The Unreal Estate Guide to Detroit

Waste Curation

Tree of Heaven Woodshop

The Tree of Heaven Woodshop was founded by Mitch Cope, Ingo Vetter and Annette Weisser as a collective of artists, craftspeople and researchers who work with wood from the Ailanthus altissima, or “tree of heaven,” the English translation of the tree's Chinese name. The “tree of heaven” is a rapidly growing and aggressively spreading deciduous tree that easily withstands polluted soil; able to colonize areas that other plants and trees cannot tolerate, it is found in, on and around abandoned buildings throughout Detroit. Conventionally regarded as a sign of post-industrial decay, the “tree of heaven” is posed by the Woodshop as, conversely, a post-industrial resource with its own unique qualities and values. According to the Woodshop, these qualities and values can refract from the “tree of heaven” to Detroit, whose signs of blight and ruination can also become materials for new forms of production.

The Tree of Heaven Woodshop stages its harvesting and processing of lumber in Detroit as an “absurd performance”—a performance that acknowledges the city's existing condition through a complex admixture of celebration, parody, mourning and pragmatic use. These performances yield objects that are custom-made for exhibitions or galleries. The objects are, in the words of the workshop, “highly rhetorical”; their function is not simply to be used as equipment or furniture, but to communicate aspects of their urban site of origin. The Tree of Heaven Woodshop suggests an innovative kind of sustainable economy, one which is premised not on transforming Detroit into a recognizably renewed city, but on recognizing and responding to the city's particular condition in the present.

Architectural Salvage Warehouse

The building demolitions that are widespread in Detroit typically yield debris destined for landfills and dumps. The Architectural Salvage Warehouse is a non-profit organization that has apprehended building demolition as an opportunity to salvage and reuse architectural material, create skilled jobs, augment historic preservation practice and enhance environmental sustainability. As alternatives to demolition, the Warehouse offers deconstruction, the systematic disassembly of buildings into reusable parts, and skimming, the capture of easy-to-remove building components such as doors, windows and fixtures. The Warehouse trains workers in these practices, which then yield materials that are offered for purchase at its retail store.

Through deconstruction and skimming, the Warehouse transforms building demolition from an end point, the terminal moment in the life of a building, into a point of transition, a moment when a building's materials leave one site and become available to other sites, other architecture and other purposes. Moreover, the articulation of this transition as an opportunity for a specific sort of labor practice, environmental awareness, and historical consciousness adds values to what would otherwise be a mere reaction to value's absence.

Friends of Gorgeous Berries

Among the plants that flourish on vacant lots in Detroit are mulberry trees and blackberry bushes, both native to the region. In the summer, these plants, located on abandoned and rarely visited property, produce huge quantities of fruit that often remains unharvested. The Friends of Gorgeous Berries is an urban gleaning project focused on the harvesting of mulberries and blackberries from plants on public and untended property.

During the summer, the Friends organize harvests in which members glean large yields of berries. These yields then form the basis for pies, jams and other berry-based goods created by the Friends. These goods are often exchanged for goods and services offering equivalent pleasures, both within and beyond the circle of the Friends, so that the circulation of berries functions to deepen and extend both friendships and community bonds.

With few and fragile barriers to its occupation and use, unreal estate allows for secrets to be publicly exposed, accessible to all at the same time that they may be comprehensible to a few, or even to no one. Enigmatic graffiti, inscrutable signs, advertising campaigns that advertise only themselves: these are public secrets exposed on the underused and untended surfaces of unreal estate. It may also be the availability of these surfaces that inspire public secrecy—thoughts, expressions or forms that assume the status of a secret only with their public appearance.

While public secrets may be inscrutable even to their authors, their apparent mystery often prompts attempts at interpretation. Secrets can thereby be endowed with meanings, although what the disclosure of secrets usually bears are the desires, anxieties and dreams of those who attempt to decipher them.