch of Woodward Avenue between Six and Seven Mile Roads was the first piece of concrete paved highway in the United States, laid down in 1909, before anybody could have guessed at the importance of what was being done. The paving represents an act of pure creativity. Like pure science or pure mathematics, it pre-dated the use that would reveal its premonitory value. Industrial modernity produced the workers who would build the cars, in such great numbers and so cheaply, that everyone, including the workers themselves, would eventually be able to buy one. And by then, the value of modern pavement would seem so self-evident as to merit no special notice of this long-since forgotten moment of foresight. Today, high-velocity pavement grids the geography of our sight-specific modernity, enabling a schematic wonder that makes all attendant wonders seem likewise possible by association.

Sight-specific modernity was no less powerful in 1951, when Detroit celebrated its 250th anniversary, which became the occasion for the publication of This Is Detroit: 250 Years in Pictures. The "Postlude," subtitled "The Vision and the Fulfillment," offers the following recollection of the city's founder Antoine Laumet de la Mothe Cadillac: "On the site of Cadillac's fort of 250 years ago the imposing buildings of the new Civic Center are now rising. As long as her citizens shall continue to dream and dare greatly, the future of the City Cadillac founded will remain secure." The final two images in the volume are of then not yet extant freeway interchanges: the Lodge/I-94 interchange north of the Wayne State University campus, and the Lodge/I-75 interchange near Tiger Stadium. The two images are titled, aptly, "Works in Progress," just as the city itself was, and is, a work still in progress. Each shows an aerial rendering of the city and, superimposed over it, a tracing of the planned freeways that would innervate that historic terrain just as a nerve innervates muscle tissue and endows it with the capacity to move. The future of Detroit will remain secure, the anniversary volume advised, "as long as her citizens shall continue to dream and dare greatly." That is what these photographs are all about. They are maps of the dream and wonder of modernity, expressed at the intersection of pavement and history.

But the photographic superimposition gives a false impression, and merely confirms the now prevalent, and nostalgic, view that freeways laid waste to otherwise vital communities that would still be vital today if only they had not been submitted to the eminent domain of concrete. These claims are utter nonsense because the freeways did not interrupt the historical logic of American urbanism. On the contrary, they are its purest, most sublime expression. The photographic image is a false one because the freeway is not a superimposition, but rather a natural outgrowth, a fulfillment of the modernity of which the city is the sight-specific expression. And now that we have arrived at the future always already inscribed in our design, the question is whether we will have the courage to take responsibility for the results. This is a complicated question, obviously, and only made more so in a city such as Detroit. In this respect at least (Vergara notwithstanding), Detroit is an exaggerated paradigm of all American cities. By default, it has been inherited by populations (many of them poor and poorly-educated minorities) whose attitude toward historic "preservation" can only be a vexed one. Particularly so, since the history in question was one scripted to exclude them from the scheme that made modernity so highly profitable to somebody else, someone who has now moved away.

As to what became of our ability to dare and dream greatly, there is no simple or single answer. Perhaps it is our frustrated national impatience with the future, and our concomitant wish to devour it ahead of time, before it runs out. "Futrology" displaces history and nostalgia supplants modernity as "cultural dominant" (to use Fredric Jameson's term): a nostalgia for how we imagine the by now exhausted future used to make us feel. William Whyte, for example, is among the most famous and famously nostalgic of city interpreters. In his book City, subtitled "Rediscovering the Center," he recounts with sociological exactitude his love affair with pedestrian streets, which are the nostalgic Other of high-speed pavement. He laments the unwillingness of Americans to walk more than 800 to 1,000 feet before getting in their cars, noting this distance as approximately that between the anchor stores in a suburban shopping mall. He concludes, "[I]f Americans could widen their walking radius by only 200 feet, there would be a revolution in U.S. land use. However, there would have to be structural changes. There would have to be places to walk."[22] It is not as if Whyte is wrong, or not entitled to his nostalgia for a redemptive future, which of course he is. The problem is his presumption that the behavior of Americans is evidence of a kind of ignorance, or moral degeneracy, although these are perhaps highly convenient assumptions to adopt.

This strikes me, nevertheless, as the worst kind of pandering. In the name of bringing things back, of rediscovering our center, "we," whoever that is, are invited to see as ruin that which others might want to call history. The city, in fact, counter to Whyte's presumptions, did produce places to get to. We got there, by choice, on paved highways. And it is the extraordinary wealth produced by the city, by this city, Detroit, that made the trip possible for numbers of individuals unprecedented in the long history of human societies. That is what the city did. Now, to presume its putative exhaustion is evidence of anything but the city's successful design is like blaming the gas tank for getting empty or the tires for wearing out when somebody drives the family car. The problem is not that so many people used the city to get to where they wanted to go, which was someplace else. The problem is that not everybody was allowed to come along for the ride, so that a population who has been excluded in its entitlements now often inhabits the structural apparatus of modernity. To blame those people for conditions over which they have had little control, or to blame the historic city for its insistent, if problematic, witness to its own success is to miss the fundamental point, only hinted at in Whyte's suggestion of a need for "structural" change. That is precisely what is needed: a structure for changing nostalgia into intelligence, ruin into history, for recalling the sights of modernity to a still relevant specificity. There will be

no arbitrary posting of the Modern, in other words, until we have reached its end, architectural cartoons notwithstanding. As to what, precisely, that end may be, it is all a matter of arrival. That is to say, it is all about cars.

Conclusion

The automobile is the mechanical summation of our urban predicament: the ultimate love object of our national desire, which renders the city at once accessible, and also outmoded, inconvenient, unnecessary, like the history, supposedly, from which it was born. There is simply nowhere convenient to park, in the city or history. Whatever is to become of the metropolis, then, and us along with it, will be determined by the confrontation of cars with historic space. The most sublime expression of our national identity was sight specific, to be apprehended behind the wheel. That is where individualist democracy and industrial modernity converge climactically in an embrace of man (or woman) and machine that is perhaps the supreme moment of fulfillment we will know as a people; with the fit of dream and reality being perfect, or nearly so.

This was all made possible, regardless of how we may feel about the results, through the logic of the "sunken ditch." This is the origin of the American freeway and also the cause of much derisive, and mistaken, criticism by architects and urban planners, who presume that some kind of gigantic mistake was made. Quite the contrary, freeways were the populist fulfillment of an urban "dream" distinctively our own (to recall the language of the 1950's Detroit commemorative volume). By sinking roadways below street level, civic authorities could control access and therefore allow greater speed of travel for urban motorists. Not incidentally, this made good on the sight-specific promise that cars had only been hinting at ever since Henry Ford drove his first "Quadricycle" through the streets of Detroit on that fateful June morning in 1896: the promise that automobiles would carry us out of the past and into the modern world.

Quite clearly, Detroit is the Capital of the twentieth century, and probably the century to come. Here, we built the auto-matic future, and it drove us out of town and into the world beyond, where it is every American's God-given right to park directly in front of wherever it is we are going. "The road generates its own patterns of movement and settlement and work," J. B. Jackson proposes, tantalizingly, in A Sense of Place, A Sense of Time, "without so far producing its own kind of landscape beauty or its own sense of place." 23 I am not so sure that those conclusions are sustainable, given the witness of Detroit, although the implication that modernity should yield a traditionally recognizable "beauty" is possibly the problem. The sense of place that modernity produces, finally, may require new, un-nostalgic categories to comprehend it. Whatever image we make of the city now, whether we left or stayed behind, it will be of the city, this city, confronted through a windshield. This is the sight toward which modernity has driven us: screened by our private nostalgias, protected by an individually serviceable technology, and traveling at speed through the ruins our evacuation has made of Detroit.

JERRY HERRON

the best the world has to offer

If Detroit is to be called "The Capital of the Twentieth Century," it is not because of its architecture, monuments, or great cultural achievements. Detroit is the Capital because of its singular devotion to the idea of industrial production, investing all of its resources into a technology and product that has transformed the face of every modern city. In the process, Detroit has allowed itself to be reinvented time and again; recasting its space, culture, and architecture in the form of the latest production idea.

The "Capital of the Twentieth Century" is not a place but a product; a new style, a new mode of production, "a better idea." This idea is confirmed in common speech when we refer to the American automobile industry as "Detroit." Nowhere else do we find a city so completely dedicated to a single industry and the obsessions of modern technology. Detroit defines itself through its pursuit of material perfections, and by forgetting the past in order to make way for technologies that promise greater accuracy and production efficiencies. Perfection is not a spiritual thing in the Capital. It comes rolling off the line every other second in the form of a new car. Ideas like the flatness of a plane or the straightness of a line are now considered as practical concerns rather than spiritual pursuits, organizing industry and science in a never-ending trajectory of progress and growth.

Practical ideas are the currency of the Capital (Ford has a better idea). They produce their own economy, re-inscribe space, and transform the city: practical ideas such as the division of labor, the assembly line, the horizontal factory, yearly model changes, and the "team" model of design and production. Practical ideas are always simple. They offer a way forward in situations that are otherwise complex and difficult. The problem is that new ideas produce new complexities. New conditions that the Capital would rather overlook than confront.

Bob Lutz, while a senior vice-president with Chrysler Corporation, described his firm's new "team" approach to design in a videotaped interview. In this interview, Lutz described how a diverse group representing the many aspects of a new car's realization could design a single part of a car simultaneously. These aspects included basic engineering, design, marketing, fabrication sub-contractors, cost accounting, and a limitless array of attendant specialties. He went on to describe how a corporation could be organized around this idea, and consider issues as complex as contractual relationships with suppliers as well as new procedures to be implemented on the assembly line. The range of applications was

enormous and this was precisely Lutz’ point: the simpler the idea, the greater its effect. Ultimately, however, there is another side to the excitement that comes with a new idea. This is the shadow of obsolescence that it casts upon the remainder of the city. With every new idea comes the realization that a part of the city is now obsolete. Bob Lutz was fully aware of this when he used the General Motors Headquarters Building in Detroit as an example of the obsolete, linear model of development and production. The old model divided the corporation into separate divisions that communicated through slow and formalized channels. The three parts of the building represented the three primary divisions: sales, engineering, and design. With this passing reference, Bob Lutz relegated this great building to the shadow of history, and denied the efficacy of its presence in the city. A new idea has great power in the Capital and architecture is always one of the first casualties. The edge of technology is always happening somewhere out of sight, and beyond the horizon of the city. It emits signals through casual remarks, subtle advertising campaigns, and stock prices. The General Motors Headquarters is still standing but the psychic locus of the city has now been shifted.

The faith in new ideas erases the past and eliminates the function of monuments. Think of a capital without monuments and the collective act of mourning that they evoke. The great capitals of the nineteenth century are full of them, constantly reminding their citizens of the formative events in their nation’s history and how they are all bound to a common culture. Monuments stand alone as stable points against the flux of the present, and inspire civic virtues through the remembrance of the ancestor’s sacrifice. According to convention, these virtues rule over civic life and are the foundation for the patriarchal nature of the nation-state.

However, despite its many imposing structures ornamented with the trappings of civic life, there are no monuments in the “Capital of the Twentieth Century.” Things move too quickly. Survival is more a matter of forgetting than remembering. Rather than guided by images of the past, the citizens of the Capital invest their beliefs in the images that promise a stake in the new. There is no future in the past. Here the complexities of the moment are presented within an image of desire, and are delivered in the form of media advertising. A recent billboard, installed along one of the major freeways in the Capital, shows an image of the new Ford Explorer set in an Arcadian landscape of waterfalls and lush trees. Across the bottom of the image is the phrase “The Best the World Has to Offer.” This image functions on many levels. The “best” the world has to offer is somewhere beyond the horizon, and the endless entropic sprawl of the Capital. This place can be reached only by purchasing the other half of what the world has to offer, in this case, the world of consumption and international techno-capital. Nature and technology are combined in a transporting picture of delight. The subtext to the image carries the message that the way forward is the way out. Technology provides a perfected nature, an idealized, and transcendent aesthetic. The city is simultaneously as unattainable and as close as this late model car.

Advertising succeeds to the degree that it denies the context within which it is placed. The paradoxical location of advertisements amidst the ruins of the Capital would certainly confirm this equation. However, there is something more to this image. The pairing of absolute nature and technology carries with it a difficult truth that we are just now beginning to comprehend. The fact that the car is placed at the edge of the world shows that the Capital is now staking claim to the edge of the planet, and also, the horizon of development has come full circle upon itself and is calling for a more ecological vision. Perhaps the car is about to be mistaken for an image of nature itself.

As markers, these images are helpful to the citizens, offering ways in which they can direct their lives in the flux of an ever-changing economy. Advertising encourages the reconciliation of one’s personal desires with the demands of the new idea that is transforming the landscape.

These ideas cannot be stopped because they hold the promise of a new life for industry in the form of greater profits and more growth. The Capital must continue to expand since growth is now in the interest of all of its citizens. Images help the citizens reconcile this trajectory, they give it a form, and they offer space.

This growth makes the Capital difficult to pin down. Things are always moving, they are a blur or a smudge on the map. In the end, it is all movement; the stable reference point was lost long ago. The images are what we remember, and the images are what we desire. They are the currency, and the moving reference for this capital on the verge of dreams.

The first of these ideas was the moving assembly line itself, which encapsulates the idea of a moving reference. Historians place the invention of the moving assembly line in Cincinnati, where pig carcasses were first moved on hooks through various stages of slaughtering and carving. $^{3}$ But its application to the assembly of automobiles brings the process to its true conceptual clarity: moving vehicles produced on a moving assembly line.

The strength of this idea was too powerful to be limited to an industrial process. Here the dynamism of a relational function is applied in practice: a moving machine produces a machine that moves. The complexity of movement within the body of a worker is externalized into a complex array of devices that can sustain that movement at a constant speed. The static reference of space is now supplanted by the temporal reference of motion. Motion is now the constant. This idea spawns other ideas and sets in motion a new economy and image. An older idea, the division of labor, is applied with a ruthless precision as every stage in the assembly process is organized around the logic of the moving line. The line is divided into an infinite number of serialized and individually optimized motions. This is Taylorism: the analysis of human motion according to principles of efficient management. $^{4}$ The body becomes a component of the machine.

The force of this reduction was a difficult, albeit thrilling, adjustment; and a great discipline was required to sustain the mechanism. Architecture, until that time, had been the very symbol of a static, spatial reference. It was called upon to lend balance to this newly unhinged world. The balance took the form of an explicit, spatial ordering, which served to prepare the population for the strict precision and hierarchy of the production system. It achieved this by recalling the virtues of civic duty and propriety, and by giving shape to an important web of civic institutions such as museums, churches, monuments, and schools. Virtue became a pragmatic thing, a question of efficiency rather than ethics. Advertising itself played a secondary role to the projection of civic duty, which, because of the local nature of the economy at the time, all businesses actively supported. One might say that a company’s building was its best form of advertising; it declared a place in the community through the fact of its physical presence. One has a sense of this in the old part of the city where ordered facades punctuated by monumental, civic institutions, such as churches and museums, shape the streets. Even the Highland Park Model T factory assumed a civic air, its concrete frame rendered in the stately air of a one-half mile long brick and limestone facade.

Siegfried Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1948), 216.
On the application of Taylorism to Fordist production in Detroit, see Patrik Schumacher and Christian Ruger, After Ford, $^{5}$ in this collection. Pere general introduction to Taylorism and Taylor’s principles of scientific management, see Robert Kangel, The One Best Way: Frederick Winston Taylor and the Enigma of Efficiency (New York: Penguin Books, 1997).

Order produced order. Straight lines produced more straight lines in a seemingly endless expenditure of energy. Building itself was rendered as production, and the crafts of the previous age existed as mass-produced emblems of virtue whose mechanical repetition on facades it both celebrated and depleted.

Order was power. The order of vertical process shaped both the vertical office and the (then still vertical) assembly lines. This spatial and operational symmetry was not coincidental, nor was its extension into the organization of the city or the maintenance of social order. This socially legible and enforceable order was a necessary aspect of the massing of labor in sufficient quantities for industrial production. Raw material was delivered to the top of a multi-storied factory and distributed to the stations along the assembly line by the force of gravity. Another new idea: order flows from top to bottom. These vertical factories mark the first widespread use of another top-down method of material distribution: the concrete frame. Ideas travel fast, pulling along a train of massive industries and their cities.

At this early stage, civic duty was characterized by strict codes of behavior. The division of labor had not yet worked itself into the division of the psyche, splitting the public from the private realm, splitting the outer and inner aspects of being. (This was to evolve in the latter history of the Capital.) At this point in the Capital's history the manner of appearing in public was determined by codes of behavior actively shaped by the civic institutions. These codes not only addressed the outward manifestations of style but also were involved in educating the citizens in the disciplines of writing and geometry, as these forms of order still had to be born by the individual worker. Machines had not yet learned to run themselves and the line demanded thorough grounding in geometric and mechanical principles. Precision was still a matter of touch, as evidenced by the Model T cast iron chassis components and the complex hammered metal adornments on buildings. All of these were formed by the disciplined precision of hand and eye.

Order was manifest at this time. It was a matter of civic responsibility and pride. The production economy flowed out of the repetitive efficiencies that such an order brought. The fact that Ford wanted all of his cars to be black was not simply an aesthetic decision but rather a statement about the nature of the production economy. Value was to be found in the modes of production itself, in its repetition, and strict adherence to economic principles. Order begets order, the acceleration and growth of which is profit.

The myth claims that over time the other car companies took advantage of Ford's rather stiff approach to production and profited at his expense by offering the new consumer a wide variety of colors and styles. Like all myths, it contains an historic development in the culture of the city, which also contains a new idea, image and economy. The fact was that the vertical system of production was approaching its limit. The concrete factories were proving to be too inflexible for the increasingly frequent changeovers due to new style and model offerings. One could have only so many holes in the concrete floor slab in order to distribute the parts to the assembly line. The new idea was to put the entire line on one level and to deliver the parts to it with the use of motorized vehicles. Albert Kahn designed the first such factory for Ford, using an integrated structural and saw-tooth skylight frame permitting the easy addition of space in the horizontal dimension.

The flexible expansion of the factory was paralleled by the expansion of the paved road system throughout the city. A new concept of urban transportation was born, one that was free of the hierarchy of avenues and streets. Houses and factories could be placed anywhere on the grid. The city was soon filled and, for a short period, it experienced the delirium of density. Tall towers were constructed in the downtown area and neighborhoods were built alongside the edges of factories. The Capital

grew at an unprecedented rate. The model of production through interchangeable parts was taken as a model for the management of production itself, articulating discrete functions for sales, engineering, and design. These components articulated the built diagram of the aforementioned General Motors Headquarters. The view from the top extended to the horizon, which offered the image of an abundant nature.

Images have always played an important role in the city. They fuse irreconcilable forces so that they may be used to promote and accommodate the latest ideas. The image of the horizon as nature portrays something immense and sublime. The horizontal expanse now extends into the far distance: an industry for the world, an industry that consumes the world. Nature comes to be understood as a resource for production and production is understood as a natural process. The paintings of Charles Scheeler illustrate this. Those great works that fuse the traditions of still life and landscape, so still and yet so filled with activity. As beautiful and precise as they are, they are haunting images that give the feeling of something violated. The large piles of black coal unloaded from the steamer at the Rouge Iron Works have been scraped up from some other time. They are charred pieces of the sun that will transform nature once again. Ford conceived the Rouge Plant as a single, organic process. From the raw material to the finished product, the vision was all-inclusive.

There is also, at this time, the question of human nature. For now, the place of civic duty becomes the place of civic strife. The mass of urbanized workers demand more time. Time is money. The solution is no longer found in the evocation of civic duty and the construction of spaces of propriety, but in the negotiation of competing interests. The image of the GM building arises again. It too is an image of conflict. Vertical structures crack under strain. Centralization reaches its physical limits: mass society, mass culture, and human being as a collective entity. Maps are drawn of populations and resources; they all become the same thing. The only solution is to expand outward, the horizontal solution. The purchase of a car is the purchase of space, a personal horizon. Now you can control the earth that moves beneath your feet. The movement of the assembly line is personalized, and the division of labor into parts begins to enter into the psyche. Personal life is separated from civic life. The space of the car is an escape into this personal realm, and we all know what happens inside. But now the inside becomes the outside: a smooth shell, an organ of speed. Speed smoothes the differences, and transforms the landscape into a compressed projected line whose absolute limit is the horizon. The pain of duty is now balanced by the thrill of escape velocity. A new danger emerges: weapons of speed in the hands of workers. Where are the limits? Where are the controls? Density remains a problem. The automobile begins to claim its own space.

The Second World War offers a small break in the action. Detroit wins the war; there is not a big difference between a car and a tank. It won because it out-produced them all. The "Capital of the Twentieth Century." The big difference comes in the pay back: the solution to the problem of density. Here is the idea: build roads instead of cities, and impose a national speed limit. It could not happen at a better time since the nuclear threat makes density dangerous: the strong image of a city in flames. Again the image resolves by combining opposing tendencies. Self-

defense is equated with self-interest. One can say that the bomb did its work without exploding. Through modern nuclear planning, the city escapes from itself over the horizon. But maybe the real danger was from inside. There were race riots in the city during the war, and walls were erected between neighborhoods. The pressure was mounting.

Turning towards the end of the century, the horizontal factory has been transformed into a network of roads extending over the horizon. Production has now been decentralized into a national network that responds to ever changing tastes. Density and flexibility are no longer problems and automation is now making the worker a secondary player. The big problem, however, is to maintain consumption at the same rate as production. Because of continual technological advances, new ideas are always increasing production.

Another idea emerges: the fabrication of desire. This is now possible due to the fact that the hierarchic structures of space are no longer in place. A network of media, criss-crossing the city without leaving a mark, has replaced them. The division of labor has finally wrestled the psyche from its civic or public obligation releasing a flood of narcissistic energies over the landscape. The overt structures of domination have been transformed into a net of psychological relations. The image is now the currency, the flow, and the energy, which transforms production into a secondary activity while the tangibility of things is always suggested. Images constitute the fabric that holds the city together. Indeed there is an economy of images ranging from the vernacular marks made by those who dwell in the absence of the power stream, marks on walls, erasures, inspired inscriptions, declarations of faith, and stains upon forgotten spaces. As economic power increases the design of the image becomes more deliberate, more planned, and the sign emerges from the index towards the abstraction of the symbol. The touch of the hand is lost as we ascend through the economy. Spontaneity becomes a fabrication, sensuousness the result of technique.

Images mark the idea of the place though they themselves are placeless. We see them from the highway: the large billboards, the Goodyear sign that registers the yearly domestic automobile production, the image of number, always changing, a remnant from the age of production. The twin billboards at Woodward and Eight Mile Road are the gateway to the suburbs, and the landscape of narcissistic pleasures. The general tire sign at the bend of I-75 displayed the news and weather and recorded the temperature of the city amidst the blackened shells of houses.

There is another problem, the Capital is becoming weary of its many transformations. There have simply been too many. There is not enough energy in the system to clean away the debris left from the previous cycles. The forces of entropy cannot be exceeded by the illusion of images. We now seem to be moving just to stay in the same place. A new idea is needed.

DAN HOFFMAN

defense is equated with self-interest. One can say that the bomb did its work without exploding, through modern nuclear planning, the city escapes from itself over the horizon. But maybe the real danger was from inside. There were race riots in the city during the war, and walls were erected between neighborhoods. The pressure was mounting.

DAN MOFFMAN

after Ford

Charles Jenks, The Language of Post-Modern Architecture (London 1977).
Post-Fordism as a category of socio-economic peri-ization is of Marxist provenance and has been the central term of a wide and fruitful debate. See David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: 1980), and Post-Fordism: A Rhetoric, ed. Ash Amin (Oxford/Cambridge, Mass. 1994).

The moment of Detroit's deepest crisis coincides with the "Death of Modern Architecture" as announced by Charles Jenks in 1977. $^{1}$ This is no coincidence. The emergence of postmodern architecture and urbanism in the seventies, sweeping the market in the eighties, represents much more than a new aesthetic sensibility. The postmodern rejection of homogeneity, coherence, and completeness, and the explicit celebration of heterogeneity mark a radical departure from fifty years of modernist development. The force behind these developments, rather than emerging from within the architectural discipline itself, must be found on the socio-economic level. Postmodern cultural production coincides with the historical crisis in the regime of mechanical mass-production, first developed by Ford in Detroit. $^{2}$

The historical closure of Fordism as a model of socio-economic progress spelled the demise of Detroit, once the proud origin of modern industrial development. "Detroitism" had become a globally emulated recipe for economic prosperity. Now Detroit stands devastated, overburdened by the infrastructural, architectural, and human sediment of its Fordist past. Central parts of Detroit are empty. Large buildings stand as ruins. Offices, schools, train stations, and vast urban territories have been abandoned. Urban planning proposals counter this drastic situation with equally drastic measures: the demolition of entire urban quarters and their conversion into parks. Greenbelts are proposed to cut the vast, fragmented field into recognizable "communities", sealing the ultimate fate of Detroit as a suburb of its own suburbs. Detroit's extended suburbs are alive and well, forming a polycentric conurbation where typically post-Fordist service industries settle at a safe distance from inner city wastelands.

However, it would be wrong to assume that post-Fordism is the era of suburbia and Fordism the era of the city. Suburbanization was the general rule of (mature) Fordist urbanization. Post-Fordism breaks the universality of suburbanization. The new model of post-Fordist urbanization reinhabited the historic city. Postmodern architecture found its market in the rediscovery and "detournement" of the historical city, not merely as brandable commodity, but as a necessary communication hub for the new economy. $^{3}$ Jane Jacobs rendered a critical verdict on Detroit in 1961, at the height of its economic power:

"All the elements of the cultural past must be 'rein-resolved' or disrupted." Again here, "Detroit and Pointing", quoted in Guy Delson, Detournement an Negation and Preclude, International Situationist #3 (December 1959), translated in Nineteenth International Anthology, ed. K. Knuth (Berkley: 1981).

Virtually all of Detroit is as weak on vitality and diversity as the Bronx. It is ring superimposed upon ring of failed gray belts. Even Detroit's downtown itself cannot produce a respectable amount of diversity. It is dispirited and dull, and almost deserted by seven o'clock of an evening.

Monotony and lack of diversity are the typical "ills" or "failures" of the modern city. To avoid Jacobs' historical condemnation of the industrial city, one must grasp the economic rationality underpinning its development. This includes the intentional rationality and social meaning of urban monotony, zoning, and the various symptoms of industrialized urban arrangement. Over half a century of rationally planned coherent city building could not have been a "mistake". But what was progressive then has indeed become dysfunctional today. The new socio-economic logic of post-Fordism offers a reading of the current prospects of Detroit and other cities caught in the dynamic of global economic restructuring. Any understanding of Detroit must begin with the socio-economic logic of Fordism and its urban implications.

Fordism as a Technical and Spatial System

Detroit served as a visible model of Fordist industrial development during the first half of the twentieth century. As an economic monoculture it mirrored the prosperity, growth, and decline of the automobile industry. Detroit offers a paradigmatic case study of Fordism as an organizational model of urbanization, and for the collusion between industry and architecture, as personified by the collaboration between Henry Ford and Albert Kahn.

One might speak of three phases of the Fordist revolution:

Phase 1: Taylorization takes Command. Automobile manufacturing in the pioneering days was organized around the work of autonomous artisan engineers. To increase the speed and scale of production, Ford applied Taylor's principles of scientific management. Work became scientific: observable, controllable, and modifiable. Individual laborer's tasks were recorded, analyzed, and broken down into elementary movements. Efficiency was optimized by the reconfiguration of tasks within time and space according to the dialectic of differentiation and repetition. Within this concept of order the flow of production over time was the controlling parameter. Albert Kahn provided the required architecture and spatial organization. The Kahn System of Reinforced Concrete enabled wide spaces offering freedom of movement and flexibility for functional adaptation to various production lines. Ford's Highland Park plant (1909) offered large expanses of clear space allowing the unconstrained organization of various production cycles, each on its own floor. Discrete processes were stacked vertically, joined via floor openings, and fed by a flow of material from top to bottom. This vertical organization enabled the production of the first complex assembly-line product: Ford's Model T.

Phase 2: The factory under one roof is superceded. The assembly line concept was applied to an overall urban complex. Several single story buildings were joined together, each accommodating a specific task, and extruded to the length desired. Entire buildings acted as elements of multi-building assembly lines. At the River Rouge plant (begun 1917) the flow of materials and sub-components determined the overall "urban" layout as an integrated machine. This was literally the "city as machine" later proclaimed by Le Corbusier and other ideologues of modernist urbanism.

receptacle for a series of universal mass consumer goods: living room, dining set, (Frankfurt-) kitchen, bathroom, washing machine, and later the refrigerator, television, and automobile. The new paradigm of Functionalism implied an objectification and analysis of the design process and architectural composition was assimilated to the principles of Fordist organization: decomposition, differentiation, repetition, and integration.

This logic was already evident in the organization of separate functions into specialized and separately optimized volumes in Albert Kahn's General Motors Headquarters Building (1917-1921). Walter Gropius's Dessau Bauhaus (1926) was paradigmatic of modernist work in this respect with residential, administrative, and workshop functions separately articulated, allowing for depth, height, and facade to be independently determined for each respective function. The same principles were at work in canonical conceptions of the modernist city. Le Corbusier's Ville Radieuse (1933) is among the most comprehensive and rigorous expositions of Fordist logics of differentiation (zoning and distinct functionalist articulation of each zone), repetition (homogeneity of each zone), and hierarchical integration (transport system) applied to the city. Lafayette Park (1955) by Mies, Hilberseimer, and Caldwell offers the most legible post-war example of these principles of modernist planning applied to the renovation of Detroit. Hilbertseimer's publication of The New Regional Pattern (1949) rendered these same Fordist principles of decentralization and differentiation by intertwining transportation, communication, and production infrastructures across the natural environment of North America.

From Fordism to Post-Fordism

In the late 1960's, the Fordist system of universal mass production, corporate concentration, collective bargaining, and state-regulation was challenged on all fronts. The first serious break in the post-war boom occurred with the recession of 1966-1967. The political struggles of 1968, the oil-crisis of 1973, the breakdown of the international exchange-rate system, and a deepening of the recession in 1974 followed. The automobile industry was in free-fall, and Detroit, site of the oldest and least competitive plants, was hit hardest. By the end of the 1970's it was clear that the recession had become a structural (systemic) crisis that called for new political and economic strategies.

See UNIDO (United Nations Industrial Development Organization), Structural Change in Industry (Weimar: 1970), and OECD Organization of Economic Co-operation and Development), Positive Adjustment Policies: Managing Structural Change (Paris: 1983).

The origins of the crisis in Fordism and an outline of emergent post-Fordist tendencies can be found in several concurrent socio-economic transformations. Among these are five key conditions: shifting commodity markets, increasing electronic control of production, decreasing state regulation, increasingly global capital markets, and deteriorating labor relations.

Market Stratification: With the growing complexity of labor division and the proliferation of white-collar labor, salary stratification increased. Affluence beyond the saturation of the most basic needs meant that markets began to diversify, allowing for status and identity consumption to accelerate aesthetically motivated product-cycles. These developments placed a reward on innovation and flexibility rather than simple cost reduction achieved through mass-market economies of scale. The house, as the main site of consumption, was itself drawn into the logic of differential identity, status, and income. The Modernist housing standard ("Existenzminimum") became the very standard against which market differentiation was measured. Postmodernist design, architecture, and urbanism catered to this demand and reconceived the "failed" modern city as a site for destination recreation and brandable post-urban tourism.
Flexible Production: New computer-based production technologies made possible greater product diversity (small runs) without the enormous cost of handicraft production that had previously limited deviations from the standard. The crucial material factor was the micro-electronic revolution that offered greater productivity through desired economies of scope, rather than scale. Flexible specialization became a technological possibility, and the subsequent fluidity of production demanded the dissolution of static Fordist labor and management arrangements.
Vanishing State-Regulation: As products and markets differentiated, economies of scale were recuperated through international expansion. The resultant international economic interdependency had the effect of eroding the economic competence of the nation state, and its ability to smooth out disturbances in the business cycle. As markets globalized, the less economically feasible it became to protect national producers. With the increasing internationalization of mobile capital, a withdrawal from Keynesian macro-economic regulation and a systematic dismantling of the social welfare state became inevitable. This process continues to this day, and Detroit serves as one of the most thoroughly developed models of this tendency.
Globalization of Capital Markets: Globalization emerged as a new model of international integration between production and consumption. Increasing volatility in capital markets resulted from speculation in "emerging" economies. Outsourced labor and offshore production optimized profits by driving down wages through international competition. Globalization took the form of a re-emergence of inter-imperialist rivalries, militarism, enforced austerity programs, the break up of national welfare programs, and a downward pressure on labor-costs. The majority's standard of living, even in the most advanced economies, stagnated or declined while class disparity increased.
Exploding Labor Relations: The increasing volatility of global markets and the abdication of state responsibility eroded collective bargaining. Capital-labor compromises and state sanctioned collective bargaining agreements were displaced in favor of "free market" neoliberalism (Reaganomics and Thatcherism). Downsizing and outsourcing

fig 8. The modern design principles of de-composition, spatial specialization, and serial repetition. Walter Groppi, Bauhaus Dessau, Germany, 1926.

fig 9. Organizational Principles of Differentiation and Repetition applied to the city. Le Cotbuiser, La Ville Radeuze, Zoning Diagram, 1933.

labor became the norm, replacing regular employment with increasingly flexible arrangements. This in turn made markets even more unpredictable. Employment contracts became shorter. Mobility increased. "Casual labor" and "self-employment" replaced regular employment.

Patterns of Post-Fordist Production

The historical crisis in Fordist production forced a reorganization of corporate structures as they faced a new pace of change and the increasingly global competition for markets. The ongoing organizational revolution tends to render corporate organization non-hierarchical and replaces command and control mechanisms with participatory and open structures; although, the drive of corporate restructuring towards discursive cooperation remains compromised by the systemic barrier of capitalism that hinges authority upon property rather than discourse. The thrust of development tears and shakes the corporate edifice of Fordism.

The "architecture" of business organization is liquefying. Fordist strategies of rationalization and hierarchy are giving way in favor of post-modern production patterns. These patterns of arrangement reflect not only a response to the economic and material conditions of production, but also portend an equally important transformation in the structure and organization of corporate space itself.

Fordist principles of corporate organization were generalized from their origin in industrial production to the organization of the service sector and ultimately served as a model of state administration. The whole of society was eventually subsumed within this rigid pattern of hierarchical organization. Everywhere a comprehensive, bureaucratic, functional hierarchy allocated rigid job-descriptions and repetitive tasks within coherent chains of command. The modernist pattern of urbanization is the projection of this total social machine into space.

With the failure of stable cycles of reproduction and expansion, post-Fordist production paradigms are increasingly organized around principles of decentralization, horizontality, transparency, fluidity, and rapid mutability. Concurrently, the organization and management of these post-Fordist processes and other forms of social arrangement are increasingly based on a set of similar post-modern principles. The new tendencies evident in corporate restructuring can ultimately be summarized as follows:

flattening of hierarchies into horizontal fields;
decentralization, devolution of authority and responsibility;
self-organization rather than bureaucratic task allocation;
collegial communication and evaluation rather than command and control;
dispersal and sharing of information and technologies;
team-work, informal or temporary alliances, loosely coupled networks;
hybrid conglomerates and ad-hoc assemblages replace integrated entities;
increasing reliance on outsourcing, temporary and self-employment;
mutability, mobility, and indeterminacy as positive values;
processes analogous to ecological or biological systems.

These organizational tendencies are presently evolving in response to the challenge of permanent innovation in production. One could expect (and can find emergent in contemporary

work) an analogous set of developments in the cultural sphere including the spatialization of these ideas in the making of architecture and urbanism. The possibilities for post-Fordist urbanism are among the many interesting questions raised by Detroit in general and this anthology in particular.

Post-Urbianism

As for developments in the spatialization of post-Fordist principles, the work of the so-called "L.A. School" cultural geographers, and Ed Soja in particular, offers an extensive analysis of the coming post-Fordist urbanism. Soja's exploration of postmodern urbanization focuses on the metropolitan region of Los Angeles. In as much as L.A. is one of the world's leading "superprofitable growth poles," it allows us to identify the future of post-Fordist urbanization. L.A., in this regard, plays the role Detroit once occupied as the "most thoroughly modern (Fordist) city in the world."

Soja's analysis of L.A. suggests that contemporary post-Fordist patterns of urbanization function as a "mesocosm" that reproduces within its own spatiality the complexity and contradictions of the global economy:

Seemingly paradoxical but functionally interdependent juxtapositions are the epitomizing features... One can find in Los Angeles not only the high technology industrial complexes of the Silicon Valley and the erratic sunbelt economy of Houston, but also the far-reaching industrial decline and bankrupt urban neighborhoods of rust-belted Detroit or Cleveland. There is a Boston in Los Angeles, a lower Manhattan and a South Bronx, a Sao Paulo and a Singapore.

The simultaneity of growth and decline, locating leading high tech industrial sectors next to abandoned industrial wastelands, and a growing low-wage economy of industrial sweatshops, posits an uphill battle for social control and exacerbates the friction of distance in the "spread city." Soja's postmodern geography (spread city) differs markedly from the process of post-war suburbanization. It is best described as "an amorphous regional complex that confounds traditional definitions of both city and suburb."

This post-Fordist landscape inte-

fig 10. Organizational Models, Gareth Morgan, Creative Organization Theory, 1989.
fig 11. Diagram study of "loosely coupled network," Patrik Schumacher, 1999.

grates a loose and open network of research, production, and service systems. Interspersed with leisure environments are alternating expensive residential developments with enclaves of cheap labor. The interpenetration of different activities succeeds even despite the problems of social control and the cost of policing caused by the proximity of populations increasingly polarized along lines of class, race, and ethnicity.

Another marked spatial phenomenon has been superimposed on the polycentric spatiality of the (L.A.) post-Fordist landscape that is also evident in Detroit: the decisive re-colonization of corporate headquarters within the downtown core, reversing the trend of the Fordist era. This revival of the central business district and selective gentrification of the inner city, including recreational and pseudo-historic tourist events, caters to a largely suburban population. This reflects the post-Fordist organizational shift in corporate structure along lines of contemporary production and consumption patterns. The ongoing annexation of Detroit by its own suburbs continues apace as suburban wealth simultaneously speculates on property values at both the agricultural perimeter and abandoned industrial center of what remains one of the largest and most prosperous metropolitan regions in the U.S.

Detroit's precipitous and public demise may have stepped over a kind of critical threshold (a point of no return?) offering an unequivocal image of post-Fordist dis-investment. In this sense, Detroit offers the most legible indictment of Fordist patterns of urbanization. The recent (and by now regular) injections of recuperative capital evident in the Renaissance Center project, new casinos, sports stadia, and other urban "cures," have failed to promote a revitalization of Detroit's downtown. Some already find delight in the ruins, indulging in a voyeuristic aestheticism. Others are determined to save the city through social missionary work. Others hope to spin it, using media hype and political spin doctoring to influence property values through real-estate speculation. Will Detroit benefit from this new form of development, and what are the possibilities for practicing urbanism in this context? Will Detroit's already evident future come to pass as a destination tourist commodity and name brandable recreation center engulfed by pockets of abandonment, disinvestment, and decay? If so, even this unenviable future will need to overcome a century of rusty prejudices.

PATRIK SCHUMACHER AND CHRISTIAN ROGNER

stalking Detroit
[2]
MÓNICA ROSELLÓ

KENT KLEINMAN AND LESLIE VAN DUZER

Detroit's Michigan

On August 23, 1926, as the world mourned the death of big screen legend Rudolph Valentino, Detroit paid its own tribute to Hollywood with the grand opening of the Michigan Theater. The seven story, 4000 plus seat auditorium, built as an appendage to a 13-story office tower, was at the time of its construction the largest theater among a growing collection in Detroit's downtown entertainment district. The Michigan Theater was one of many theaters built in Detroit between the First World War and the Great Depression to capitalize on the public's desire for escape. While the movies had always served to dislocate the spectator, these grand atmospheric palaces extended the world of illusion to the physical spaces in which the films were screened.

After the Second World War, with the advent of television and the great migration to the suburbs, the downtown theater audience dwindled significantly. In 1967, the Michigan Theater was closed and slated for demolition. Last-ditch efforts successfully postponed its destruction for over eight years while a string of optimistic entrepreneurs tried to find a new use for the building. A porno theater, a supper club, and a rock concert hall all failed to revitalize the old

4
6

the building for a secure, indoor garage. While the press referred to the proposal as "unthinkable," the idea was curiously apt: the requirements for the new parking structure corresponded well with the existing configuration of the theater. The main entry, once funneling thousands of people into the foyer daily, was wide enough to allow for in-and-out automobile access. The long foyer with its sweeping stair was easily adapted to accommodate the approach to the curving parking ramp. The 140 by 200 foot auditorium provided enough area to house the required 160 cars on three levels. The demolition of the theater's interior, and subsequent construction within, was executed with expediency: a hole was ripped into the flank of the auditorium to make way for the wrecking ball and the interior was cleared as required for the erection of a simple steel and concrete parking structure.

One is struck by the crudity of the formal work. The marks of brute force are visible everywhere: sheared beams, amputated balconies, severed electrical lines, and the ragged plaster canopy. Rather than a work of architecture with the attendant conceit of completion and stasis, the effect is one of demolition in progress, with the implied sense of transition. At the Michigan Theater, one is confronted by "work" as a verb rather than "work" as a noun. Herein lies part of the legitimate fascination of this interior; namely, the exposure of the mechanics and techniques of architectural fabrication. It is the same fascination that draws spectators to construction sites, demolition sites, and ruins alike. Both the brute tectonics of the building's anatomy and the thin lining that once marked the limit of experience are revealed in a single glance. While still clinging to the interiors of its past, the Michigan Theater now offers up the padding and voids that are the architect's means of shaping space.

This condition is rare in a building; in a sense, it is an illegitimate state. In conventional architectural production, this condition corresponds more closely to that of the section drawing, for the section focuses on the creative gap between the thin veneer of experienced surface and the underlying construction required to produce this surface. Sectioning, whether executed with a draftsman's pencil or a contractor's wrecking ball, is revelatory precisely because it

is transgressive; the section fascinates because it violates perceptual boundaries.

Paradoxically, while fundamental to the production of architecture, the section is antithetical to the actual experience of architecture. What is most uncanny, and what constitutes a most unsettling assault on architectural sensibilities, is the fact that the violated condition of the theater was not accidental. Contrary to appearances, this is not a ruin, a construction, or a demolition in process. The results were intended and projected and are indeed rational. This interior was remodeled "as specified" by the Engineer's Project Report.

The architectural treatment of the Michigan Theater is not merely careless, it is anti-architectural. In the current economic and cultural landscape of Detroit, thorough destruction (itself an act of optimism and investment) is as rare as thorough construction. Ad hoc dismantling and ad hoc construction have become the dominant modes of forming and inhabiting the city. This does not mean that the city or the buildings are defunct. What has expired is the comprehensive plan, the ordered transition, completeness—in other words, the traditional modalities of the architectural project.

figs. 1-2. Entry Foyer.
figs. 3-4-5-6. Auditorium.
figs. 7-8. Balcony.
fig. 9. Plaque.
fig. 10. Section through the theater and the office tower.
fig. 11. Parking ramp.
figs. 12-13. Garage.
fig. 14. Michigan Theater.

Photo credits:
Manning Brothers Archive, Detroit
figs. 1, 3, 5, 7-14
K. Kleinman and L. Van Duzer
figs. 1-4, 6, 8, 9, 11, 12
S. Dinh
fig. 13

DAS : 20 ARCHITECTURE STUDIO
Architects GEORGIA DASKALAKIS AND OMAR PEREZ

Production collaborators
Model JILL FORTUNA, ERIK L'HEREUX, BEN TRANEL
Color model photography ROBERT PETTUS
B + W model photography JOHN TAN
Photography, 40 x 60 mixed media plates JOHN HILGERT
Lithography JOHN POELKER
Silkscreen ALAN LEVIN

PROJECTING
DETROIT
DASKALAKIS
PEREZ

It makes no sense to divide cities into these two species (happy or unhappy) but rather into another two: those that through the years and the changes continue to give their form to desires, and those in which desires either erase the city or are erased by it.

Italo Calvino

I
Lethargic, fallow, inactive... the street is as empty behind as in front. Lone figures and relatively few cars traverse the broad boulevards of this once fully urbanized and congested metropolis. Not too long ago, Detroit was one of the largest cities in the U.S. and one of the wealthiest industrial cities in the world. Today, with a decrease of 50% of its citizenry since the early 1950s, the city of Detroit is experiencing an ongoing process of aggressive de-urbanization as it enters the post-industrial phase of its cycle of modernization. The prior trajectory of continuous growth experiences a reversal: the city begins to contract, dispersing its energy across the visible and invisible landscape beyond.

In the Motor City, the effects of industrial modernity unfold with unrivalled clarity. The automobile, the "magic carpet of transportation for all mankind," the quintessential representation of industrial modernity, of Detroit's modernity, logically drove us beyond the city. Now faced with the impossibility of continuing to reenact the processes of industrialization and urbanization, and still devoid of a new raison d'etre, Detroit begins to substantiate its own disappearance; a displacement, it should be noted, already written into the fulfillment of its modernity. At present some form of Detroit persists, suspended between an obsolete, abandoned past and an unimagined future. The 1989 Census Bureau population estimates reported Detroit's population at just under one million. What "city" (political, social, and economic organization) will the substantial number of remaining residents inhabit? And what will be its physical, spatial, and experiential characteristics?

II
For a brief moment, upon entering Downtown Detroit, the urban setting seems recognizable. The structure of the city appears elaborate; tall buildings cast oblique shadows concealing the voids. The effects of perspective vision work optically to collapse space into familiar groupings of horizontal and verticals, parallels and perpendiculars, thus blurring the distinctions between the built and the unbuilt. With a simple turn or a change of viewpoint, the insistent weight of emptiness encroaches. The common becomes extraordinary. The arrangement of the vertical surfaces that seemed to delimit space expands with the changing position of the viewer; one is pulled into a vacuum. The vertical density gives way to a horizontal emptiness, effecting unexpected encounters with the distant horizon. There are few limits to be ascertained, mostly free, roving space. Building surfaces are revealed as thin and fragile. Empty, abandoned shells hold back the forces of void. Objects are strewn over boundless and immeasurable spatial fields. With awe, both dread and wonder, the gaze glances out over the barren landscape and registers the presence of the absence.

Apparent across the surface of Detroit's landscape is a scattering of vacant fields and abandoned buildings, evidence of the progressive erasure of the urban fabric and the consequent radicalization of its urban space. What remains in many zones is simply the city's abstract structure according to a grade zero of block, street, and parcel interspersed with objects disjointed from its logic: blocks differentiating nothingness; streets leading to nowhere; unbuilt or uninhabited parcels. As the city disappears, it leaves behind strange territories and fixes vast undifferentiated fields of vacancy absent of explicit purpose yet ripe with a sense of expectancy.

The complex French term terrain vague effectively names and contemplates these vacated regions of Detroit. Ignasi de Solà-Morales Rubio, in his essay "Terrain Vague," uses this expression to precisely describe

the post-urban residual spaces of the abandoned industrial city. Through an etymological tracing of the words terrain and vague, and a compounding of their significantly ambiguous meanings, Solá-Morales arrives at a complex characterization of the empty, abandoned spaces of our cities:

The relationship between the absence of use, of activity, and the sense of freedom, of expectancy, is fundamental to understanding the evocative potential of the city's terrain vague. Void, absence, yet also promise, the space of the possible, of expectation.4

These indeterminate, fluctuating spaces exist as vital counterpoints to the productive, efficient city, "as much a critique as a possible alternative."5 "Foreign to the urban system,"6 they are "its negative image,"7 but a paradoxical negative that while creating absence, fear, and even longing, engenders hope and expectancy: "expectations of mobility, vagrant roving, free time, liberty."8

The current fascination with the terrain vague is not a simple capricice. These silent, luminous, free spaces shock and reactivate our sensory and experiential abilities that have been diminished by the crowdedness, the material superfluity, and speed of modern life, dulled by the incessant movement of space, people, informa-tion, and capital. Terrain vague are conspicuous pauses amidst a landscape homogenized to the point of indiscernibility. These voided, abandoned spaces resonate with what Solá-Morales refers to as "our strangeness in front of the world."9 they empathize with our feelings of placelessness and dislocation within our cities.

Jim Jarmusch's 1985 film, Stranger than Paradise, registers precisely our strangeness in the world. With a humor that prevents nostalgia or judgement, it powerfully indicates the conditions of our contemporary experience. Eva arrives in Manhattan from Budapest. Her back is turned to us; she is standing alone at the periphery of the airport looking out over the landing strips. Following a significant pause, the camera returns to Eva, now wandering alone through the streets of Manhattan. They appear to us unpopulated and abandoned. This most urban of cities is presented as strange, anonymous, as a setting reduced to signs of former inhabitation. Jarmusch renders the urbanity of Manhattan invisible and thus brings into visibility what Solá-Morales describes as "our position external to the urban system, to power, to activity."10 Willie and Eddie, unemployed hustlers, express this extreme sense of powerlessness, always drifting at the margins of the efficacious city. The film presents us with, "our own insecurities, our vague wanderings through limitless space."

Nothing happens in the film; wandering takes the

place of action. There is no there; the specificity of place is replaced by sameness: Willie's apartment, his aunt's house, and the Florida motel. Even the streets of Manhattan, the industrial landscapes of Pittsburgh and Ohio, and the Florida beaches, all acquire a certain homogeneity. Eddie, after arriving for the first time in Cleveland, says "you come to see something new and everything looks just the same." Jarmusch reflects our incapacity to be somewhere, the weightlessness of our dwelling. His cinematographic technique of cutting the scenes, leaving silent, black gaps, only to return to the same, creates a palpable rhythm of anticipation and despair, heightening our sense of strangeness and universal homelessness, but also of expectation. And like Molloy's inability to remember, to speak in Beckett's novel, Willie, Eddie, and Eva cannot see. In the most disconcerting scene, the three are standing on the banks of Lake Erie, but the snow, fog, and clouds prevent visibility. They see nothing. Terrain vagues reflect these existential anxieties; they are palpable physical manifestations of both our fears and desires.

The terrain vague, as witnessed in Detroit, is the product of an erasure produced through a process of obsolescence and subsequent abandonment, but it is not a tabula rasa. The street grid, a lamppost, and an abandoned or functioning building, persist as significantly unstable vestiges. The 1973 painting titled Terrain Vague by the artist Constant, beyond the simple depiction of a "wasteland," illuminates the complex dynamics between presence and absence, between erasure or destruction and construction. A predominantly barren, emptied white space traced with a few lines recognizable as planes and volumes recedes toward a strongly

figs. 1-2 Detroit (1995). (Photo by authors)
figs. 3-4-5 Film still from Jim Jarmusch, Stranger than Paradise (1985). (still photos by author)
3. Eva at the periphery of the airport.
4. Eva in Manhattan.
5. Willie, Eddie, and Eva at Lake Erie.
fig. 6 Constant, Terrain Vague (1973). (Collection Gemeentemuseum, The Vague). Image reprinted from Stuartonists' Art, Politics, Ubonesm (Barcelona: ACTAR and the Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA), 1996).

marked horizon. Lingering traces of previous or other realities are visible beneath the whitewashed surface. Along with tears, blotches, and markings, these traces pressure the emptied ground and render it both agitated and fragile. While perhaps Constant was erasing his project for the New Babylon, it is not a complete erasure. Analogous to the way we experience the terrain vague, in Constant's painting, we are not confronted by a clean, new surface, but rather with a fluctuating, indeterminate one, whose vitality lies in its very undecidability.

The act of erasure or voiding is not and can never be complete; there is always the residue of something that is no longer there and the expectation of something that could be there. There is always the trace of something that has occurred and the anticipation of something that is about to happen. Constant lets us see the process of becoming, that ambiguous moment between appearance and disappearance. The idea of terrain vague suggests an intertwining of presence and absence as a necessary mutual qualification. Michael Heizer's land sculpture, Double Negative, explicitly expresses this oscillation between presence and absence: "Neither simply present nor absent, Double Negative, is the presence of an absence that is the absence of presence."12

The terrain vague, the contracting city itself, compels us to contend with a set of impossibilities, with a series of open, vital questions at the limit of our traditional disciplinary concerns, at the limit of what is even thinkable: impermanence, disappearance, absence. This unfamiliar territory forcefully imposes itself on us as an imperative, a necessity derived from a changing reality and from a changed perception of that reality. The performance choreographer, William Forsythe, experiments with these same impossibilities and questions that similarly lie at the limits of his own discipline. In many of his recent productions, he explicitly experiments with disappearance, with that which has "vanished from existence, from presence."13 As Heidi Gilpin points out in her essay, "Aberrations of Gravity." Forsythe "seems to be pushing dance through invisibility."14 He does this by the use of various means such as near darkness on the stage, the instability of movement, or the loss of verticality. He emphasizes the invisibility of the dancers, in Gilpin's words, "forcing the audience to strain to see or imagine the body that produces the movement whose traces are all that can be discerned."15 Forsythe emphatically eliminates visibility, appearance, and presence. Gilpin refers to his work as "(a)n architecture of disappearance in which the performative events display movements where the presence of the body is no longer assured."16.

In Forsythe's compositional processes "invisible moments of discontinuity and absence are the connectors of movement. Missing parts are precisely those that create continuity. The source, the event that engenders other events, is located in a gap, in a void."17 There is always an encounter with absence. Forsythe's processes are permeated with instability, with traces of the fleeting, thus bringing to bear the question of impermanence. The dancers are called upon to transgress the boundaries of equilibrium, "to maintain a state of vibration, a moment of trembling devoid of stability, devoid of permanence."18 Again Forsythe employs various strategies such as improvisation, chance, and accident in order to display impermanence and to stage disappearance. In this way, he generates unpredictable, unanticipated residual movements. As in the experience of Detroit, our attention is forcefully drawn to the gaps. These multiple interdisciplinary

convergences serve as a background of meaningful thought and activity that can motivate the way we think and project Detroit.

The filmmaker, Wim Wenders, shares with the photographers Solá-Morales references, the enthusiasm for these alternative, other spaces and the desire to preserve them. In his 1988 film, Wings of Desire, Wenders likewise "seek(s) refuge in the margins of the city." In the opening scene, from high atop a church tower, the melancholy gaze of the angel scans the dense fabric and busy streets of the familiar metropolis. The nomadic angel wanders through the city, arriving at the place of the circus scene: an empty, desolate landscape viewed against the large, open firewalls of the remaining buildings, markers of the precise moment of the city's dissolution. These strange, peaceful voids are rendered visible and at once preserved as silent witnesses to the history of the city.

In the scene at the Potsdamer Platz, the angel accompanies the storyteller through another vacated landscape, heightening our awareness of the terrain vague. The registered absence blankets the territory as a continuous presence perpetuating a vastness of dimension and an openness to the horizon. The city appears vaguely in the background as a distant haze. "I cannot find the Potsdamer Platz," ruminates the disoriented old man, recounting a sense of loss as he drifts through the wild, overgrown landscape, finally settling onto a discarded armchair strewn amidst the vacancy. Unwittingly, these filmic images mirror the restless landscape of Detroit; they articulate the simultaneous terror and thrill of the emptiness and allude to the contradictory and fantastic nature of these spaces.

Detroit exacerbates and universalizes the condition of terrain vague; it is no longer that anomalous space that dwells at the periphery of the city, at its margins, but one that is ubiquitous, boundless, that sweeps across the entirety of the city, invading its core, disfiguring its urban form. This radicalized form of the terrain vague is tangible evidence of the dissolution and imminent obsolescence of the modern, industrial city and its inevitable dispersal into an evolving nomadic, post-urban landscape. Detroit offers us the experience of a new and unprecedented reality.

fig. 7: William Forsythe, Limbs Theorem with Tracy Kai Maier-Forsythe. Photos copyright Carl Wiegelt, partial image reprinted from Heidi Gilpin, "Aberations of Gravity" in Any, #5 (1994).

figs. 8-9-10: Film still from Wim Wenders, Wings of Desire (1988). (Still photo by author).

Circus scene.

9-10. Potsdamer Platz.

III

What attitude, what "state of soul" will permit the architect or the urban designer to see, think, and project the space of the contracting city? The philosopher, Richard Rorty, in the final essay of his book, Achieving Our Country, titled "The Inspirational Value of Great Works of Literature," refers to a particular kind of thought currently prevalent in the teaching and production of philosophy and literary criticism which he denominates "knowingness." "Knowingness," he says "is a state of soul which prevents shudders of awe." Knowingness departs from an analytical, a scientific spirit that seeks understanding through explanation; it arrives at judgment and critique, but devoid of hope and futility. Deprived of inspiration, of the imaginative spirit, "knowingness" leaves behind in Rorty's words, "only professional competence and intellectual sophistication."

According to Rorty, the ability of a text, for example, to produce "shudders of awe" is its inspirational value. Although, in his argument, he specifically references the inspirational value of works of literature and philosophy, we can extend this thought to the inspirational value of a place, a situation, to what surrounds us, to the terrain vague. If we view these radicalized spaces primarily as the products of a mechanism of social, political, and economic forces, we may not see their inspirational value. "Knowingness" offers us understanding and knowledge, but not inspiration, hope, or vision. Extrapolating Rorty's thought again, knowledge is about placing something "in a familiar context - relating it to things already known." But if something is to have inspirational value, it "must be allowed to recontextualize much of what you previously thought you knew; it cannot, at least at first, be itself recontextualized by what you already believe."

"Knowingness" has given us a necessary understanding of the mechanisms of the unfolding of modernity and post-modernity in our cities; it has theorized the movement from an industrial to a post-industrial landscape, from Fordism to post-Fordism, from colonialism to post-colonialism. The terrain vague is being quantified and objectified; the space of the contracting city has been and continues to be explained; it is gradually being given a less alien or foreign aspect, one that is more comprehensible, more reassuring. But in our anxiety to contextualize it, to analyze, interpret and assign meanings, we may obviate that potent moment of observation: we may forget to pause and simply experience the immediacy of this reality we are so desperately trying to master, to appropriate. We may not see it at all. And in the moment of our inattention, these expectant voids will have been re-colonized and dressed with a recognizable identity, either hastily returned to an unambiguous pre-urban "nature" or reabsorbed into the latest productive cycles as strip malls, suburban housing and large-scale projects such as stadia and convention centers.

The terrain vague has inspirational value; it has the capacity to produce "shudders of awe," that strange mingling of dread and wonder that can move our intellect and our emotions, and can motivate and incite us. Its sheer magnitude, pervasiveness, and otherness force us to recontextualize what we thought we knew. It shatters pre-established categories for thought and action. It disorientes us. The terrain vague cannot be fully integrated into our understanding. As an atypical phenomenon, it cannot be easily explained by the situation that gave rise to it. The terrain vague leaves a vital gap in "knowingness" that can be activated. The shock of otherness may permit us to create new ways of thinking, seeing, and feeling for this yet unchartered territory, to slip outside what is familiar and reassuring. Inspiration begins in "wild, unreflective" fascination, enthusiasm, and awe.

To think or project Detroit is a coming to terms, not with the angst and despair of congestion, velocity, and chaos imposed by the early 20th century metropolitan experience, but rather with the anxiety propitated by the progressive silence and emptiness of this post-industrial metropolis at the turn of the millennium. To speculate in and on the city today involves not only the awareness of a discordant and aleatory reality, but also the determination of an horizon of attention capable of provoking an (impossible) event, of creating a visibility, within the indeterminacy of the terrain vague.

20 Richard Rorty: "The Inspirational Value of Great Works of Literature," Achieving Our Country, Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 155-140.

21 Budi, 166.

22 Ibid., 132.

23 Ibid., 133.

24 Ibid., 134.

25 Ibid., 134.

26 Soli-Morales, 123.

Projecting Detroit experiments with the city in the midst of its unforming; it traces an outline that registers and watches over the city in the act of its disappearing. The project invents a possibility for inhabitation that resists strategies of aggressive transformation or systematic (re)appropriation of the city’s terrain vagues. Rather, through a “contradictory complicity” with the forces and rhythm of the city, the project constructs an event that exploits and preserves the dissonance and flow of these strange spaces. Projecting Detroit dwells within the city’s unfolding present, approximating that ambiguous and expectant moment hovering between presence and absence.

The specific zone for speculation is located at the threshold of downtown, circumscribed by the Grand Circus to the south and the freeways circumnavigating the center of the city to the north, east, and west. Downtown Detroit, while experiencing a vigorous process of un-making, remains the most ambiguous and contradictory space within the city. It precludes the possibility of re-densification and, as the city’s political, economic, and cultural anchor, it resists complete erasure. Projecting Detroit proposes a particular conception of landscape, understood as a strategy for intervention in the terrain vague that comprehends absence, the disappearance of architecture. This idea of landscape privileges the horizontal, the dynamics of the surface, over the vertical, the stability of fixed forms. The proposal is specific and indeterminate, concrete and flexible, at once. As an infrastructure, it prepares or arranges the surface of the ground for future events; it acts as a staging for the indeterminacy and unpredictability of the contracting city, capable of prompting or anticipating future intensities, gestures, uses, events. But the landscape is also a highly singular construction accommodated to an actual situation, a framework for new modes of experience, activity, and inhabitation. The landscape is an architecture of absence, but in the presence of life.

The projection of a landscape is viewed as an active and productive form of mediation between the terms of those oppositions extrapolated from the city itself: the cultural and the natural; building and unbuilding; use and disuse; permanence and impermanence; presence and absence; experience and alienation. Intervening in the actual space and time of the city, the land-

scape functions as a tracing of the presence of the absence, a measure of the history of the city at the intersection of memory, dissolution, and anticipation.

The predominantly vacant ground is mediated through a re-conceptualization and redistribution of land: a political, economic, and spatial partitioning of vacancy which alludes to present (re) or (de)functionalization. As an initial gesture, the remains of obsolete blocks, streets, and parcels are erased, establishing over-sized patches of land, new divisions of the existing terrain that affirm the already evident dismantling of urban hierarchies. The surviving buildings, isolated fragments of the urban fabric, physically coexist in the new landscape with implications of possible programmatic reactivation or eventual disappearance.

The impermanence of the city, the ephemeral quality of the constructed environment, is exploited through the creation of horizontal, virtual densities: topographical displacements that redefine the uncertain ground of the city. The protracted horizontality of the flat empty ground is abstracted as oblique planes and deflected lines that effect a slackening in the tautness of the unmediated land. The shifting line of the ground, alternately attenuated and tensed amidst the dipping and rising of inclined planes, challenges the coordinates of synoptic perception. The folds of the land at times obscure vision, alternately revealing and concealing the line of the ground, effecting rapid, successive alignments and divergences of landscape, city, and horizon. The new topography negotiates the pressure of this relentless horizontal extension. The ground, while constructing the space, drifts into background. The void is made tangible and determines the place. There is still virtually nothing there; the landscape substantiates the existing terrain vague as a multiplication of the same desire, a reiteration of void on void. It describes the gestures of silence and emptiness as palpable modes of being, irrefutable presences, neither significant nor senseless.

Two vectors are inserted into the landscape as directives or forces drawn between points suspended in nothingness. They slip between the existing forms as drifters through boundless space, repeating the indeterminacy of the terrain vague. These material lines of possibility, infrastructure insertions in the void, attempt to motivate the emptiness: experientially, spatially, and programmatically. A slightly inclined

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plane leans over the landscape, constructing its entire length. The variegated glass surface: clear, opaque or translucent; open or closed; textured or smooth, is imprinted with reflections, perceptions, and orders of the past, present, and future city. The vectors act as virtual mirrors that cite the phenomena of a reality that escapes our apprehension; they register a multitude of pure sensations. They do not explain but rather expose or bear witness to the erasure of the city. A suspended, undulating path sits alongside the inclined plane: an inhabitable trajectory traversing the amplitude of the place. The restless path mirrors the movement of the indentations and rises of the landscape beneath and prompts transitive relations with the appearing and disappearing city.

These two suspended gestures vaguely connect speculative programs to existing ones and prompt or insinuate new uses. The topographical event to the far west end of the site doubles as a drive-in theatre. It initiates the trajectory of the first vector that begins as the projection screens for the drive-in and stretches to the cultural anchor of the city, the Fox Theatre. At the drive-in, the ground bends down from the existing street; access off the highway is woven into this sloped plane, repeatedly disrupted by surface undulations. Light suggests shadows faintly on the faded, compressed forms, dividing the slope visually into multiple outlines of upper and lower grounds, overlapping pedestrian and vehicular zones. The land rises and falls in elongated broken parallels until it reaches a point of tangency with the trench incised in the longitudinal axis of the site: a patch of nature; trees hovering at eye level; a shadow or reflection of the path suspended at some distance above.

At the edge of the depressed freeway, the second vector passes by the Fox Theatre and stretches to the far east end of the site, meeting the embankment of the web of highway interchanges. It projects uninterrupted over the new and existing topography; an encounter of disconnected points in space. The raised pedestrian concourse meets the oblique plane of an amphitheater: the spatial inverse and programmatic double of the Fox Theatre. A volume of the continuous voided three-dimensional space of the city is tentatively captured within its translucent shell.

The perspectival crossing and convergence of the

two vectors into this cultural realm is grounded in the space of the sky, severing the otherwise limitless horizon and supporting the inexorable weight of the emptiness. These suspended lines of mobility are initial forms of knowing and orienting the site across its vast undifferentiated landscape. They mark, fix, and measure the dimensions of the indeterminate; they weave the new landscape together, mediating the region between void and nothingness. The artificial topography below traces their memory. Public realms are opened in the foundation of the ground, disclosing fantastic spaces: undulating paths drifting through warping grounds; gardens hovering above and below eye-level; plateaus wedged into the embankment of the highway. Folded ramps move the inhabitant over the surface of the multiple grades or simply project the body over the land on continuously sloping platforms. The occupant slips from ground to ground over this network of oblique lines stretching out over unspecifiable distances.

The unleveling of surface differentiates parcels of terrain for hybrid uses: an intermingling of the private and public realms. At the far east end, these parcels are interspersed with athletic zones: tennis, basketball, and handball courts; bocce grounds and a public pool. Strewn beneath the second vector, an assemblage of dancing forms inhabit the uneven surface: a series of reliefs made more apparent or unreal by shadows exaggerating their contours as they fold into and over the sloping ground. At some distance above, wandering on the raised concourse, onlookers glance down and contemplate the play.

A pool is inserted in the final depression, an elongated basin above the flattened bottom of the hollowed ground, partly obscured by a horizontal plane enclosing a poolhouse. At the easternmost edge of the site, the ground projects almost imperceptibly over the broad trench of the highway; vision spreads and is swallowed by the vast distance. Beneath this terrace, practically disappearing from sight, a curved translucent edifice housing an infirmary and bathhouse silently embeds itself into the wall of the embankment. Across the breadth of the newly imagined landscape, relations of affinity and dissimilarity fix a moment of fragile intensity in the midst of unpredictable events.

Ampitheatre,
landscape, and vectors
Detail plan and sections, model views and photomontage

Athletic grounds at highway embankment

D1
B1
C1
B1
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|visual content|

Crossing of the two vectors at Fox Theatre and ampitheatre: model view

Architects CHARLES WALDHEIM AND MARILI SANTOS-MUNNÉ
Project Assistant TOM REID
Production Assistants
BARBARA ACKERMANN
JAYDEEP BAGHAT
DANIELA KONRAD
HENRIK LUNDEN
SILKE LUX
IGOR MARJANDVIC
ANDREW YOUNG

DECAMPING
DETROIT

WALDHEIM
SANTOS-MUNNÉ

Things to do in Detroit

"(...) all the notes should be separated from each other in time, preceded and followed by silence, even if brief."

John Cage

On my table, I have Gia and Omar's project for Detroit.
My table. Do you remember the photograph, by now famous, of Mondrian's table? On an unpolluted surface sit the objects of his desk, organized more than ordered. Well, my own table has no similarity. Next to, on top of, and behind the folded plans of their work are mixed, in total disorder, half-read books, magazines I referred to months ago that have nestled in amongst back issues of periodicals, CD's, letters awaiting responses, and of course, this or that drawing related to the work of my own office. Add to this an array of pens, markers, mechanical pencils, scales, an anthray, and the computer keyboard flooded with ashes, all the instruments of this persistent ceremony of thought that is my own work.
Order and disorder are especially ambiguous terms when they pretend to describe the relationship between an instrument and the person who uses it. For example, when we have the possibility to view firsthand some of Mondrian's unfinished paintings and to appreciate the highly subjective character of his working method: long, narrow strips of paper glued on surfaces with imprescindible contours, continuous pentiment in the proportion of the areas, or the lack of definition of the perimeter in the final painting, then serious doubts arise about the precise and meticulous disposition of the objects on his work table. The observation is no longer directed to relating the order of the work to the order of the worktable where the work is produced, but rather the contrary. Can the doubts about the proportion of a painting not be reflected in the arrangement of the objects on the table of the painter? What certainty allows him to decide where to put the black notebook or if the gray one will have a side that is perpendicular or parallel to the table edge? Between the apparent certainty of his worktable and the doubt in his painting, is it not too great a leap to understand both actions as rituals of the same ceremony of affirmation?
"Don't be too hasty in trying to find a definition of the city; it's far too big and there's every chance of getting it wrong." This is how Georges Perec begins the chapter on the city in Espies d'espaces. He continues with a phrase that, in his thought, a continuous reference: "First, make an inventory of what you can see. List what you're sure of. Draw up elementary distinctions; for example, between what is the city and what isn't the city."
What significance does this fear of confusing what is city and what is not hold for Perec? Perhaps this can be clarified by the phrase that heads the chapter dedicated to the countryside: "I don't have a lot to say concerning the country, the country doesn't exist; it is an illusion." That which is not city does not exist; it is illusory. The city, on the contrary, is real. In relation to the city, the country is no more than an illusion that, as in the myth of the cave, does not permit us to know any more of it than shadows. The city is a refuge as opposed to the enslaving country, subject to the laws of nature that bind man and censure his free will. "The country is a foreign land."

How does Perec distinguish what is and what is not the city? At first, listing seems sufficient to establish this difference. "...an absolutely foolproof method for telling whether you're in Paris or outside Paris consists of looking at the numbers of the buses. If they have two digits, you're in Paris, if they have three, you're outside Paris." Perec himself recognizes the deficiencies of this method, "...it isn't, alas, as proofof as all that, but in principle it ought to be," surely because of the strong tendency of the suburbs "not to remain at suburbs," and to become cities in whatever way they can.

List, count, and make an inventory in order to understand what is the city. Let your own capacity for observation distinguish what is and what is not the city. In a radio broadcast, Perec sat in a café on the Boulevard Saint Germain and recounted all that happened in front of him: a woman with a dog, a man dressed in black. In Perec's La Vie Mode d'Emploi the narrator describes all she sees in a house in the center of Paris, whose street façade had supposedly been eliminated so the interior could be viewed as if through a vitreine. For Perec, visibility is a fundamental condition for knowing the city. What is not visible, and therefore cannot be listed, does not give us a reference for the city. It does not contribute facts; it is not useful for description, and therefore neither for comprehension.

Is the city then only what can be seen? Can what is not seen, that which remains hidden to the eyes of the observer, that which the city itself has always tried to keep hidden, be the city? The founding ceremonies of cities in ancient cultures always insisted on this differentiation. The foundational gesture of the plow cultivating a furrow in the land marks the character of what the city will be: a difference, a difference between up and down. The selection of the foundational territory presupposed the determination of an elevation, a level for placing the city, above which, not only the visible part of the city was erected, but also the inhabitable part. Beneath, everything that supported and made usable this habitability remained hidden: the foundations, the infrastructure, the roots of everything that flourished at the surface, and also the basements where the servants were heaped and the cells where the delinquents were secluded.

In any case, since Marat installed himself in the sewers of the Paris of Terror to write his incendian pamphlets and Ginsberg chose the basements of New York's Greenwich Village to recite his poems, the city never returned to being what it was. Suddenly the underground flourishes, imposing its presence as a standard of the modernity born on the other side of a mirror situated flush with the ground. Up and down cease to cohabitate and construct the new city in conditions of equality.

But there is still more. If for Perec visibility is an instrument for understanding the city, it is equally the concretion of its limits. How far does the city reach? What does the foundational plowed ground trace or plan other than the cells? What is the furrow but a differentiation between in and out, being not in the city? What worse punishment is there for a citizen than the giving of his privileges, his exit?

Does the contemporary city maintain this secular respect for its limits? Is the census still the instrument determining the rights and responsibilities of the citizen as in ancient Rome? In and out have ceased to act as adjective equivalent to up and down. What is there to do in a place where the adjective function has lost its old value and in which we now navigate a sea of new kinds of nouns with respect to those that surely need be re-qualified?

In "Situationists Theses on Traffic," Guy Debord wrote:

The mistake made by all urbanists is to consider the private automobile (and its by-products like the motorcycle) essentially as a means of transportation. Such a misconception is a major expression of a notion of happiness that developed capitalism tends to spread throughout the society... To want to redesign architecture to accord with the needs of the present massive, parasitical existence of private automobiles reflects the most unrealistic misapprehension of where the real problems lie. It is necessary to transform architecture to accord with the whole development of the society, criticizing all the transitory values linked to condemned forms of social relationships (in the first rank of which is the family).

The breaking up of the dialectic of the human milieu in favor of automobiles... masks its irrationality under pseudopractical justifications. But it is practically necessary only in terms of a specific social set-up. Those who believe that the particulars of the problem are permanent want in fact to believe in the permanence of the present society.

In this citation, Debord works with two distinct concepts: the car as the symbol of a determined capitalist happiness and the car as the sole object materializing the renovation of the city based on the idea of the practicality of its use. Debord thus proposes we reflect on the whole of society rather than on one of its factors in particular. He alerts us to the danger of being blinded by the vertigo that the change of scale the massive and gratifying use of the car supposes and therefore abandoning our cities to the hands of those who make the car their measuring stick.

The result of using the car as the only instrument of design, as a singular parameter for the organization of the city, is the indiscriminate superposition of scales of use and perception and the unequivocal appearance of the void as a negative product of this operation. The "demonization" of the void in large cities, linked to an unresolved confrontation among diverse scales, is not just a recent situation. Recall the engravings that reflected the construction of the barque Rome, the opening of the Piazza di San Pietro and the Piazza del Popolo, or the beautiful engraving descipling the confrontation between the destruction of Ladoo's Barriere de l'Étoile in the construction of the IArc de Triomphe. In these cases, it is not about a void coming from destruction but rather from construction. Therefore, the void does not carry the sigma of war or desolation found in so many central European cities. It is a different void. A void coming from a construction that disregards the character of the scales it uses, and, conscious of this, is self-incriminatory toward the user.

As I said in the beginning, I have on my table Gia and Omar's project for Detroit. Their drawings intermingle with my objects, and my own disorder with theirs. Their disalignments both subvert my own and coexist with the foundational plot of Detroit in a way analogous to the relation of the perfect geometry of my table.

But Omar and Gia, maybe without knowing it, propose with their work a new way to interpret the city in which the obsolete originary order, already broken by a thousand economic disasters, is superimposed with new parameters of comprehension.

The city their work evites forever abandon the values of the primitive foundational level. There no longer exists a zero level of the city to refer to. There does not exist an 'up' or 'down' that makes reference to the urban status, 'up' and 'down' in and of themselves, never again dependent on an absolute value prior to their creation.

Omar and Gia's Detroit lacks limits. All that has collaborated in the marking or the lessening of the problems of Detroit's downtown: the parcelization, the plan of the streets, the infrastructure, in their work, cease to act as limits, but instead erect themselves as an integral part of the city they serve. The "in and out" of the traditional city stops existing and becomes, instead, a generic "outside," invisible in Perec's words, inasmuch as it lacks parameters for observation. The new city cannot be seen because there is nothing to see. There are no monuments. There are no buildings, just a continuous unfolding of vacancies, indefinitely prolonged and undulating, like an ambiguous plane upon which we do not know how to situate any concrete coordinates.

The city Gia and Omar try to re-found employ's vacancy as an instrument for work. It uses public space, but devoid of traditional programmatic content, and even of formalization, to trace the new city. There is no possible mistake in the new city. There is no error in its definition, as Perec foresaw, nor error in its resolution as Debord may have feared of the 1950s "automobilist" interpretations.

In Gia and Omar's work, there are things to do and actions to be realized. Action is capable of substituting planning where planning itself has only sewn devastation.

5 What moment is our moment in time? What cities are our cities? It seems impossible to speak of a city in the past knowing that something of it is still present in the city we now inhabit. What Rome do we see when we go to Rome? What remains of the flourishing Detroit of the last century within the Detroit we now visit? There is something in the time that cities occupy which Perec was able to explain well in his comments on man in the last sentence of his novel, Time Regained:

So, if we given long enough to accomplish my work, I should not fail, even if the effect were to make them resemble monsters, to describe men as occupying so considerable a place, compared with the restricted place which is reserved for them in space, a place on the contrary prolonged past measure, for simultaneously, like giants plunged into the years, they touch the distant epochs through which they have lived, between which so many days have come to range themselves – in Time.9

To "...touch the distant epochs through which they have lived..." as Perec describes, makes our cities appear as monstrous beings. Their continuity in time sometimes makes them comprehensible to us. Even so, we try to uncover their essence, their intrinsic truth, in order to keep building them, to complete them in a kind of divine mission assigned to us from above. As Perec said, to search for a definition of city is too important a task, and there are many possibilities for making mistakes.

Do we really need to define the city in order to work on it? In any case, can we define something that has no limits in time?

George Perec, Species of Power and Other Poets (New York: Penguin Books, 1997), 60. Trans. and Id. John Stuock. Translated from English.
Ind. 60.
Ind. 68.
Ind. 68.
Ind. 60.
Ind. 60.
Ind. 60.
Guy Debord, "Stuartists' Themes on Traffic," Stuartations International Anthropology (Berkley: Bureau of Public Secrets, 1983), 65-99. Trans. and Ed. by Ken Knoblack.
Marcel Perec, Time Regained, in Search of Lost Time, Volume V. (USA: Random House, 1993). 53-94. Revised edition of the eight translation by Andreas Mayor and Terence Klimatton (USA: Random House Inc., 1983 and Great Britain, 1983), devoted by D.L. Ernght.
Ind. 52.

erasing Detroit

One of the more pressing issues in Detroit's recent mayoral elections has been the amount of public money to be spent on removing abandoned structures in the city. These structures are seen as a danger to the surrounding neighborhoods because they are often set on fire or used for drug deals. The selective removal of housing stock has become standard procedure in this beleaguered city. Little or no housing has been built to replace what was removed. "Unbuilding" has surpassed building as the city's major architectural activity.

The projects shown here, produced by architects in the Cranbrook Architecture Studio, attempt to come to grips with this development. In Erasing Detroit, the sites of removed dwellings are covered with black paint on aerial photographs of the city. This procedure parallels that of the city government charts, which indicate open land parcels by blacking them out. The resulting patterns indicate that unbuilding overwhelms building and reveals erasure as a significant force in the urban environment. By rendering this erasure, Erasing Detroit offers another "view" of the city and its architectural culture, a view free of the positivist prejudice that still determines much of the architecture discipline's conception of urbanism.

As visible in Erasing Detroit, large portions of Detroit are being transformed through the abandonment and subsequent demolition of houses and neighborhoods. This phenomenon has profoundly affected architectural culture in Detroit, and revealed the notion of unbuilding, often overlooked in contemporary discussions of architecture. The term unbuilding is invoked rather than destruction or deconstruction because the processes involved are neither anarchic nor critical. The removal of built structures has become a significant industry in the city with demolition contractors bidding to clear large lots. The industries that once employed workers and the economies that support the development of cities no longer view the city as having a value beyond providing services to consume their latest products. The city is expendable in their eyes; their global economic interests make local concerns such as the architecture and qualities of a place minor considerations.

The choice to work within this context of unbuilding is a difficult one since much of the ideology of architecture supports the organization of materials and energies toward the positivist idea of a building as a perfected instrument, however

fig. 1. City of Detroit Vacant Land Map.
fig. 2. Aerial Photograph indicating Removed Dwellings.
fig. 3. 911g St. Cyril Front Porch.
fig. 4. Unbuilding.
fig. 5. Plaster House.
fig. 6. From Plaster to Wood.
fig. 7. Wood House.
fig. 8. Interior Exposed.
fig. 9. Plan.
fig. 10. Gallery installation of 911g St. Cyril.

One last question must now be asked: during a crisis period, will the demolition of cities replace the major public works of traditional politics? If so, it would no longer be possible to distinguish between the nature of recessions (economic, industrial) and the nature of war.��

Paul Virilio

Paul Virilio, "The Overexposed City," Zone 1 (New York, Utrecht, 1980), trans. A. Atkinson Dawley in 1998, Detroit's Mayor Dennis Archer secured $60 million in loan guarantees from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to finance the demolition of every abandoned residential building in the city. See "Dismantling the Motor City," Metropolis, June 1989, 33.
Detroit Vacant Land Survey, City of Detroit City Planning Commission, August 24, 1990.
Ibid, 3-5.
"Day of the Bulldoze," The Economist, May 8, 1999, 35-24.
US Census Bureau figures for Detroit showed 8,849,568 residents in 1950, and that number dropped steadily in the post-war years to an estimated gain of twenty-year prior to the 2000 Census. For more on Detroit's declining population see Witold Ryczynski, "The Zero Density Neighborhood," Detroit Free Press Sunday Magazine, 9 October 1995, 14-17, 19. Also see "Census should show if Detroit is successful in its comeback," Chicago Tribune, 5 June 2000, sec. A, 1-10.

In August 1990, Detroit's City Planning Commission authored a remarkable and virtually unprecedented report.² This immodest document proposed the decommissioning and abandonment of the most vacant areas of what had once been the fourth largest city in the U.S. With this publication, unimspiringly titled the Detroit Vacant Land Survey, the city planners documented a process of depopulation and disinvestment that had been underway in Detroit since the 1950's.�� With an incendiary 1993 press release based on the City Planning Commission's recommendations of three years prior, the city Ombudsman, Marie Farrell-Donaldson, publicly called for the discontinuation of services to, and the relocation of vestigial populations from, the most vacant portions of the city:

The city's ombudsman... is essentially suggesting that the most blighted bits of the city should be closed down. Residents would be relocated from dying areas to those that still had life in them. The empty houses would be demolished and empty areas fenced off; they would either be landscaped, or allowed to return to "nature".��

In the second half of the twentieth century the city of Detroit lost half its population.�� This was largely accomplished without the endorsement of, or even meaningful acknowledgment by, the architectural and planning professions. What was remarkable about Detroit's 1990 Vacant Land Survey was its unsentimental and surprisingly clear-sighted acknowledgment of a process of post-industrial de-densification that continues to this day in cities produced by modern industrialization. Equally striking was how quickly the report's recommendations were angrily dismissed in spite of the fact that they corroborated a practice of urban erasure that was already well underway.

Prior to this politically volatile plan for the city's de-colonization, the planning professionals responsible could offer no solution to the ongoing demise of what had been the finest example of modern industrial urbanism. Planning could not even publicly acknowledge a process that was evident as early as the 1920s when Henry Ford committed his empire to the increasing decentralization of industrial production methods. By the 1990's, that process had made redundant the very city that launched the Fordist model of modern industrial development itself.

While European proponents of modernist planning had originally imported Fordism and Taylorism from American industry and applied them to city planning,

DECAMPING
DETROIT

WALDHEIM
SANTOS-MUNNÉ

it was the American city (and Detroit in particular) that offered the fullest embodiment of those principles in spatial terms. Ironically, while the American planning profession ultimately embraced the virtues of fordist urbanism in the middle of the twentieth century, they were ill-prepared for the impact those ongoing processes would have on forms of urban arrangement as evidenced by the condition of Detroit at the end of that century. Among those impacts were the utter abandonment of traditional European models of urban density in favor of impermanent, ad hoc arrangements of temporary utility and steadily decreasing density.

While flexibility, mobility, and speed made Detroit an international model for industrial urbanism, those very qualities rendered the city disposable. Traditional models of dense urban arrangement were quite literally abandoned in favor of escalating profits, accelerating accumulation, and a culture of consumption. This of course was the genius of Ford's conception: a culture that consumes the products of its own labor while consistently creating a surplus of demand ensuring a nomadic, operational, and ceaselessly reiterated model of ex-urban arrangement. That ongoing provisional work of rearrangement is the very model of American urbanism that Detroit offers.

Typical of their peers in other American cities, Detroit's city planners, architects, and urban design professionals clinicalized the dying industrial city to the extent that Detroit came to represent an urban failure, as though the responsibility for its viability rested with the techniques of modernist urbanism that shaped its development. This was to mistake effect for cause. As a product of mobile capital and speculative development practices in the service of evolving models of production, Detroit was a clear and unmistakable success.

As promoted internationally by the proponents of fordism, Detroit served as a model of urban placed in the service of optimized industrial production. With each successive transformation in production paradigms, Detroit re-tooled itself more completely and more quickly than virtually any other city in history.

What was remarkable about the Detroit Vacant Land Survey and the city of Detroit's plan to decommission parts of itself was not its impossibility, but rather the simple fact that it dared articulate for public consumption the very real fact that the city was already abandoning itself. This fact alone did not make Detroit unique. In the 1990's Detroit ranked a distant 22nd nationally in the percent of its population lost compared with other metropolitan centers, having already surrendered the majority of its citizenry over the previous four decades. The original abandonment and subsequent suburban annexation of central Detroit began well before similar conditions emerged in other major cities. Unlike other cities, however, Detroit began its process of decentralization and urban abandonment sooner and pursued it more completely than any other city in the modern world. For this reason alone, Detroit offers a seminal case study of post-fordist urbanism. Perhaps most importantly, Detroit was the only city that dared to publicly articulate a plan for its own abandonment and conceive of organizing the process of decommissioning itself as a legitimate problem requiring the attention of design professionals. In a graphically spare document featuring maps blacked-out with marker to indicate areas of vacant land, Detroit's planners rendered an image of a previously unimaginable urbanism of erasure that was already a material fact.

Over the course of the 1990's the city of Detroit lost approximately 1% of its housing stock annually to arson, primarily due to "Devil's Night" vandalism. Publicly, the city administration decried this astonishingly direct and specific critique of the city's rapidly deteriorating social conditions. Simultaneously, the city privately corroborated the arsonists' illegal intent by developing, funding, and implementing one of the

US Census Bureau figures for Detroit indicate that the populations of 22 metropolitan areas in the United States, including St. Louis, Washington DC, and Philadelphia, were shrinking at a faster rate than Detroit's during the decade of the 1990s.
Detroit Wear Land Survey, City of Detroit City Planning Commission, August 24, 1990.
On Devil's Night in Detroit, see Ziev Chafels, "Devil's Night: And Other Trail Rides of Detroit New York: Random House, 1990, p. 3-16. While precise numbers of houses lost to arson are hard to quantify, local myths place the figure at a conservative 1% annually. On media coverage of arson in Detroit, see Jerry Heron, AfterCulture: Detroit and AfterCulture: Detroit (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1993).
On the urban impact of Detroit's massive demolition program, see Dan Hammers "Training Detroit" in this collection.
Michiel DeCortelaud, "The Unmanable," The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1984), p. 190.
Hoffrich "Training Detroit."
Following Dan Hammers, "The Best the World has to Offer," in this collection.

largest and most sweeping demolition programs in the history of American urbanism. This program continued throughout the 90's, largely supported by the city's real estate, business, and civic communities. This curious arrangement allowed both the disenfranchised and the propertyed interests to publicly blame each other for the city's problems while providing a legal and economic framework within which to carry out an ongoing process of urban erasure. Ironically, this "solution" to Detroit's image problems completed the unsanctioned process of erasure begun illegally by the populations left in the wake of de-industrialization. Vast portions of Detroit were erased through this combination of unsanctioned burning and subsequently legitimized demolition. The combined impact of these two activities, each deemed illicit by differing interests, was to coordinate the public display of social unrest with administration attempts to erase the visual residue of Detroit's ongoing demise. For once, with the Detroit Vacant Land Survey, Detroit's planners were up to speed with events on the ground, even if they were momentarily out of step with popular public opinion formed by the media and fueled by equal parts nostalgia and denial.

In The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau describes the limits of disciplinary relevance absent the human subjects demanded by professional authority:

...the dying man falls outside the thinkable, which is identified with what one can do. In leaving the field circumscribed by the possibilities of treatment, it enters a region of meaninglessness.

For the architectural profession, the city of Detroit in the 1990's entered a similar condition of meaninglessness precisely because it no longer required the techniques of growth and development that had become the modus operandi of the discipline. Absent the need for these tools, Detroit became a "non-site" for the architect in the same sense that deCerteau's dead body ceased to operate as a "site" for the physician's attention. As the city de-commissioned itself, it entered a condition that could not be thought by the architectural and planning disciplines. As Dan Hoffman put it, in the early 1990's "...unbuilding surpassed building as the city's primary architectural activity."

The fact that American cities began to dissolve as a result of the pressures of mature fordist decentralization came as a surprise only to those disciplines with a vested interest in the ongoing viability of a nineteenth century model of urbanism based on increasing density. Free of that prejudice, the development of American industrial cities can more easily be understood as a temporary, ad hoc arrangement based on the momentary optimization of industrial production. The astonishing pliability of industrial arrangement and the increasing pace of change in production paradigms suggest that any understanding of American cities must acknowledge their temporary, provisional nature. The explosive growth of Detroit over the first half of the twentieth century, rather than constructing an expectation of enduring urbanism, must be understood as one half of an ongoing process of urban arrangement that ultimately rendered its previous forms redundant.

As the essays, images, and projects in this anthology can attest, Detroit can be seen as nothing more than the most recent idea about production as manifest in spatial terms. The fact that American

industrial urbanism would decreasingly resemble its European and pre-fordist precedents should come as no surprise. Rather than a permanent construction, one must take American urbanism as an essentially temporary, provisional, and continuously revised articulation of property ownership, speculative development, and mobile capital.

Rather than locating the origins of American urbanism in a fictional continuity with the formal qualities of European cities, it seems more plausible to draw continuity between contemporary regimes of accumulation and the pre-industrial assumptions behind patterns of American urban development. In this light, rather than stylistic, formal, or even material continuity as found in the study of European cities; the continuity to be found in American cities is based on the increasingly precise refinement of the spatial relations between capital, labor, and material. Not coincidentally, these were precisely the terms by which American settlements were initially conceived, as the pragmatic and provisional delineation of colonial regimes for the production and accumulation of wealth. In The Rediscovery of North America, the naturalist author Barry Lopez acknowledges the implicit symmetry between colonialism and fordism as the two most significant historical forces responsible for the shaping of the American landscape. Both regimes, Lopez argues, considered the natural environment as simultaneously a store for raw materials and a set of logistical obstacles to be overcome in the pursuit of optimized profits and efficient accumulation. For Lopez, industrial production has been the continuation of colonialism by other means, the technique by which the promise of colonial riches have been realized in the Americas.

One image illustrates the ideological conditions of American colonial development like no other. Drawn by the cartographer Peter Gordon, its ostensible subject (the clearing, partitioning, and construction of 18th century Savannah from the pine marsh of the Georgia colony) could stand for an image of the architectural assumptions of urbanization itself. The terms of this colonial projection include the naming and survey of a precinct of land which allows for the vending of property in a series of transactions between colonist and capitalist; colony and capital.

On closer reading, the essentially map-like status of the drawing becomes clear. Intended to be read initially as an aerial view, the painterly conceits of the foreground and sky, failing prolonged inspection, quickly recede in lieu of the plate's primary ideational content: the blank whiteness of its newly scrubbed ground. This ground, it turns out, provided both a suitable drawing surface and an equally pliable surface for the spatial partitioning of "wilderness." The vast sea of pine forest extending to the horizon from which the clearing has been cut exists as an endless undifferentiated condition of pre-erasure, sufficiently devoid of local specific "situation" so as to provide an ideal condition of pre-developed frontier demanding consumption. Unlike the inevitably palmipestal ground of Europe, the Americas are pictured here as an essentially boundless horizontal surface of prescribed commercial potential. The geometric means by which the map is coerced to coincide with the horizon are the same geometric means by which the projection of colonial power extends to the horizon in the manifest destiny of imperial will.

The ostensible purpose of this quasi-military expedition was (and is) the procurement of material and labor; that is to say, the building blocks of industry and capital. Curiously, the military encampment that provides the model for this sort of expeditionary landing site is virtually indistinguishable from this image with one troubling exception. While the drawing serves nicely as an image of a military encampment either in the process of deployment or withdrawal; it can, in the context of the context, only be read as the first step toward an inevitable future (horizontal/horizontal) expansion

Following Patrik Schumacher and Christian Rogner, After Ford, in this collection.
Barry Lopez, The Rediscovery of North America (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1990).
Gilles Deleeuse and Felix Guattari, "227; Treaties on Nomadology." The Wax Machine, "A Thousand Poor Minimagists: University of Minnesota Press, 1987."
Paul Virrillo has commented on the fundamentally warlike conditions of fordistrict urbanism. See Virrillo, 'The Overexposed City,' Zone 5 (New York: Urone, 1986), trans. Astrid Hustvedt.
See Schumacher and Rogner, "After Ford," in this collection.
Joseph P. Raven, The Idea of a Town: An Anthropology of Urban Form in Rome, Italy and the Ancient World (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988).
Michael Hays, "Contra the Bourgeois Interior: Co-Up Tzimmer," Modernism and the Posthumanist Subject (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995), 54-81.
Ludwig Hilfseimer, The New Regional Pattern (Chicago: Paul Thoreau & Co., 1930). Richard Pommer, David Spath, and Kevin Harrington, In the Shadow of Miles: Ludwig Hilfseimer, Architect, Educator, and Urban Planner, ed. Richard Pommer, David Spath, and Kevin Harrington (New York / Chicago: Rizzoli Art Institute of Chicago, 1988).
Ludwig Hilfseimer, "Cities and Defense." In the Shadow of Miles: Ludwig Hilfseimer, Architect, Educator, and Urban Planner, ed. Richard Pommer, David Spath, and Kevin Harrington (New York / Chicago: Rizzoli Art Institute of Chicago, 1988).

to the west. In this sense, the military camp is an essentially nomadic assemblage while the colonial settlement implies the fiction of a permanent urbanism through the optimization of production.

Not surprisingly, both colonial development and modern industrial development ultimately depend upon the physical coercion of populations and draw their ultimate authority from a set of quasi-military techniques of command and control. The militaristic underpinnings of colonialism and fordistism recommend this argument and further reinforce the symmetry of their intentions in enforcing social order in the service of optimized profitability. The origins of American colonial development and modern industrial production can be traced to parallel techniques of military infrastructure. For modernist planners and architects, the nomadic military encampment provided a useful model of optimized arrangement and ultimate infrastructural flexibility as demanded by fordist production.

Especially for those Modernists interested in mobility and new models of social arrangement, the flexibility and increasing pace of technological change associated with fordist production served as models for an increasingly temporary urbanism. The most obvious model for this iterative and responsive urbanism could be found at the intersection of industrial production and military infrastructure. For Le Corbusier, the origins of the city itself could be found in the ur-urbanism of the military encampment. Commenting on the architectural myths of the primitive hut, this drawing of a circum-scribed martial precinct reveals the essentially nomadic pre-history of urban arrangement in European culture. Ancient rites for the founding of Roman cities were essentially symmetrical with those for the founding of military encampments. In The Idea of a Town, Joseph Rykwert describes how performing the precise reverse of those founding rites was used to signify the decommissioning or abandonment of an encampment, thus corroborating their essentially symmetrical status.

With his Coop Zimmer project, Hannes Meyer commented on the collusion between the mass consumer products of fordist production and their replication in the miscellany of modern military nomadism. Meyer's project arranged a petit-bourgeois domestic ensemble of semi-disposable consumer furnishings as the interior of an equally transportable military accommodation.

The most direct critique of modern urbanism is informed by twentieth century military techniques can be found in the projects of Ludwig Hilbersheimer. Hilbersheimer's proposals for a radically decentralized pattern of regional infrastructure for postwar America simultaneously optimized fordist models of decentralized industrial production and dispersed large population concentrations that had become increasingly obvious targets for aerial attack in the atomic age. Hilber-sheimer's drawing of an atomic blast in central Illinois renders a clear imperative for the construction of a civil defense infrastructure capable of transporting dense urban populations away from the dangers of the city and toward the relative security of suburban dissolution. This model of the highway as a military infrastructure afforded a form of civil defense through camouflage. Not coincidentally, the depopulation of urban centers in response to the cold war argues quite

effectively for precisely the kind of decreasing density that his previous work had been predicated on in the name of efficient industrial production and optimized arrangement. In both modalities, as military encampment and industrial ensemble, the vision of a nationally scaled infrastructure of transportation and communication networks revealed a fundamental sympathy between fordist models of industrial production and military models of spatial projection.

Much has been written on the military origins of the modern interstate highway system in the U.S. and the impact of military policy on postwar American settlement patterns has been well documented. While the highway is arguably the clearest evidence of fordism's impact on postwar urban arrangement in America, it is also clear that this most fordist network is itself an essentially military technology. Given Ford's well-documented sympathy to Nazism, the infrastructure and logistical logics of the German war machine provided an essential case study in the virtues of fordist mobility. Not simply a model of production, but an essential fordist precept, mobilization was understood not only as a preparation for the projection of military power but also the retooling of the very industrial process itself toward martial ends. It should come as no surprise that the modern interstate highway, the very invention Ford's success postulated, was itself first proven necessary through German military engineering. By witnessing the logistical superiority and civil defense potential of the Autobahns, the American military-industrial complex was able to articulate the need for the highway as an increasingly urgent matter of national security.

Not coincidentally, Detroit has the dubious honor of being the only American city to be occupied three times by Federal troops. Another evidence of the parallels to be drawn between military encampments and Detroit's temporary urbanism can be found in the symmetrical techniques employed to enforce social order amidst the dense concentration of heterogeneous populations. The history of Detroit's labor unrest documents the various quasi-military techniques employed to render a suitably compliant labor pool to serve the needs of the production line. Detroit's social history has oscillated between periods of peacefully coerced consumption (fueled by advertising and increasing wages) and periods of profound social unrest, largely based on the desire for collective bargaining, improvements in economic conditions, and to redress racial and ethnic inequities.

Ford's famous five-dollar day and five-day work-week were quite calculated levers intended to fuel the consumption of mass products by the working classes themselves. The volatile concentration of diverse populations of laborers in dense urban centers was among the factors that led Ford to begin decentralizing production as early as the 1920s. The combination of decentralized pools of workers each with sufficient income to consume the products of their own labors produced a new economic paradigm in the twentieth century and also helped to fuel the rapid depopulation of post-industrial urban centers in postwar America.

The Decamping Detroit project is based on the City Planning Commission's Detroit Vacant Land Survey and is premised on staging scenarios for the execution of its recommendation that the most vacant portions of Detroit be abandoned and returned to landscape. Postulating that the work of decumption is a legitimate practice for those interested in the future of contemporary urbanism, the project stages and choreographs the process of decommissioning, depopulating, and reconceiving of those territories.

As Detroit decamps it constructs immense empty spaces, tracts of land that are essentially void spaces. These areas are not being "returned to nature", but are curious landscapes of indeterminate status. In this context, landscape is the only medium capable of dealing with simultaneously decreasing densities and indeterminate futures. The conditions recommending an urbanism of landscape can be found in both the abandoned central city and on the periphery of the still spreading suburbs. Ironically, the ongoing process of green-field development at the perimeter of Detroit's metropolitan region brings up similar questions posed by the incursion of opportunistic natural environmental systems into areas of post-urban abandonment. For these sites, both brownfield and greenfield, what is demanded is a strategy of landscape as urbanism, a "landscape urbanism for Detroit's post-industrial territories."

For a discussion of the military imperatives of civil order in the context of race relations in Detroit, see Thomas Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). 84-95.
A description of the martial enforcement of civil order in the context of race relations in Detroit, see Thomas Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).
Thomas Sugrue, "Crisis, Detroit and the fate of Postindustrial America," The Origins of the Urban Crisis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). 86.
See Schumacher and Rogert, "After Ford," in this collection.
Waltheim coined the term landscape urbanism in 1990 to describe the emergence of landscape as the most relevant medium for the production and representation of contemporary urbanism.
See James Corner's critique of Decamping Detroit's subjectivity, see Andrew Tarkovsky, Sulcinating in Time: Reflections on the Cinema, trans. Katy Jaeger-Blair London, The Bodley Head, 1986).

The decommissioning of Detroit's vacant lands recommends strategies for staging or setting-up reserves of open land of indeterminate status. These reserves of open space necessitate infrastructural strategies for social and ecological arrangement. Also needed are collective conceptions of these spaces that are capable of rendering Detroit's post-industrial territories legible to various populations and constituencies. Rather than allowing these spaces to be legislated by naming activities, their future viability as true void spaces depends upon the imaginary and mythic conditions of their founding. Toward this end, the decommissioning of these territories requires the same kind of public participation and rites that attended to their original annexation and incorporation.

One of the more compelling cultural images for these deterritorialized "zones" can be found in Andrey Tarkovsky's film Stalker. Tarkovsky's film constructs a de-commissioned post-industrial wilderness in which the causality, linearity, and temporal organization of fordist space are inverted. In the place of a recently and catastrophically absent fordist / militarist control, Stalker presents a uniquely imaginative view of a post-industrial future in the aftermath of Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and Bhopal.

Tarkovsky's protagonist, the Stalker, displays a post-urban intelligence capable of divining a trajectory across an otherwise inhospitable and foreboding landscape. At once both more ominous and more inspiring than the primordial European wilderness that serves as its inverted other, Tarkovsky's Zone conflates the worst of post-industrial contamination, invisible toxicity, and entropic decay. Occasionally offering a deceptively beautiful impression of a seemingly pastoral and benign nature, Tarkovsky's Zone represents the overlay of a primordial and abundant natural environment, an aging and abandoned industrial infrastructure, and an increasingly opportunistic set of mutating ecological conditions. The Zone's cessation of Fordist/Taylorist imperatives in lieu of a post-modern conflation of infrastructure and ecology recommends it as an image of Detroit's not too distant future.

figs. 9-12 Andrey Tarkovsky's Stalker

Dislocation

The first revision of the territories involves the voluntary relocation of those remaining residents wishing to be relocated, the discontinuation of city services, the capping of utilities, and the spatial demarcation or bounding of the newly constituted zones. This activity is accompanied by the appropriate political and economic de-commissioning and divestiture and has the effect of altering the status of the extant ground and building fabric. Once evacuated, these “Zones” effectively sever the arterial connectivity between the remaining marginally viable portions of the city and ultimately hasten their own entropic demise.

Erasure

The second phase of the project concerns the erasure and scrubbing of the newly evacuated Zones. The proposal authorizes and accelerates the ongoing arson of abandoned houses in the city. The effective erasure of urban vestiges within the Zones are initiated through the sanctioning of regularly scheduled large-scale burns as a continuation of Detroit’s Devil’s Night festivities. These burns are complemented with the aggressive demolition of selective portions of the Zone, the release of captured wildlife species, and the insertion of plant species that would effectively hasten the natural deterioration of the city's building fabric as an effect of weathering.

Taking the city’s proposal for the abandonment of the least viable lands at face value, the project describes a series of scenarios by which Detroit would be decamped. Based on the Detroit Vacant Land Survey, the project identifies seven bounded territories within the city surveyed as over 70% vacant land and proposes scenarios by which they might be reconstituted. Additional territories are fied for future application, appropriated as scapes of indeterminate four stages in the scope territories: infiltration.

Decamping Detroit Map

Absorption

The third phase of the project proposes the ecological re-constitution of portions of the Zones through tree farming and the inundation of the ground through selective flooding. The use of aerially deposited low-grade seed and the manual insertion of fast-growing seedlings allows portions of the Zones to enter a period of lessened investment and maintenance. These softwood tree farms can effectively be abandoned for generations and returned to at some future date as ex-urban resource parks. The presence of the Detroit River, St. Lawrence Seaway, and Great Lakes systems allows for the selective introduction of flood plane de-regulation and the partial inundation of certain Zones. Using the existing infrastructure for the collection, distribution, and release of the region’s abundant fresh water supply, regularly scheduled soakings are an effective long-term solution to the contamination of the ground on many sites. These transformations of the urban ecology will have the effect of changing the status and image of the city’s remaining territories while materially enforcing the evacuation of the Zones.

Infiltration

The final stage in the project speculates on the future re-appropriation of the de-commissioned Zones and their annexation from agents and constituencies outside the city. These re-programming proposals make a virtue of the Zone’s abandonment, erasure, and relative vacancy by opportunistically occupying the physical residue of Detroit’s ex-urban landscapes. Not insignificantly, these activities are economically viable given ongoing market conditions. Those market conditions continually present demand for opportunistic incursions by the population of the metropolitan region. The future annexation of Detroit’s zones will continue as open-ended responses to individual or collective demands placed on the landscape and its infrastructure as ambient absences. Rather than master planning or scripting a particular material and spatial future for these zones, Decamping Detroit speculates on the process of their decommissioning and the staging of their vacancy.

Zone 1 Suburban Campground / Garden Annex

Boundary
Arson
Demolition
Arson
Weathering
Demolition
re-settlement

Zone 2 Migrant Worker Mobile-Homesteads

boundary
nomad
plug-in
seed
harvest
homesteader

Zone 3 Pigeon and Falconry Range / Rifle Range

Zone 5 Ex-Urban Survival Training Course / Boot Camp

Zone 6 Experimental Agriculture Cooperative Homestead

Zone 7 Firefighters Academy / Arson Investigation Center

boundary outpost
Arson training
administration
storage
communication communication

Landscraping

The Stalking Detroit Project, and Waldheim/Santos-Munne's proposal "Decamping Detroit" in particular, prompt one to reflect on the reversal of traditional architectural approaches toward colonization and building to those of un-building, removal, and erasure. These are important concerns not only because of the de-population of certain urban areas, as in Detroit, but also the opposite extreme: the expansion of urban areas and the need to preserve or retain sectors of empty and open space. If the former case implies de-colonization, then the latter suggests an active process of anti-colonization. Both are strategic operations that are crucial to the development of open reserves of space, reserves that are fast disappearing as low-density development sprawls unconfined across the surfaces of the earth.

What character or program could be assigned to such reserves? Should they in fact be assigned any identity at all? And what mechanisms might be deployed to ensure the integrity and longevity of such spaces?

In considering the above questions with specific regard to Detroit, Waldheim and Santos-Munne look to two references. First is the city orbudsman's suggestion that blighted areas of metropolitan Detroit be closed down, vowed, and left to nature. The second is the film-maker Tarkovsky's enigmatic "Zone" in his film Stalker. Both references paint a picture of a deared, de-commissioned terrain that is essentially empty of references, representations, or programs. More importantly, these references also suggest that empty spaces are not simply the left-over results of desertion but rather construction; they are intentionally "set-up" and staged as open grounds, for wholly indeterminate futures. The fact that such activity resides in the logistics of creating and maintaining such spaces rather than in their appearance presents a real challenge to architects who have been long concerned with formal expression and completion.

This notion of setting-up reserves of indeterminacy points to a number of significant issues with regard to the development of genuinely open-space. The first issue raised is management. Decommissioning and reallocating resources is an inevitable aspect of urban economy, as in "good housekeeping." Therefore, a variety of precise organizational measures must be devised and implemented. While many aspects of landscape and city, especially open-space, may appear to be quite simple, these structures are typically undergirded by an entire arsenal of instruments and mechanisms that derive from quite complex regimes of organization. These infrastructure regimes are best described as "diagrams," or schematic frameworks that describe the codes and mechanisms necessary for something to be enacted (including erasure). As such, they point toward a form of architectural practice that is logistical and performative, as distinct from one that is primarily representational and object/form focused.

These mechanisms of management raise a second set of issues related to strategy and power. Power implies that there will always be winners (typically the power authority), as in the State) and losers (typically the lowest income groups) when territory is reorganized. However, the diagram-

matic emancipation of large tracts of land, the deterritorialization of property, suggests a condition where there is in fact no single power or authority but rather a mass collection of individual choices and actions. In other words, while there may well be a central agency that conceived and directs the deterritorialization of space, the ensuing result can be completely open and unregulated, thereby conflicting questions of hierarchy, control, and power. Thus, rather than "fixing" the city through architecture, or "architecturalizing" the city in order to discipline its spaces, both perspectives of power, the work of deterritorialization simply establishes the conditions for the processes of urbanism to perform and unfold in more dynamic ways.

Moving from both modernist and new-urbanist models of ordering the city (both of which believe that formal models alone will remedy many of the problems of the city, stylistic differences notwithstanding) to more open-ended, strategic models of radical emancipation through diagrammatic means. Thus, instead of "scaping" the land into a formal composition of meaning and presence, I am suggesting the possibilities for "scraping" the land of its various residues: symbolic, political, and material. The scraped ground then becomes an empty field of absence that accommodates multiple interpretations and possibilities.

Walheim and Santos-Munne's work demonstrates one such instance of landscaping, but there are other examples as well. For instance, Rem Koolhaas and OMA's proposal for the staged erasure of la defense in Paris and its subsequent overlay by an autonomous grid survey framework. "The process of erasure could be scraped over time in a surreptitious way—an invisible reality. We could gradually scrape whole areas of texture off the map, and in 25 years the whole area would be available. What to do with this new territory?"11 a different way, Koolhaas and OMA's proposal for the construction of five "linex voids" in the planning framework for the new town of Melun-Senart provides another useful comparison: "A system of bands, linear voids, is inscribed on the site like an enormous Chinese figure. We propose to invest most of the energies needed for the development of Melun-Senart in the protection of these bands, in maintaining their emptiness."12 Here, a reversal is exposed, as the voids are the important vessels that are highly regulated, while the spaces left in-between the bands become open for development with minimal regulation. A third project of erasure by Koolhaas is the Point City/South City plan, which speculatively reallocates density and distribution of settlement across the Netherlands in order to concentrate urban areas while preserving open space: "We systematically, deliberately, intentionally fabricate a Western metropolis, and at the same time create emptiness—a reservoir of void—in the rest of the country."13 Dutch landscape architect Adriane Geuzel and West H have proposed a similar strategy of empty scenarios, this time for the Randstad and Green Heart, "Empty scenarios are more sensible the more they are based on introducing guidelines and restrictions for developing each individual area than designating 'empty expanse.' These can be

related to excluding certain functions, limiting the height of buildings, density, noise, production, or incorporating ecological textures, and so on. There are other instances of landscaping, for example: landscape architect Peter Latz's concept of "residual" and "blank" space, artist Tony Smith's "unrecognizable space," earth-artist Robert Smithson's "non-site," or Marc Auge's "non-space," and there is good reason to believe that practices of landscaping are constructing alternative grounds to that of either the traditional city or landscape.

These various practices of scraping and deterritorialization suggest another set of issues that deal with voidness. Regardless of how much the process tries, the decommissioning and erasure of sites still leaves a vacancy. It is impossible to completely remove space. As mentioned above, this void-space, like the ancient European Wilderness, presents the city managers with multiple logistical and operational problems while providing the estranged residents with a vast range of unsanctioned and perhaps even hitherto unforeseen opportunities. However, it is important to note that these qualities are dependent upon the wholly undefined aspects of the void. The void cannot be earmarked as "nature reserve," "succession habitat," "recreational field," or any other such designate, because name it to claim it in some way. And what is potentially more socially liberating about the void is precisely the absence of recognition and the subsequent indifference toward it. One simply does not "see" it, even though it surrounds and enables performance, and is itself sustained by invisible mechanisms and regulatory infrastructure.

These issues challenge conventional architectural practice and the assumptions that underlie its methods and techniques. They also challenge society's acculturated assumptions about what is "good" and "bad" in a city, and what role landscape plays in the projection of urban morality. Ultimately, they suggest that the city is a complex and always emerging entity that can no longer be shaped through "architecture" or "landscape." In recognizing the dynamic, uncontrollable, and wild effects of contemporary urbanism, new techniques of intervention need to be devised that allow for the living entity of the city to be more creatively engaged. The move away from "master plans" to more tactical, improvisational, and provisional projects marks a shift in attitude from that of architect as super-authority to architect as adaptive entrepreneur: a social manager of sets and stages that enable the city to perform in newly dynamic ways. These sets and stages, these infastructures, no longer aim to improve or correct the city (a position of power) but are rather aimed at establishing the conditions for the full liberating promise of contemporary urbanism to play out.

Two landscapes that come to mind with regard to the management, voidness, and morality of the Detroit cleaners are the English Commons and the Indian Maidan. These vague, simple, and empty spaces, centrally located in towns and cities, escape easy definition or explanation: they simply ore. Free of the excesses of design, composition, or representation,

these blank and open fields invite the participation of all the city's residents. They function as blank slates, level terrains upon which differences may be negotiated in time. At once campground and nomadic field, these sites allow for the double experience of individual freedom and collective engagement. Anonymous and plain, the Maidan and the Commons belong to everybody and to nobody. They are readily accessible, openly shared, yet non-descript, banal, and ordinary. It is precisely these characteristics of blank space, the very lack of identity and (re)cognizance, that enable it to perform so adaptably and inclusively over time. It is in this generized form of space that we move away from architecture and landscape to something that is undesigned, unbuilt, and open.

This is not at all meant to suggest that space should simply be left alone, as in the politics of non-development or ad-hoc emergence. On the contrary, both the Maidan and the Commons have particular structures that undergird their existence: deterritorialized cuts and breaks, reterritorialized fields and frames, infrastructure points and lines of force, some visible, most invisible, hidden in the diagrams and regulatory apparati of the various city managers, and, of course, the performative social patterns and group alliances that eventually colonize these surfaces in provisional yet deeply significant ways. Moreover, their very existence is dependent upon the density, intensity, and development of their surroundings. However, whereas these surroundings may continue to evolve according to typical processes of urbanization, including architecture and planning, the deterritorialized spaces are dependent upon a very different framework of mechanisms. Thus, to the degree that we might still speak about landscape and architectural design, it is more the design of managerial procedures, set-ups, and strategies of disappearance than it is the design of scenic compositions. It is in this framework that one might be able to both recognize current and imagine new forms of evolving posturban (and postlandscape!) life. Here, the Detroit work of Waldheim and Santos-Munne begins to cast significant new light upon the advancement of these conditions.

See Rene Koehbaas and Bruno Max, S.M.L.XI (New York: Monacalli Press), pp. 193-195.
Ind. ghl (193-195).
Ind. ghl (193-195).
See Adrian Guzman, "Wilderness," in Dr. Alexander Parker, New Urban Frontiers, Anne Max Desolder, ed. (Boston: Netherlands, Thradh, 1992), pp. 105.
See Annalia Malhotr, Neather Wilderness Not Home: The Indian Maidan in Recovering Landscape (Evergreen Landscape Architecture, London Center, ed. (New York: Princeton Architectural Press), 1999), pp. 204-195.

the Heidelberg Project

By what process are the parts of an edifice, the elements of a drama, the factors in a victory, reconciled one with another? By what series of obscure analyses is anyone led to the production of a work?

In 1986, something curious emerged on the East Side of Detroit. An artist by the name of Tyree Guyton grew dismayed with the abandoned houses on the street where he grew up and the threat they posed to his neighborhood. He responded as any artist might, through the making of work. Guyton began appropriating the vacant houses on Heidelberg Street as sites for giant assemblages created with found objects that he hauled in with the help of his wife and grandfather.

Detroit did not become great through centrally planned visions. Detroit became great through the millions of spontaneous, very personal and not always beautiful visions of its people.

With the Baby Doll House (1986-88), Guyton's work evidenced two themes that would figure prominently in the future of work on Heidelberg. First, was the exploration and expression of social issues, in this case the tainted innocence of children growing up on the turbulent streets in Detroit as implicated by the collection of children's dolls. The second development was the inclusion of the neighborhood residents, especially its children, in the execution of the project in an attempt to leverage community involvement and interaction. As Guyton said, "People from all over participated. City workers would leave me signs. Little kids would bring me toys. It was art that everybody took pride in." Later came the Dotty Wotty House (1992), owned by and dedicated to Guyton's grandfather, which was a celebration of color inspired by Dr. Martin Luther King's statement that "we are all the same color on the inside." Obstruction of Justice (1994), sometimes referred to as the OJ House, mocked the media attention given to the Simpson trial in light of the pervasiveness of injustice surrounding its more immediate physical site.

As the project grew, so did the reaction to it. The art community was solidly in support of Guyton and it spearheaded efforts to recognize him with a Spirit of Detroit Award in 1989 and a Michigan Artist Award in 1992. A curator at the Detroit Institute of Arts observed, "the message in his work is very complex. It ranges from the humorous to the sober to the very serious to the enlightening. His work is very positive even when it's dealing with difficult and negative issues." A word spread of the sheer visual energy that could be found on Heidelberg, and mostly white outsiders from all over the world could be seen slowly driving down the street, doors locked of course.

The project had numerous detractors as well. "What Mr. Guyton is calling art is what residents are calling garbage," said a member of McDougall-Hunt Citizens Group who felt it was difficult enough for black neighborhoods to present a positive image without additional trash parading as art. The group's chair added, "People around the country see what he's doing on the news and think that's the way we live. Detroit's

Paul Valery, "Introduction to the Method of Leonardo da Vinci," from Paul Valery: An Anthology edited by James Lawer (Princeton: Princeton university Press, 1977), 72.
Thomas Stoll, "Is saving Detroit ruins truly abused?" The Detroit News, December 24, 1995.
Tyrese Guyton quoted in Ann Swensen: "Art everyone took pride in. It's gone." The Detroit News, November 24, 1991, 1A.
Patience Young, Curator of Education, Detroit Institute of Arts quoted in Scott Walton: "Rising from the Razing," Detroit Free Press, December 18, 1991, 1E.
Sentiments of the McDougall-Hunt Citizens District Council are expressed in William Kleinnecht, "Neighbors say it's not art, seek to end show in street," Detroit Free Press, November 5, 1991, 1A.

not like that." "I'm not against his work, but how would you like this next to your home?" asked a neighbor of the Numbers House (1990). A city spokesperson was quoted as saying the city received complaints daily.

In the fall of 1991 Guyton began a new project titled Street People that sharpened criticism against his work. He scattered hundreds of discarded shoes in the street, with the intention that they be run over by cars and pummeled by the elements, analogous to the plight of homeless people as he saw it. This initially resulted in an innocent littering ticket, but may have forced the city's hand to curb the growing media attention for the Heidelberg Project and its physical and conceptual statements about Detroit's shortcomings. "When complaints come through, whether we like it or not, we have to act on them," said an official for the Department of Public Works. On a Saturday morning a month later, Guyton was given fifteen minutes notice that city bulldozers were on their way. They arrived, escorted by six police cars, by order of then Mayor Coleman Young who "didn't really consider it art." By the end of the day four houses had been flattened and removed. "A shame?" responded Guyton, watching six years of effort being summarily erased, "There's three crack houses the city left standing

Heidelberg resident Otila Bell quoted in Nancy Ann Jeffrey, "Flattened creation draws a crowd," Detroit Free Press, November 25, 1991, IA.
James Biedae, Environmental Control Division, Detroit Department of Public Works quoted in Jim Schuster, "Heidelberg down at the beck," Detroit Free Press, October 10, 1991.
Mayoral spokesman Bob Berg on behalf of then mayor Coleman A. Young, as quoted by Joy Hakanson Colby in "Deconstructionism," The Detroit News, November 26, 1991.
Tyree Guyton quoted in Ann Sweeney, "Art everyone took pride in. It's gone." The Detroit News, November 24, 1991, 10A.
Heidelberg Street resident Teresa Woods quoted in Sweeney, 10A.

right behind here. That's the shame." A supportive neighbor lamented, "That man was making something out of this neighborhood. Now that it's gone, we really do live in a ghetto."

But the project wasn't gone for long as Guyton's indomitable spirit could soon be seen in the trees on the street and the landscape of vacant lots left in the bulldozer's wake. He began with People's Tree (1991), a memorial to the first phase of the project assembled with objects salvaged from the wrecker's piles. He followed with Faces in the Hood (1991) which commented on the irony of countless abandoned autos littering Detroit's streets by appropriating their hoods as a site for smiling self-portraits. In a politically charged tribute to Rosa Parks called The Bus (1994), Guyton commented on Detroit's history of racial tension and social injustice by working with an abandoned bus manufactured in the same year as her historic bus ride challenging institutionalized policies of racial segregation in the South.

Although the project continues today, so does its controversy. Several lots were cleared in February of 1999 when a restraining order barring the project's demolition was lifted. Other legal battles lie ahead and the future of Guyton's work on Heidelberg Street is threatened. Ultimately the only remaining work may be Field of Grasshoppers (1994), a deliberately uncultivated vacant lot left to overgrow like countless vacant lots in the city.

Even if all traces of Guyton's work were systematically erased, the true value of the Heidelberg Project would remain: its cultivation of the public's understanding of the inherently troubling realm of terrain vague through community involvement in the definition and determination of the work. The experimental nature of the project generated participation and a call to action on the part of the city and the community, something previous planning proposals could not, and its specificity gave substance to issues that could be identified and discussed. In the spirit of the Situationist proposals of the 1960's, the Heidelberg project stirred public debate, which although painful in the short-term, proved ultimately healthy for the vitality of civic discourse surrounding the future of the city.

fig. 1 Baby Doll House.
figs. 2-4-7-8-9 Heidelberg Street.
fig. 3 O.J. House.
fig. 5 Numbers House.
fig. 6 The Bus.
fig. 10 Heidelberg Project (Detail).

Line Frustration is the result of a collaboration involving
JENIFER BURKE
MATT MACDONAGH-DUMLER
JOE MEPPELINK
JASON YOUNG

LINE
FRUSTATION
DETROIT
YOUNG

“You see that?” the man pointed toward an empty field next to the sunken railway line, “…that was the brewery.” The air was cool and crisp. His voice reverberated against the thickness of the fog with an attenuated Slavic accent. “Over there, a meat-packing plant.” He pointed again to an empty expanse. “The slaughter house was right there.” Turning away to speak directly into the air, he said, “that’s all gone now.” An indirect response to a question about the ongoing demolition of Detroit's Rickel Malt Building, the statement was cold, clear, matter-of-fact: “That's all gone now.” His words repeated endlessly across the horizon, filling the landscape and calming its fearful emptiness. The old man was much more interesting than he was important. His words were cold and distant, lacking all irony or sense of loss. The absence of nostalgia in his tone was intriguing.

The chance meeting with this old man occurred in the winter of 1995 during a day of wandering through Detroit.

Detroit’s local media have been broadcasting clues to the emigrant (suburban) middle class for years: fill the emptiness with memories, order this unprecedented cityscape by remembering how it used to be. The media compel their audience to focus on the act of remembering what cities once stood for, how they once operated, while thinking they could have been better, if only they had been more beautiful. If the audience can’t remember how Detroit used to be, they are asked to think it through prosthetic memories: Hudson’s Department Store, the Michigan Central Train Depot, Woodward Avenue back in the day. The list is always in flux, determined more by the particulars of the situation rather than by the potency of the memory itself. In a certain sense, the mission of the media in Detroit has been to maintain a perception of order through constructing a nostalgic gloss. But why?

The answer is simple; there is control in broadcasting nostalgia. It blunts the possibility of a serious rethinking of the city itself, and this blunting conserves. As the cultural evacuation of Detroit gave rise to an urbanism seen nowhere else, the broadcast media perpetuated a sense of complacency, a sense of powerlessness towards anything other than lament. The evening news, the advertising that paid for it, and the viewing audience at home grew ever more committed to a trajectory of divestment that they themselves, found acceptable at a comfortable distance. The media’s attention on the past precluded the possibility of a future. What was broadcast as a permissible future did not include all that was possible. In order to conserve its own mission, the media sold a gap between an empowered middle class and the city itself. The media did not create this gap, they simply exploited it. The gap is part of what Guy Debord called “the unrealism of the real society.” This gap between territory and its image is both the outcome and the goal of the spectacle of modern coverage. In the absence of the city, the idea of the city persisted and grew stronger. As the city emptied out, the media produced a new tracing of the territory left behind. This tracing was then mapped across the city, covering the history of the land itself. A new reality, an unreal one, was forged onto the empty landscape of divestment. The emptying out of the city, its evacuation, its humiliation, set into motion the nostalgic representation of those empty spaces. Charged with a nostalgia for what they once were, or with a sense of disbelief over what they have become, the media’s suburban shareholders were offered multiple ways out of historical responsibility for them. The market created its own tautological reality. Broadcasting was an effective technique in that its means and ends are the same.

Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (Detroit: Black and Red, 1983), entry #6.
Jerry Heron, AfterCulture: Detroit and the Humiliation of History (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1993). See Chapter Two, “Convoy.”
Ibid., 54.

While it is obvious the American media operates along an axis from sensational to apathetic, this does not disperse its cultural impact. The force of the media is palpable. Through the late 1980s and early 1990s, local television news coverage of Detroit relegated itself, generally speaking, to the task of legitimizing the white middle class flight from the city. By that time the city had witnessed decades of profound divestment. The middle class majority had migrated away from the city center and the local television stations followed. Their news telecasts subsequently placed the middle class in a position of control over the city through distance, displacement, and absence. This accentuated the operational mode of the "local" media and heightened their importance as witnesses to an already well-documented crisis. Detroit's suburban majority were afforded knowledge of their own (former) city streets not through lived experience, but rather through coverage: the displacement of reality itself in favor of its televisual representation.

In much of America, media coverage of urban events has come to supplant the lived experience of those events themselves. This was never truer than in Detroit. Unfortunately, the media's rendering of Detroit as a mythic landscape mostly excluded the description of actual conditions on the ground. The extraordinary image of Detroit broadcast regularly to local audiences was void of the city's ordinariness. The staggering sobriety of Detroit's material residue was hardly legible in its media projected identity. By catering to the buying power of the middle class market, the media created a profitable recreational emptiness in the city. Detroit's was not simple abandonment. Its empty spaces were consciously maintained so as to propel the myth that allows them to be covered again and again. Here, the urban landscape was more valuable empty and mystified than developed. This is the ultimate irony in the historical relationship between urbanism and land value. By the early 1990's Detroit had developed an indirect land value structure. Emptiness in the city carried an indirect televisual value. Even though Detroit's

empty expanses rendered poverty legible, a vast system of wealth was projected across its empty fields. The indirect nature of this economy thwarts attempts to ask what went wrong. Not coincidentally, this system of value is analogous to the relational system between an actual televised event and its advertising potential. The media, and its self-conscious attempts to remember when, seem to be the cultural agents most able to broker this wealth and put it on the move. Meanwhile, in the territory of absence that is Detroit, large tracts of land and vast fields of potential are left untapped, open, fallow.

The city administrators themselves came to recognize the indirect value of Detroit's emptiness. Or so it seemed in 1994 when Mayor Dennis Archer, interviewed on the local evening news, described the city's bid to gain designation as a federally funded Empowerment Zone. In living rooms across the market, the mayor was heard to say: "the submission made to the federal government by our city was among the best in the country." His call for a sense of civic pride in diligently documenting the devastation was underpinned by a much more complex understanding of political capital. The city was reaching a singular moment in time when its definitively bad character was becoming an asset. Detroit witnessed an urbanism gone so bad, plummeted so low, that its potential was unrivalled. With the Empowerment Zone proposal, the Mayor was spinning his own future around the transformation of the city from America's worst to America's first. And it is, genuinely a first-place city. No other American city has given itself so unabashedly over to industrial capitalism. From Henry Ford's rendering of Detroit as the automobile industry, to his efforts aimed at redefining Detroit as nearby suburban Dearborn, Detroit seemed to never lose its nerve, nor turn its back on what appeared to be the messy endgame of the trajectory of progress implicit in modernity. This held true even as the city began to stretch the limits of its image beyond recognition. Detroit afforded a new prototype for the relationship between a city and its image of urbanity. And the question of appearances is very much the operative question, for the architects and urban planners who tried to solve Detroit's problems almost exclusively tried to do so with a renovated image of its urbanism. With this, the question remains whether a city that does not look urban is still, in fact, a city at all.

In entry #169 of Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord writes, "Urbanism is capitalism's seizure of the natural and human environment; developing logically into absolute domination, capitalism can and must remake the totality of space into its own setting." The Mayor, to be sure, did not have Debord in mind when he trumpeted the city's bid for empowerment funding, but its associative potential cannot be overlooked. The bid for federal funds was a bid to harness sufficient capital to launch a new version of the economy's legibility. After all, capital had already created a reality for Detroit through an image of absent urbanism. This is what emptiness is all about: the remaking of a thing into the image of what it ought to be. Capital's movement away from the city proper produced new conditions progressively developed by the media into an identity so harsh and unforgiving that it rendered the potential return of capital to those abandoned fields a self-fulfilling possibility. Federal funding flowing into the city as a result of the Empowerment Zone can be seen as another version of the seizure of property by capital. Interestingly, this capital would be reterritorializing what was already under its direct supervision. The empty ground plane redesignated "Empowerment Zone" had already relinquished its other more problematic identities to become the very image of Detroit's absent urbanism. The media then set forth the promise of a robust, full set of activities. Emptiness found its replacement in a new set of permissible futures. And we all viewed this from the safety and security of our remote living rooms wondering collectively, "what is this Empowerment Zone anyway?"

Take, for example, the National football league's championship game, the Super Bowl. Each year the game itself seems to become less and less interesting when compared to the excitement surrounding the premier broadcast of new television advertisements. See Herron, 59.
Detroit's Empowerment Zone is an 18-35 square mile territory inside the city's boundaries that has been given special designation by the Federal Government. The Federal Empowerment Zone program was designed to foster private as well as non-profit and public initiatives within designated areas of strangent economic distress. Detroit was one of its urban areas disbanded in 1994 nationwide. Each area is to receive up to $100 million in federal funding, plus federal tax benefits of even greater value.
Debord, Society of the Spectacle (Detroit: Black and Red, 1983), entry #169.
This is evidenced by Detroit's late 1990s media comeback. Casinos, stables, and suburban entertainment venues have marked the "return." The media has largely reversed its strategy of coverage from one that maintains that Detroit is still dangerous and undesirable as an address to one that hallmarks the return of Detroit as an economically viable city.

Detroit's Federal Empowerment Zone

The project, Line Frustration, essentially corroborates Mayor Dennis Archer's contention that the severity of Detroit's disinvestment is its greatest asset. Line Frustration is not interested in how this condition lends itself to romantic images of aestheticized ruin, but rather in the ways that Detroit offers a profound set of conditions from which to rethink the expectations and conventions of a city. The city, this city, is so bad, that it is good. This is what Dennis Archer articulated on TV that night in 1994 and it forms the basis of an urban proposition. Where this proposition differs with the Mayor is certainly that he cares deeply for the city of Detroit, wants to do good for the city, and Line Frustration is ambivalent on the possibility of using architecture to do good. Rather, the project documents conditions in Detroit that demand a reorganization of the discipline of architecture, a rethinking of its urban assumptions, in light of the city's ongoing erasure. It is simply not possible that the very harsh socio-economic realities of Detroit can be solved through architecture, or that urban design can forestall an apocalyptic end or even maintain an historical continuity through spatial order. Line Frustration describes the brokering of Detroit's empty territory by the media and attempts to locate architecture's potential fit within that economy. The project postulates that the rough texture of Detroit's urbanism can be most fully described in the space between the representational bias of its news media coverage and the city's ever-present material sobriety.

The Empowerment Zone initiative and the delineation of its boundary were taken at face value. The work deliberately postponed the traditional modes of architectural production in favor of a strategy of self-conscious description. The role of the architect/urbanist as problem solver was placed at a critical distance, and a healthy ambivalence was maintained to the notion of progress implicit in the site's identity. Collaboration was aimed at setting up a generative urban practice, one that was sympathetic to the material and cultural conditions of the Empowerment Zone, yet sought to challenge them. This animation of the existing ordinariness of the city was informed by the work of the Situationists, a politic art-action alliance spearheaded by Guy Debord. The Situationists worked collectively between 1957 and 1972 from a position critical of the over-rationalized control of the city by urban planners and big business alike. They surmised that the benign professionalism of architecture and urbanism, taken together with the aggressive movement of capitalism into every phase of life had resulted in a sterilization of the world. Of the many reflections on the relationship between spatial practice and the media, Debord's is clearly the most apt for moving within the space of coverage in a manner that is critical and resistant, but not rendered ineffective through simplistic opposition.

In his 1956 essay, The Theory of the Dérive, Debord established both a working definition of the city as well as a method for considering its qualities. He asserted that the city is comprised of a series of distinct 'psychogeographies', perceptible landscapes of ambiance, attraction and repulsion. In order to better articulate the impact of this understanding of the city, Debord

described a process of drifting (dérive is literally the drift, drifting) across the urban landscape in a manner that allowed for indeterminate deviations away from any a priori intent. Debord advocated the practice of letting oneself be empowered by the conditions of the city by submitting to its pushes and pulls. Intentions are put forth, action is embarked upon, and then a will to powerlessness reveals itself in a fluid and constantly chitering it. For Debord the city and the system used to understand it are mutually dependent. The Dérive can be understood as the ultimate resistance to the media enterprise of mythic exaggeration. Broadcasting's goal of a bastard familiarity, one built on distance and not propinquity, is refused by the derive as it reasserts the power of present conditions as perceived on the ground.

Line Frustration was framed as such a drift through the conditional emptiness of Detroit, through the media's brokerage of the indirect economy of cultural land value, and through the pliability of an architectural practice freed from the limits of problem solving. To initiate the exploration, the boundary line of the Empowerment Zone was studied. In many ways, this line of demarcation is rhetorical. It separates this from more of this. The line's intention is to introduce difference where there is none. In this sense, the Zone's boundary is an impossible line. However, if this inscription operates as a boundary to the flow of revenue, tax breaks for business, and incentives for improving the quality of housing (as intended), it could very well transcend the representational space of the map and embed itself in the spatial and material conditions of the city. Fulfilling its own will, the Zone's edge will become legible in the city. In this sense the line is latent with possibility. Line Frustration's architectural inquiry figures itself into this paradox.

Three segments of the Empowerment Zone boundary line were selected as itineraries. The initial selection was made intuitively, artistically, compositionally through the abstract tendencies of the map. Intentions were attached to these vectors ex post facto: follow these line segments, walk along, within, and adjacent to them. But also meander, loiter, and solicit the material nature of each segment. Each line segment was drawn and explored for its slack rather than its linearity. After the Situationists, psychogeographic charts were made recording each attempt to walk the line.

These representations of the line segment were inspired by the generative practice of the derive itself. In wandering and making, the only absolute imperative was continual movement. The psychogeographic maps analogue the volumetric condition found within the specific line segments. Reading the maps invokes the line; there is no other convention of readership written into the mappings. The Empowerment Zone's boundary was understood as a volume of varying intensity. This understanding was corroborated by Catherine Ingraham's notion that the line itself is a complex and paradoxical subject, caught as it is between its origin as a conceptual apparatus and its identity as a proper result for architecture.

The plurality of the line presented its own set of necessary proprieties.

A series of photographs were consciously framed to record the experience of each derive. These photographs provided the basis for reflecting on the texture of the line. Lines were folded, bent, returned into and out of the surface of the photographs. The psychogeographic mappings were re-informed through the generative analysis of the photographs. Applying the lessons of the media enterprise, the project folded back on itself in an attempt to cover its own documents. There were a series of successive approximations of the experience of the boundary line. The production ultimately became saturated with the resistance of materiality. Materials were distributed in the intervals between the possibility and the impossibility of the line. Conflicts between the linearity of the map and the fulness found along the boundary were maximized. A series of architectures were projected into the slack of the line. This process of inscription was conflated with the writing found along the line of the Empowerment Zone. It too, the graffiti and tagging evident along the line, mobilizes architecture as a mode of writing the city. The documents of Line Frustration can be read as a kind of inverted graffiti, an illicit practice of architectural delineation. In graffiti, the representation of urban territory is translated into phenomenal experience through tagging. In Line Frustration, phenomenal experience is translated into the representations of space conventional to the discipline. By postponing architecture's role as scenographer to urban improvement, Line Frustration offers an alternative economy of inscription.

Psychogeography

Jabrina
BIRD CROSSING

Gratiot

GAS
OFF

Mack Avenue

We remember that when people
lose their lives as a consequence
of injustice their spirit wander
unable to pass over—seeking
resolution.
We remember that our lives are

St. Aubin

Constructions of the line

Inscription along St. Aubin Street

How long
Not long

This Buildi
WATC

STOP DEVIL'S NIG
Report suspicious activi

Line drawing as qualification

EAST-PARK
PRODUCTION CENTER
COMMUNITY REDEVELOPMENT
ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT
HOUSING/REPAIR & REHAU
LIGHT MANUFACTURING & MARKET
SKILLS TRAINING
MUSIC PRODUCTION
PERFORMING ARTS
TAILORING & ALTERATIONS
SOCIAL CLUB

831-6422 # ST. AUBIN

Programmatic writing

How the making of architecture might be pursued in the Empowerment Zone replaced the prevailing tendency to ask what will the architecture be, or look like. Building, the inevitable endgame of architecture, does not fully emerge from the project. There is no economic incentive to build on the wrong side of the line. Architecture must seek other manifestations there. At one location the project attempts to fully frustrate the boundary by inverting its conventions of inside and out. A landscape of programmatic activity is written onto the vacant ground plane there, as architecture yields to an infrastructure of community events. Multiple programmatic inscriptions cancel out the specificity each program might have individually. A multiply programmed Production Center will be built straddling the line. Inside the Empowerment Zone, the Production Center will hurt the benefits of empowerment towards the other side of the line. Architecture will form a line of scrimmage between the mission of empowerment and the city/image paradox of Detroit. Community might follow, rather than precede, the act of building. How Detroit builds here is as important as what Detroit builds here.

Detroit's Empowerment Zone has been characterized as 18.35 square miles of the worst of the worst. The lines of the Empowerment Zone encompassing that condition represent the gerrymandered spatialization of a political process. That process had as its goal the delineation of the worst from the just as bad, and the articulation of those conditions through two forms of development: economic and political. Line Frustration describes, through the obsessive and consciously a-professional delineation of those gerrymandered boundaries, the grounds for a genuinely contemporary urban practice.

Here, "line of scrimmage" refers directly to the plane at which all action starts in American football. Scrimmage, whether done in competition or practice, is the rough exchange of desire and strategy. Line Frustration tries to position the practice of architecture at this threshold.
This figure, along with the other Empowerment Zone Statistics are taken from a document titled: "Jumpstarting the Motor City," circulated by the Empowerment Zone Transition Office in Detroit.

Model view of Production Center

Production Center
Inscription of Production Center and model views

Stats Detroit’s Federal Empowerment Zone

population 101,279
area 18.35 square miles
diversity 67% African American. 24% White.
9% other racial groups (of which 11% is Hispanic)
poverty 47% of all residents live in poverty.
65% of all children age five and under live in poverty.
63% of all children 17 and under live in poverty
median income $9870 median family income
unemployment 29% (50% above the city’s rate and more than three times higher than that of metropolitan Detroit)
households 53% are family.
20% are single parents with children under 18.
47% are single person households
education 51% of adults age 25 and older lack a high school diploma. High school dropout rate is approximately 40%
crime 20% of city’s homicides + 38% of city’s aggravated assaults + 17% of city’s sexual assaults

architecture how?

When traveling on a US Interstate Highway, what matters is destination. You know where you want to go, and the Interstate provides the best combination of high speed and directness. You may notice things along the way, hurting toward your goal at seventy-five miles per hour, but nothing about that roadway encourages you to do more with what you notice to make a mental note of it, or perhaps a remark. It feeds so slow, too slow, too wasteful to get off. When you are in that frame of mind, it is best to be on the interstate, where the center stripe is always white, where you can always pass, where no farmer on his tractor will hold you back.

But if you travel on the old US highway system, or on state or county roads, an entirely different attitude infuses the operation. Small town main streets force slow-downs; intersections allow distraction from the goal. You stop thinking in terms of hundreds of miles; you stop thinking in terms of hours to destination and you begin to think smaller and more deeply. The simple, straight line of the Interstate yields to a plane, across the surface of which lines scamper crazily in all directions, colliding like bumblebees in flight, folding their paths around these points of impact, around towns, river bends, mountains, cemeteries. The sharp contrast between the sacred highway and the degraded world around it blurs and blurs. Life goes from thin abstraction to thick, varied, concrete reality. Vision becomes miraculous: at once microscopic, telescopic, stereoscopic. No more punctuated celebrations; no more endless waiting and whining. Just a never-ending undulating surface of affect: let’s stop, this place is great. I could spend my entire life here, let’s move on. And this is being free. The burden of a single, transcendent destination is replaced by the immanent surface of choices, immediate and distant, from among alternatives whose names will shift ceaselessly, with every revolution of the engine: keep moving or stop, go faster or slow down, go straight or go right, left or back.

Confronted with Detroit’s obvious and considerable problems, and the acute suffering and difficult struggles experienced by many of its residents, it seems natural and right to want to look for, and to attempt to offer remedies. I don’t want to argue with that impulse or try to discourage it. It’s true that any improvement in the quality of life for Detroiters requires the desire for, as well as the attempted implementation of, remedies. It is good that people who spend time in Detroit, who enjoy what it has to offer, should also want to give something back to the city in the form of some contribution to its citizens’ ongoing attempts to construct a sustainable, enjoyable life there. This said, I am interested in exploring the possible utility of at least temporarily resisting a course of thought and action aimed toward a predefined improvement or solution. However, it’s not the improvement! I wish to resist, but rather the predefined aiming at a distant target. I’m interested in the question: what good can possibly come from not responding to the urgent social conditions of Detroit with a plan, a proposal, or even, a desire to improve them?

Judging from the products of Line Frustration – it offers no building, let alone one that solves any of these problems – Young has refused to provide an architectural solution. The refusal to provide a building at all permits a shift in attention from product to process, from destination to drifting. And “drifting” is the right word. It may be no accident that the first curiosity discovered by Young, now freed from the requirements of preset destination, was an essay called “Theory of the Dérive,” by Guy Debord. Debord himself, it seems worth the digression to

note, was the kind of character you might only run across if you were lost: working-class drifter who spent a lifetime developing – and communicating in film, painting, art, essay, and everyday life – alternative ways of being to those widely available in post-war France.

It was as part of the so-called Situationist international that Debord and his collaborators came up with the idea of the derive. Debord defined the derive as “a technique of transient passage through varied ambitions” and described it in the following terms: “In a derive one or more persons during a certain period drop their usual motives for movement and action, their relations, their work and leisure activities, and themselves be drawn to the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there.” Understood in this way, derive describes the kind of backroads wandering undertaken by Young and his collaborators through refusing the disciplined tendency to provide architectural solutions to urban problems.

This already signals one of the healthy effects of this sort of suspension of purpose. It allows you to hear and feel the surrounding world of which you are always a part. Permitting yourself to hear and to feel, to acknowledge the demands of the people and things around you, puts you in a better position to assess them, to decide what degree you want to allow them to penetrate and change you, to what degree you want to expose yourself to them.

There’s some risk involved, a certain letting go of control, a exposing of the thick line around you, but the possible pay-off in the enriching of your experience, in the complication of your own understanding, and in the construction of new relations with the world might be well worth the price. This is particularly suggestive in its implications for political or ethical action.

In the Marxist tradition there has been a disappointing tendency not to listen, not to allow one’s theoretical truths and strategic certainties to be penetrated by the claims of the terrain, people included, in which one might seek to operate. In the most benign cases, this insularity leads to impotence. In the worst cases, it leads to frightening instances of repression and violence. The derive suggests, in an admittedly loose fashion, a different scenario in which the definition of needs and solutions pertinent to a given area and a given community might be negotiated in a conversation of mutual respect, if not equal power.

But Debord’s theory of the derive functions in Line Frustration as more than an analogue to the general suspension of product-oriented design, and accordingly, it offers more than just a suggestive alternative to certain conventional ways of approaching social problems. In Line Frustration, the theory had the more immediately concrete effect of setting the design process in motion. As might have been expected, since they had nothing in particular to do inside the Empowerment Zone, Young and his team decided to drift along its boundary line. Walking along three randomly chosen segments of the line, they allowed themselves to not only accelerate and stop, but also to be pulled off the line altogether by arresting visual, spatial, and material stimuli. Among the effects of this process was the thickening of the line on which they were walking became, under the force of these pulls, indistinguishable from smaller or larger areas adjacent to it, both inside and outside the Empowerment Zone. In some cases, the line swelled into fairly regular geometrical shapes. But in others it seemed almost to explode, spilling previously secret contents in a seemingly random fashion throughout adjacent neighborhoods.

The manipulated maps of the city on which the group recorded their perceptions led to another beneficial consequence of the process. In comparing these maps with the corresponding sections of the Empowerment Zone map, much is lost in the official representation of the Zone’s boundaries. Once again, it seems, and may in fact be, more expedient to work

with convenient, shorthand abstractions like this boundary line. But Line Frustration awakens the sense that this may be true less often than is commonly thought. William James once referred to this tendency as "vicious intellectualism" or "the abuse of naming" in which, as he illustrated, "because we have once called a man an equestrian" we come to believe "that he is forever unable to walk on two legs." James was reminding us that names and concepts are useful things; they can also blind us to the fact that the phenomena they point to are infinitely more complex than the names and concepts themselves. He was also concerned to point out that the "abuse of naming" often carries with it practical consequences – when, due to its complexity, some phenomenon fails to behave as its concept or name would predict – through which the apparent gain in efficiency acquired through the use of abstractions are erased.

Here again, there's no call to dispense with abstractions like words, concepts, or lines on maps. Merely a reminder that they do not exhaust reality, they are just a part of it, to be used like any other instrument whose benefits and costs for any particular task must be weighed.

Line Frustration's manipulation of the line of the Empowerment Zone boundary leads to an additional reflection. That boundary is crazy. No doubt, the individuals charged with drawing this line would be able to dispel a sense to offer a relatively sound rationale for its mad zigzags. Even if you knew nothing about Detroit, you'd be struck by the line's apparently arbitraryzigzags. The way it suddenly veers off its trajectory to exclude or include some minute portion of the city fabric. And, as young observes, if your familiarize yourself with the surface of the city, this impression is only heightened. The line does indeed appear, in Young's words, "to separate this from more of this." At the level of social policy, this makes you wonder a bit. You wonder whether the city block just outside the zone here doesn't need the benefits of Empowerment as the block across the street just inside the zone. More ominously, you wonder if the Zone isn't likely to create, at best, something like an enclave of affluence and richness of life within the city, and whether the emergence of this enclave isn't going to reproduce the disappointing practices we currently associate with some suburbs: a preoccupation with the various kinds of gates by which some of us secure our attachment to the status quo at the expense of others.

Now Line Frustration helps make these considerations possible: it makes you wonder a little bit. The point in the project where a small section of map inside the Zone is flipped over the boundary so that it falls outside the Zone would hardly be called, even by the design team, some kind of solution to the potential problems just raised. I doubt it was intended as such and, had it been, it would obviously fall short in many ways. That's why it's also easy to imagine a serious and well-meaning objection to the operation of Line Frustration. In fact, one might argue: "Great for you, Jason Young, you've frustrated" the line of the Empowerment Zone, but isn't that a self-indulgent luxury given the urgent problems for which the Empowerment Zone boundary – unlike your own project – at least tries to offer some remedy?

received back in the form of wages. Now, imagine that I produce this value in four hours of work. I don't stop working. I am compelled to work an eight-hour day. Surplus labor is what Marxists call the other four hours. I am still producing value, in the form of commodities, but now that value will be consumed not in the reproduction of my own existence, but by the capitalist in the reproduction of the capitalist system, through reinvestment in one or another of the elements of the production process, at an ever-expanding scale.

Negi's compadres in the so-called autonomic movement in Italy in the 940s and 70s, called for a "refusal of work." They didn't mean, of course, a refusal to work, but rather a refusal of work extended solely for the benefit of the capitalist. Or, to put it in other terms, a refusal to expend one's own creative energies and abilities for the profit of the capitalist. Yet again, we can look at the "refusal of work" from the point of view of the affirmative impulses that it helps to unblock. "Self valorization" is the name autonomia gave to "the elaboration of the self-determined multiple projects of the working class in the time set free from work." The desire for self-valorization, where the self understands its existence and potential for growth, to be symbolically related to the health of the communities of which it forms a part, means nothing other than the desire to materialize one's creative energies in a fuller range of activities and engagements with others and the world. It simply states that a human being might naturally want more from life than to wee blindly back and forth between repetitive work commanded by others and time. The revolutionary politics of autonomia provoke an ethics that affirms first, the legitimacy of the human desire to practice (to work, play, think, whatever) independent of the narrowly defined productivity requirements of capital, and second, the value of the process of itself, independent of the utility of whatever by-products or products may result from it. These are the issues put in play anytime someone hits the pause button on whatever real or metaphorical production line they're working on.

You might already see that I want to understand Young's "self-indulgent" flip of the map, by which we might be led to consider some of the possible problems of the Empowerment Zone, as a practice of self-valorization. Indeed, the entire process-oriented operation of line Frustration works along these same lines. I'm interested in affirming the value of such "drifts" or "backroads," not instead of another way of working that might be led by a desired and planned outcome, nor even alongside another way of working, but rather as a strand woven in with many other ways of working. Then perhaps practicality and experience wouldn't be perceived as mutually exclusive with critical self-reflection, with mindfulness, with care. Then perhaps learning through encounters with the unforseen might not be seen as unaffordable luxuries relegated to the more or less privileged ghetto of the academic and artistic worlds, but instead as indispensable, necessary components of operating effectively in any undertaking.

Why don't we stop here?

Debard, Guy. "Theory of the Deine." Stuttgart International Anthology edited and translated by Ken Krabb. (Berkeley, Bureau of Public Secrets, 1989), 50-54.
James William, A Permanent University. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986).
Negi Antonio, A Permanent Marx, South Hadley Region and Harvey, 1984).
See Autonomia Postpolitical Politics. Special Issue of Semiotextro] Volume III, Number 5 (1980).

Afterword: Impossible Urbanism

July 5, 1996, Barcelona

It all began that day. I remember it was a very hot and humid day. I remember just two days before I had been the moderator in another of the UIA Congress sessions: a very boring session in which the participants, camouflaging their interventions with provocative titles, consistently ended up talking only about themselves. The only thing I hoped for in the Detroit session was that it would end as quickly as possible because I did not expect much of those events when thousands of Marco Polo's came from all over the world to explain things about themselves. Shortly before the session began, Gia, Marili, Charles, Jason, and Omar were introduced to me. They formed a group. This surprised me, but I still remained suspicious. We began the session and immediately I discovered they were not speaking about themselves; they were talking about cities that seemed impossible and imaginary, as if from science fiction. Only later I understood that they were all speaking of the same city. It did not seem that the images they were showing were of one city, but they insistently described it that way. I could not imagine a city in which time moved in reverse according to which zone of the city you were in, or in which the distances between things were measured in square feet of vacant space. Nor could I envision a contemporary city in which the majority of the buildings were abandoned or simply occupied by squatters of vegetation, and in which the buildings have unthinkable uses in relation to how they were originally intended. I could not fathom a city in which interior doors configured the exterior enclosure, and in which the horizon was no longer a limit, but rather an accumulation of vacant spaces. I could not imagine a city in which all the laws of urban logic had been transgressed.

My curiosity and intrigue were steadily growing. This city was not a dream; it was not invisible. It seemed this city existed. These emissaries had proof. Photos don't lie. This is what Roland Barthes said, "they inform us that these cities exist." Photos aside, if this city existed, I wanted to see it.

February 23, 1998, Detroit

It was not very cold. The day was a bit cloudy and a great day for driving. I like to drive on American highways; the landscape is very different than what I am accustomed to. The American landscape produces a unique sensation with big trucks, billboards, good music on the radio including a little of everything; lyle Lovett, Credence Clearwater Revival, Tom Waits, Willie Nelson. When driving, oftentimes you are distracted by music, the landscape, and your own thoughts. Time and distance pass without taking notice and you almost don't know where you are going or even where you are. I imagined being Jim Nash, the character of Paul Auster's, The Music of Chance. My car was not a Saab, but it was red. That was enough for me. Tom Waits' Downtown Train was playing on the radio and this made me remember where I was going and to think about what I would find upon my arrival to Detroit. Would I see the real scenes from those photos? Did they still exist? Would they impress me in the same way as those first photos?

I continued driving, unaware I was already in Detroit, in fact, in its downtown. I had been driving on the highway and I remembered seeing some sign that indicated an exit for the airport. I also remembered seeing an airplane flying relatively low which usually indicates a nearby airport, but I had no sense of having driven through one of those peripheral zones that indicates the close proximity of a big city. I did not have any sense of the skyline on the horizon as is common when approaching any other American city in which the skyline becomes recognizable by way of the silhouette of some buildings identified with that particular city.

Passing in the opposite direction, a truck transporting cars indicated that I was near Detroit, but I could not see it. There was no horizon and it seemed like I was going nowhere. I followed the instructions given to me by a friend and I got off on the indicated exit. You always have to believe what your friends tell you, but that time he must have been wrong. I had exited at the downtown exit, but I landed in a vacant place. I thought I had made a mistake, but I continued following the instructions and I began to traverse an un-urbanized zone, only realizing later it was a zone in the process of de-urbanization. I kept driving and I saw ahead of me, not too far off, the remains of downtown.

The sensation was very strange. There were hardly any people in the streets, and when someone passed by, it seemed the landscape became even stranger. Once in a while, I stopped the car to take some photos. I walked a bit, but not too far, not for fear of anyone, I actually wanted to find some people, but for fear of becoming a part of those scenes.

I kept driving. I understood what made those scenes so strange was that their reality was very close in time. These were not ancient ruins. They were contemporary ones, perhaps ruins of the future. This is what made them impossible and unreal. Suddenly, in the midst of that urban ruin, there appeared bubbles of civilization, floating happily and completely foreign to all that surrounded them. They did not burst when I passed through their skin. I realized then the people in that city went from bubble to bubble without worrying about the vacant spaces between. I thought this space between must be purposeful so that the bubbles, not having direct contact with one another, would not explode. I kept on driving, entering and leaving the bubbles and crossing the vacant spaces. The city seems even more impossible when it actually exists and you are there.

I tried to find some logic to be able to foresee what I would find next, but neither the size nor location of the distinct bubbles was foreseeable. I came across that gigantic and heavy transparent building that had once been a train station. I saw that strange vision of a former theatre turned parking garage (a species of drive-in theatre) with cars parked at the level of the dilapidated orchestra pit. One time I stopped in a solitary place where the sidewalks were completely invaded by vegetation. Returning to my car, I discovered an absurd sign prohibiting parking located on a totally abandoned street. The sign indicated, with great precision, the months, days, hours, and other circumstances of the no parking zone. At the bottom of the sign, it read "no parking anytime during emergencies." Maybe that was why no one was there. Maybe there was an emergency that I was unaware of.

Evening was approaching, so I decided to return to Chicago.

January 14, 2000, Chicago

There were many photographs on my table. I looked at them, sometimes all at once, sometimes more profoundly at only one. I was trying to remember those days in Detroit when the photographers, Monica and Jordi, had just arrived, and began shooting the first photographs, still insecure about how to carry out their work. I had been in those enormously real scenes, but still, even contemplating the photos, they seemed a fiction. The more I looked, the more impossible they seemed. I began to confuse reality and fiction as if in a dream. Furthermore, today photographs no longer certify a reality. Rather they certify the possibilities of technique and the photographer's creativity and imagination in allowing us to participate in other realities and in other ways to understand and see things. Jordi and Monica's photographs are apparently quite different from one another, clearly distinct interpretations of the same reality. What makes them similar is, through different paths, they reach the same conclusions. They both show us a fictional reality.

The objective, but at the same time, tentacious, presentation of reality in Jordi's photos, with their extreme hyperrealist desire, makes them all the more unreal. In Monica's, because this reality is presented as an imaginary dream, both anguished and calm, the scenes are transformed into even more unreal and impossible ones. I remembered one of the cities Alan Lightman described in his book, Einstein's Dreams, in which there is no time, only images, a city of memories and therefore a city that does not exist, and has disappeared, but, within its own logic, continues to function. This city exists. It is a memory or an imagination. Photographs generally evoke memories, not only memories of past histories, but also, and in this case, they acquire greater value. They provoke the imagination of possible future histories, of urban deserts, uninhabitable and inhospitable space, but quite attractively open to visitation because of this very impossible existence.

I kept looking at the photographs, remembering or maybe imagining the future of other cities. Maybe I was dreaming. Despite all this, it seems Detroit exists. I think I remember I was there one day.

Contributors

Robert Arens, Associate Professor of Architecture at Kansas State University, was born in Detroit and is a practicing architect based in Manhattan, Kansas.

Jordi Bernadó, photographer, lives in Barcelona. He works on the subject of the city around the world. Most important projects: Berlin, Atlanta, Canada: Coast to Coast, China Instant, Good News! Always read the fine print, Mutations, Beyond Borders, Very very Bad News.

Santiago Colas, Associate Professor of Latin and Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan, is author of Postmodernity in Latin America: The Argentine Paradigm. He is currently writing a book on the worlds of Julio Cortazar.

James Corner, Associate Professor and Chair of Landscape Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania, is author, with Alex Maclean, of Taking Measures Across the American Landscape. Corner is editor of Recovering Landscape and is a practicing landscape architect based in Philadelphia.

Georgia Daskalakis, Assistant Professor of Architecture at Washington University in St. Louis, School of Architecture and former Director of the Undergraduate Program, is Principal of Das:20 Architecture Studio. Daskalakis was a Muschenheim Fellow at the University of Michigan and has taught at Parsons School of Design in New York. The work of Das:20 has received numerous awards and has been exhibited internationally including Barcelona, New York, and St. Louis. Most recently, articles and design work have appeared in Quaderns d'Arquitectura I Urbanisme (Barcelona), On Diseño (Barcelona) and Summa (Buenos Aires).

Jerry Herron, Director of American Studies and Professor of English at Wayne State University, is author of AfterCulture: Detroit and the Humiliation of History. He is currently writing a book about nostalgia and souvenir culture in America.

Dan Hoffman, Professor of Architecture at Arizona State University, is author of Architecture Studio: Cranbrook Academy of Art 1986-1993 featuring work done under his direction as head of the Department of Architecture at Cranbrook.

Kent Kleinman, Chair of the Department of Architecture at the State University of New York at Buffalo, has authored two books with Leslie van Duzer: Villa Muller: A Work of Adolf Loos and Rudolf Arnheim: Revealing Vision. They are currently working on their third, Notes on Almost Nothing: Mies van der Rohe's Haus Lange and Haus Esters.

Alex Maclean, Proprietor of Landslides, is an aerial photographer based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He has published two books of his work: Look at the Land: Aerial Reflections on America with text by Bill McKibben and Taking Measures Across the American Landscape, co-authored with James Corner.

Omar Perez, Principal of Das:20 Architecture Studio and a senior designer with HOK, Inc. in St. Louis, has taught design at Washington University, the University of Michigan, and the City College of New York. The work of Das:20 has received numerous awards and has been exhibited internationally including Barcelona, New York, and St. Louis. Most recently, articles and design work have appeared in Quaderns d'Arquitectura I Urbanisme (Barcelona), On Diseño (Barcelona) and Summa (Buenos Aires).

Ramon Prat, is a graphic designer and director of ACTAR, a publishing house based in Barcelona, specializing in architecture, photography and design.

Joan Roig is a practicing architect based in Barcelona.

Christian Rogner, a practicing architect based in London, received his Diploma from the Technical University in Munich. He joined the Design Research Lab at the Architectural Association in 1997 where he has contributed to research on the spatial articulation of contemporary corporate organization.

Mônica Roselló is a photographer based in Barcelona.

Marili Santos-Munné is a practicing architect based in Basel. She was Muschenheim Fellow and Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan and has taught at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Patrik Schumacher, co-director of the Design Research Laboratory at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London, has been visiting professor at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the University of Illinois at Chicago. He has worked with Zaha Hadid in London and has been Partner on various recent projects. He recently completed his doctoral thesis at the University of Klagenfurt on the economic instrumentalization of art.

Ignasi de Solà-Morales was, at the time of his death, an internationally renowned architect educator, critic, and theorist.

Leslie van Duzer, Associate Professor of Architecture at Arizona State University, has authored two books with Kent Kleinman: Villa Muller: A Work of Adolf Loos and Rudolf Arnheim: Revealing Vision. They are currently working on their third, Notes on Almost Nothing: Mies van der Rohe’s Haus Lange and Haus Esters.

Xavier Vendrell, Professor of Architecture at the University of Illinois at Chicago, is a practicing architect based in Chicago and Barcelona.

Charles Waldheim, Director of Graduate Studies in the School of Architecture at the University of Illinois at Chicago, is a practicing architect based in Chicago. He is author of Constructed Ground and editor of Landscape Urbanism: A Reference Manifesto. His research and teaching focus on landscape as an element of contemporary urbanism. Waldheim was Sanders Fellow and Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan, and has taught as a Visiting Critic at the University of Pennsylvania and the KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm.

Jason Young, Assistant Professor of Architecture at the University of Michigan, is Principal of the WETSU, a design+build studio in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He is Director of the Graduate Thesis Option at the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning and researches conditions of contemporary American urbanism. He is editor of Michigan Architecture Papers 7: Mack & Merrill.

Stalking Detroit is an anthology of essays, images, design projects and critiques, each offering a purchase from the urban milieu of Detroit in the 1990's.

"Forget what you think you know about this place. Detroit is the most relevant city in the United States for the simple reason that it is the most unequivocally modern and therefore distinctive of our national culture; in other words, a total success. Nowhere else has American modernity so completely had its way with people and place alike."

JERRY HERRON
Director of American Studies, Wayne State University

"If Detroit is to be called the 'Capital' of the twentieth century, it is not because of its architecture, monuments, or great cultural achievements. Detroit is the 'Capital' because of its singular devotion to the idea of industrial production, investing all of its resources into a technology and product that has transformed the face of every modern city."

DAN HOFFMAN
Professor of Architecture, Arizona State University

"The moment of Detroit's deepest crisis coincides with the "Death of Modern Architecture" as announced by Charles Jencks in 1977. This is no coincidence. The emergence of postmodern architecture and urbanism in the seventies, sweeping the market in the eighties, represents much more than a new aesthetic sensibility.

The postmodern rejection of homogeneity, coherence, and completeness, and the explicit celebration of heterogeneity mark a radical departure from fifty years of modernist development."

PATRIK SCHUMACHER
Co-Director, Research Design Laboratory,
Architectural Association School of Architecture