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Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning University of Michigan Arch 672 Architectural Design (2G3/ 3G6) - Systems Studio Fall 2020

www.systems.studio

SYSTEMS STUDIO ‘20

INNOVATIVE AND FUTURE ORIENTED MEDIUM DENSITY, MID-RISE HOUSING FOR DETROIT

The central topic and the common goal of the studio is to explore and to understand the systemic components in buildings and to understand their integral role in the process of architectural design. The integration of social and urban aspects as well as environmental and economic concerns make Housing an ideal architectural design challenge. In recent history more meaningful innovations and creative solutions have been produced in housing than in any other typology. The desire to provide for a good living environment for all on one hand and an architectural type which is constantly scrutinized on the other, fosters innovation and therefore resembles the ultimate architectural challenge. The studio will take on the challenge and will contribute to the Detroit Design Excellence Expo in 2021. Named “Detroit Design 139”, the biannual exposition concentrates on the 139 square miles of urban development, and primarily on housing within the city’s boundaries. It is the plan of the City of Detroit’s Planning and Development Department to implement this instrument of the Design Exposition to generate impulses for urban, social and economic development through new ideas and projects, especially in housing. Under the guiding theme of “A CITY FOR ALL”, the city will solicit creative ideas and innovative concepts in order to demonstrate how housing can contribute to the social and economical restructuring process of the city, while contributing to the culture of design through excellent examples of housing in particular.

The studio will take the topic of the Expo “Detroit Design 139” as an opportunity to contribute with approximately 43 projects from 5 studio teams to develop innovative ideas for housing in various conditions in Detroit. The expected broad range of concepts and proposals are meant to start a discourse of what housing can be for the future generations, of how innovative housing can foster social inclusivity, of how changing lifestyles can be sustainably integrated in new neighborhood developments, and of how innovative development in a city like Detroit can set examples for other American cities.

In order to affectively integrate urbanistic, social, cultural, psychological, sociological concerns with environmental, structural, mechanical, economical, legal, and procedural aspects of architectural design The Systems Studio (Arch 672) will be taught in conjunction with the Integrated Systems Course (Arch 527).

The studio (Mondays and Thursdays, 1:00 - 6:00 pm, or other scheduled times for students in timezones with a difference of 8 hrs or more to EST) will concentrate on the synergistic development of a housing project while the Integrated Systems Course will focus on technical, structural and environmental, as well as legal and procedural topics in greater detail and in support of studio assignments. Individual studio section will offer hybrid or remote studio sessions.

GREEN DETROITA CITY FOR ALL

Gräbner, Lars graebner@umich.edu Sharon Haar haar@umich.edu Hansen, Christina hansench@umich.edu

Velikov, Kathy kvelikov@umich.edu Rule, Jonathan jonrule@umich.edu

Kennedy, Mick mickk@umich.edu McCullough, Kit kitmcc@umich.edu

Borum, Craig cborum@umich.edu Wigger, Claudia cwig@umich.edu

Elli Abrons eabrons@umich.eduMeredith Miller mlmmlm@umich.edu

inspiringaffordable

multi-generational

inclusivesustainable

catalyticvisionaryadaptive

productiveunexpectedconnectedpermeable

multi-ethnicflexiblediverse

transformativeunrestricted

pedestrian friendly

synergistichybrid

multi-racialexperimental

diversity

density

dwelling

+Ddiversity

density

dwelling

Detroit

d3

Detroit is experiencing unparalleled demand for new housing, creating opportunities to develop new residential models for an increasingly diverse population. Only innovative new housing typologies and planning tools can address the changing demands on the living environment.

Innovation, however, is constrained by prevailing and non-adaptive economic principles, traditional marketing schemes, and outdated masterplans, zoning regulations, and definitions of family that are often not in tune with the needs of contemporary urban residents.

d3+D studio will look creatively at urban density through the lenses of diversity and domesticity. Demographic changes, new ways of working and living, and a desire for active, green urban space require more differentiated and inclusive approaches to the planning and design of contemporary housing.

This studio offers the opportunity to develop and test alternative concepts for housing through the creation of environments that question normative urban routines and housing typologies. Student teams will explore how different and novel programmatic elements and combinations can contribute to vibrant and resilient housing. The envisioned projects will react to new and emerging structures of habitation, testing a variety of innovative housing models while creating catalytic, inclusive, and transformative urban spaces.

In collaboration with the Detroit Planning Department, the studio teams will explore the synergistic proposition of living at the gateway to Belle Isle on E. Jefferson and Grand Boulevard in Detroit. The studio will work on one site in Detroit, however models of housing should address broader concerns, ideas, and concepts deployable across Detroit or other North American cities.

d3+D student teams will develop and present convincing and inspiring arguments through systematic, environmental and social concepts. Within these frameworks, they will explore issues such as urban design, domesticity, communal living, economies of production, constructability, and others. The outcomes will demonstrate innovation in alternative construction and integrative systems.

The studio is currently set up to be taught remotely with possible in person meetings TBD. Students, of course, may work in studio during assigned weeks should they desire to do so.

Arch 672 Systems Studio Fall 2020Taubman College of Architecture and Urban PlanningUniversity of Michigan

Prof. Christina Hansenhansench@umich.edu

Prof. Sharon Haarhaar@umich.edu

Prof. Lars Gräbnergraebner@umich.edu

Mondays and Thursdays 1:00 - 6:00

diversitydomesticity

density+ DETROIT

In the past 60 years, every decade has been hotter than the last, and 2020 is on track to be among the hottest years yet. But the burden of extreme heat is not shared equally — it’s significantly worse for people at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder.Extreme heat can exacerbate poor health, ravage crops and make it dangerous to work outside. And in many parts of the world, simple ways to alleviate those effects — like water, or electricity for fans and air-conditioners — are a luxury.

__A Warming World. New York Times, Friday, August 7, 2020

the HEAT is on

Arch 672 | Beat the Heat | Fall 2020 | Claudia Wigger, Craig Borum | Mondays and Thursdays: 1pm-6pm | Zoom, Room 3100

Boy and Fire Hydrant, 2011, Corine Vermeulen

This studio seeks to turn up the Social HEAT on the long history of discriminatory practices/policies based on race, ethnicity, gender, age and class or sexual orientation. We seek to challenge the lack of access to education, labor, healthcare, freedom of speech, political representation (lack of neighborhood amenities, social networks, schools, mortgages, police brutality, high crime rate, food deserts)

This studio will make proposals that turn up the Economic HEAT on the lack of access to affordable, quality housing and the low rate of homeownership as an alternative to economic exclusion and physical displacement as a result of gentrification.

This studio will foreground architectural and landscape architectural approaches to passive systems (natural ventilation, shading, access to outdoor spaces), that address a broad array of challenges brought on by the increasing extreme Environmental HEAT.

HEAT Island(view): The studio’s site is located on East Grand Boulevard in Detroit’s Islandview neighborhood. Large empty lots, Historic single- and multi-family homes, apartments and rowhouses define the surrounding context. The neighborhood is home to more than 15 Elderly and Adult Foster Care Homes and nonprofit organizations like Gleaners Community Food Bank and Capuchin Soup Kitchen and its Earthworks Urban Farm. Located in-between Downtown and the Villages and in close proximity to Detroit’s island park, Belle Isle the neighborhood has experienced an increase in real estate values and recently planned real estate investments. These trends will most likely affect the affordability of housing for the current low income, majority Afro-American population.

This studio hopes to operate in a hybrid model of remote and when possible (based on a collective agreement among the

studio participants and based on infection rates at the time) face to face meetings for studio meetings.

Constructing New Collectivities

The Constructing New Collectivities studio unit will confront the design of new housing in a post-capitalist context, working at the junction of Detroit’s Barton-McFarland, Littlefield, and Oakman Blvd. neighborhoods. The urban condition of the City of Detroit is characterized by drastically uneven development, comprising large areas of dispossession and disinvestment with asymmetrical distribution of urban services and access across neighborhoods. The conventional urban development plan that once defined much of Detroit’s fabric—main streets lined with businesses and infrastructures of daily life such as grocery stores, banks, pharmacies, shops, restaurants, and gathering spaces, organizing blocks of housing punctuated with facilities such as schools and parks—is no longer coherently in place after years of abandonment and erasure. The nuclear blue-collar family, which dominated Detroit’s single-family housing during its boom in the early 20th century, has all but disappeared. This shift elicits a response that considers diverse typologies of post-familial living arrangements, extended families, single parents, various forms of collectives, and new ways of combining dwelling with working, entrepreneurship, and sharing. Outside of the urban core and “investment zones”, paradigms for housing need to be conceived that cultivate and construct community as well as new forms of resilient urban existence that do not depend on capitalist activity or neoliberal planning strategies.

The Constructing New Collectivities studio will negotiate a publicly owned urban megablock adjacent to the Joe Luis Greenway to develop hybrid buildings and unit typologies that are evolved from part-to-whole relationships at these multiple scales and that can foster alternative collectives and communities in Detroit. The studio will draw ideas from existing community-organized collectives currently operating in Detroit and elsewhere, discourses on “the commons”, and material and spatial strategies collective buildings and places.

University of Michigan Taubman College ARCH672 | Velikov + Rule | Systems Studio Fall 2020 | Mo + Thu 1-6pm Hybrid

Léon Ferrari, “Street” (fragment) 1980

Arch 672 Systems Studio F20Kathy Velikov + Jonathan Rule

STANDING IN PLACE We begin with the experience of our being, in the place that we are. No matter where we are in the world, we each have feet, a head, eyes, ears, skin. We each feel heat, see light, hear sound. The ways in which our bodies respond to place create patterns of living that remain timeless and universal. But light, heat, sound are particular to place. The activities of daily life shape spaces in response to the phenomena of place. Patterns of living in place form typologies that are specific to locale. Perception is exquisitely localvore. Our study of patterns will operate at multiple scales: We will examine the patterns of place and typologies that serve as increments of neighborhood. We will study the patterns of living that inform increments of housing. We will examine patterns of occupation that shape rooms, and the patterns of activity that shape the increments of rooms: doors, windows, thresholds. We will study the patterns of daily life—sleeping, bathing, cooking, eating—that create the places we call our homes. We will examine how place shapes the architecture of housing, and how housing shapes the life within. Fall 2020 I Arch 672 Systems Studio I Mick Kennedy I Kit Krankel McCullough

OverviewAccording to a recently published report, housing construction in the U.S. is lagging behind the increasing demand for smaller rental units. To make matters worse, the multi-family buildings that are being constructed target high-income tenants, squeezing out middle- and low-income households. Overall, vacancy rates are down, rents are rising, and incomes are stagnant. These problems in housing are compounded by the dominance of an American emblem in the built environment: the owner-occupied single-family home.

For 75% of residential land in the U.S., zoning ordinances contin-ue to prohibit building anything other than a detached single-family house. The significance of this legacy is multifold. The laws regulating housing density were enacted as a way to intentionally segregate neighborhoods by race and class and they still function as such. Sin-gle-family houses are more expensive to build, purchase, and main-tain than a unit within a multi-unit building, making them unattainable to many. And their large footprints, low density, and typical reliance on automobiles make single-family homes far more carbon-intensive than multi-unit buildings. Spurred by these crises in housing affordability, racial equity, and climate change, many municipalities have begun to challenge the sustainability of such an exclusive form of housing.

The continued authority of these historic zoning ordinances are at the center of debates around how to make housing more affordable, pitting YIMBY’s against NIMBY’s. “Yes-in-my-back-yard” advocates are calling for zoning reform to increase density in residential neigh-borhoods by allowing more dwelling units per property. In opposition, “not-in-my-back-yard” groups are actively resisting changes that would allow more people to move into their communities — often using a dog-whistle call to ‘preserve neighborhood character’ but in effect, keeping their neighborhoods exclusive and inaccessible.

This tension has led to cities with dense downtown cores sprinkled with market-rate or luxury housing and sprawling residential neigh-borhoods populated by expensive, single-family detached homes. Recently, some urban planners, architects, and developers have be-gun to advocate for a housing typology that mediates between these two extremes in order to increase neighborhood density and thus,

housing affordability. Called “Missing Middle Housing,” this typology is emerging as a strategy for working incrementally against the strictures of zoning to create a walkable density close to urban centers.

While it holds promise, the concept of Missing Middle Housing was designed to preserve the ‘traditional character’ of single-family neigh-borhoods. As such, many Missing Middle projects are orthodox in their design, missing an opportunity to merge increased density and scale with innovations in construction and materials or forward-think-ing ideas about lifestyle and program. Grounded in this contemporary debate around affordable density, this studio will experiment with alter-nate notions of ‘middle’ that can make high-quality homes accessible to more residents. The Missing Middle will be both a model and a foil for the work of the studio which will explore a greater range of hybrid scales, unit densities, and building types between the two extremes of the single unit and the monolithic housing block.

Studio MethodologyWhile designing truly affordable housing is the goal, the design objective should not reduce architecture to a minimum product. Good design negotiates trade-offs to produce the highest impact for the lowest costs. Students will position their design values relative to the cost-related trade-offs that result from decisions about density and land use, construction systems, interior and exterior materials, repetition and variation, and formal exuberance. To help us navigate these issues, we will hear from housing advocates, city planners, and zoning experts as well as look at a range of housing precedents.

Final projects will include 40-50 units across multiple buildings on sites zoned R2 near Butzel Playground in the Islandview Neighborhood in Detroit. Students will work individually for weeks 1-3, then in groups of three from week 3 to the end.

In the Middle: Attainable Housing By Design

University of Michigan // Taubman College of Architecture & Urban Planning

This studio will be conducted

remotely using Google Classroom,

Zoom, and Miro.

ARCH672: Systems Studio, Fall 2020Monday + Thursday, 1pm - 6pm

Instructors: Ellie Abrons + Meredith Miller

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