底特律艺术车站中心设计丨美国底特律

Heart of the city. DSFA.

I’d flood the city with artists, 100,000 artists from all over the world

(Tony Goldman, property investor, New York)

In addition to the required units and uses of the former Michigan Central Station, we suggest establishing it as a new center for Detroit. Not only is this center going to create room for artists and new inhabitants, it is also designed to include the surrounding suburbs and the current residents. Instead of spatially separating the creative middle class from the job - seeking youth, it will be a meeting place for the two. Detroit’s problems can only be resolved in a joint effort.

To name just one example, adolescents with few opportunities can gain insights into the working world and make a contribution in the newly created workshops, ateliers and restaurants. We are creating a place for communication, for the exchange of ideas and knowledge. New businesses will offer adolescents job training and the shops will sell the products these young people make in collaboration with the craftsmen and artists.

We also pursue this idea of mutual complementation and enrichment in our architectonic design. Therefore, a cube with the dimensions of 7m x 7m x 3m will form our basis. The interior, windows and the entrance of this unit can be customized for specific purposes. Several cubes will simply be added and joined to form such larger establishments as a hotel or a restaurant. The large number of identical units keeps the production costs low, thus resulting in the purchase of the cubes being particularly budget-friendly. In a first step, all interior walls inside the Michigan Station will be removed. The cubes can then be bought and placed freely within. Our design also predetermines exactly which areas are for circulation and which are supposed to remain open spaces.

We imagine this new center, this new heart of the city as a self-perpetuating and regenerating entity, which preserves the original historic façade of the building.

On the inside, however, it contains a small vibrant vertical city that reacts to the new necessities of life, as well as to the demands of its inhabitants and is able to change accordingly.

In this respect, the new center differs from the shortsighted designs of the early 20th century, whose buildings are decaying now because they are ill-suited to adapt to new circumstances.

The Michigan Station is the pilot project of our overall design where we illustrate how the grid and the cubes function together.

There are many historic buildings in Detroit, which shape the present cityscape but are decaying as time goes by. Our units are an answer to the question of how such buildings can be reactivated.

Making use of our units, edifices such as the Brodhead Naval Amory, the Grande Ballroom, the Greater Marcadonia or the Parkavenue Hotel can be efficiently repopulated step-by-step. The buildings will be gutted and filled with the aforementioned units. They can then be populated on an individual basis. Thus, the original facades and the historic cityscape are retained.

The buildings are brought back to life. They get a beating heart, which revitalizes and connects people.

Detroit station for the Arts Competition, 1st place