The Unreal Estate Guide to Detroit

Accidental Architecture

Michigan Building Parking Garage

The Michigan Building was opened in 1925 in downtown Detroit. It originally contained a block of offices and the “French Renaissance” style Michigan Theatre. The Michigan Theatre contained a large auditorium with over 4,000 seats, an intricately detailed proscenium, mezzanine, roof, balconies and lobby, and stage with Wurlitzer organ and orchestra pit. In the 1950s, 60s and 70s, as a result of declining audiences and the more general decline of downtown Detroit, the theater was transformed into a movie palace, pornographic film venue, supper club and rock concert venue; none of these ventures proved profitable and the last of several interim closures took place in 1976. At the same time, tenants in the office block adjacent to the theater demanded “secure parking” from the owners of the Michigan Building. The owners proposed to demolish the unused theater and replace it with a parking garage; due to structural conditions, however, the theater could not be demolished without threatening the adjacent office block. A solution was then improvised; a three level steel and concrete parking structure was inserted into the theater's empty shell, leaving much of the theater's original architecture intact.

The inadvertent result of the transformation of the theater into a parking garage is a space of enormous aesthetic effect and historical resonance. This effect and resonance emerged not because the theater was valued as a work of architecture or historic monument, but precisely because it was not valued as such. For the owners of the Michigan Building, the theater comprised merely valueless empty space; this perception of emptiness yielded an act of accidental preservation whose formal and historical properties diverge from, and perhaps exceed, any deliberately conceived work of heritage conservation.

Peacemakers International

Peacemakers International is a Christian ministry located in a group of buildings in a disadvantaged neighborhood on Detroit's Eastside. For Peacemakers, this neighborhood provides a field of opportunity to engage with the “many precious souls who lie in this vast inner city wasteland, waiting to be rescued by the blood of Jesus Christ and rescued from Satan's capacity.” Poverty, that is, provides conditions to Peacemakers that are particularly conducive to missionary work—the loss of economic value of property in its neighborhood produces the possibility to cultivate otherwise-inaccessible spiritual values.

The community activities of Peacemakers include church services, prayer meetings, a soup kitchen open for breakfast and lunch three times a week, and the hosting of activities for neighborhood children. Members of the Peacemakers ministry live and work in several adjacent buildings. Much of the work of these members is focused on urban agriculture, with gardens both inside and around abandoned buildings providing produce for the soup kitchen and sale to a commercial vendor, as well. The ministry's gardens inside a roofless and otherwise empty building comprise a remarkable example of unreal estate; the gardens are made possible by the evacuation of all architectural value from the building and the subsequent emergence of the building's footprint as its only resource for development.

Blotting

The many vacant lots in Detroit allow both new sorts of public uses and new forms of private dwelling. One form of the latter takes place when homeowners appropriate, borrow or purchase vacant lots adjacent to their property and expand that property to a new, larger size. This expansion produces what the design studio, Interboro Partners, has termed “blots”—a hybrid urban space that functions as both a “block” and a “lot.”

Blotting emerged as a grassroots form of residential property development. Since the early 2000s, however, the City of Detroit has officially sponsored blotting by selling vacant lots under city ownership to adjacent homeowners or other neighborhood residents for nominal prices ($150 to $500) and by allowing vacant lots to be used for gardens under the Adopt-A-Lot program. This sponsorship reflects the municipal utility of blotting as an occupation of otherwise abandoned urban space.

Blots have been used by homeowners in a variety of ways, from parking cars, through gardening, to simply enlarging front or back yards. While these uses are not at all radical in themselves, the process by which these uses take place is specific to cities of unreal estate like Detroit. In these cities, the creation of blots transforms empty space that is valueless to its formal owner (typically the city, county or state) to space endowed with new values by new users or owners.

Where there is a surplus of houses, the house is available for extreme housework. This work takes the house as something that can be taken apart—carved up, tricked out, faked, parodied, re-assembled or given over to hitherto undomesticated needs and desires. Extreme housework is dedicated, then, not to house cleaning or home maintenance but to passionately rendering the house anew.

In the city of unreal estate, there is a great deal of this housework left to be done, but there is also a great deal of time in which to do this work. No one waits for extreme housework to be completed so that no one is bothered by its deferral. Abandoned houses spread slowly across the city's depleted terrain. Once in a while, extreme housework will transform one of these houses into something else, but something that satisfies no need for comfort or shelter. The need is for something different: what estranges the days, what beguiles the city, what renders architecture unfamiliar to itself.