The Unreal Estate Guide to Detroit

Extreme Housework

Detroit Industrial Gallery

The Detroit Industrial Gallery is a house/urban art work in the midst of the Heidelberg Project. Its creator, the artist Tim Burke, purchased a piece of property on the Heidelberg Project's block and then re-purposed an existing house as a work of art. Greatly indebted to the Heidelberg Project, Burke collects and exhibits abandoned objects on and around his house's walls and grounds.

The aesthetic effect of the Detroit Industrial Gallery is far less vivid than that of the Heidelberg Project—it is at once derivative of its precedent but also devoid of that precedent's discomforting conjoining of mourning and celebration. Yet the Detroit Industrial Gallery was endowed with entirely new levels of meaning and import when, in the spring of 2009, Burke introduced the project to the market economy by placing a “For Sale” sign on his front door. The sign announced an asking price of $1,000,000,000 dollars; simultaneously, Burke listed the Detroit Industrial Gallery on eBay, asking for a starting bid of $500,000 dollars.

Describing his thoughts on putting his house up for sale, Burke wrote in his blog, “Why not stimulate the Detroit real estate market? Let's get things moving in Detroit again!” Thus, precisely the imperatives of the market economy that many artists of urban renewal explicitly attempt to refuse (“we're not in this to make any money…”) became the objects of Burke's engagement. This engagement, however, was an overt over-identification in which the market was neither an object of denial nor an instrument of exploitation, but rather a site of play. For sale, whether for $500,000 or $1,000,000,000, the Detroit Industrial Gallery was endowed with a value that was wholly unreal—an endowment that, in turn, raised questions about the reality of values that the market economy so routinely fabricates.

Full Scale Design Lab

Occupying a fire-damaged North Hamtramck house owned by Power House co-owner, Mitch Cope, the Full Scale Design Lab was a platform for experimental architectural alterations. The members of the Lab were fellows in the Architecture Program at the University of Michigan. Taking advantage of the house's position outside the market economy, the Lab apprehended the house as site on which to conduct “full scale” architectural experiments that would be precluded anywhere architecture possessed value as real estate.

The experiments were formal interventions that were tied to loosely defined or experiential programs. One intervention took the form of a movable room that could be pushed outside the house, where it would offer entry to the house; another illuminated the house's windowless garage with one thousand glass tubes inserted into the garage's wood-frame walls; still another created a new wedge-shaped room, with bleacher seating and a skylight, within the house's existing volume.

Approaching the house primarily as form, the work of the Lab extended a venerable tradition of architectural thinking and making. This tradition has been focused on the disciplinary and professional possibilities of architecture. Detroit's unreal estate offers a plenitude of sites where such possibilities can be explored. At the same time, the concept of unreal estate also discloses the horizons of thinking about architecture as a discipline or profession; architecture in the city of unreal estate is often authored without architects, on the basis of forms of knowledge exterior and irrelevant to architecture-as-such.

Power House

The Power House is a self-styled “social art project” taking form through the renovation of a damaged house in North Hamtramck. Conducted by Mitch Cope and Gina Reichert, who together comprise the art/design group, Design 99, the renovation is intended to yield not only a model home but also a site of neighborhood interaction, a catalyst for new ideas about community-building, and a stimulus for new social networks. Based on these intentions, Cope and Reichert pose their interventions at the Power House as components of a “crude performance,” a process at once artistic, architectural and social, that is the fundamental work of the project.

The focus on the process of the Power House's renovation, rather than on the product that is the outcome of this process, gives the project a unique architectural temporality. While speed is valued in market-based renovations, slowness is valued at the Power House; slow building allows each intervention to be considered on its own terms, resourced by unique or found materials, and carried out with attention to its performative dimension.

As one of the most widely known urban art projects in Detroit, the Power House has also consolidated an audience far beyond its immediate neighborhood, an effect perhaps unanticipated but one that has introduced a highly-salient dimension to the project's performative status. Serving as a reference for many different ideas of artistic agency in post-industrial Detroit, the Power House has become a kind of icon of unreal estate, a figure for an entire range of creative possibilities emerging from Detroit's decline. The Power House project has also come to include the support of other projects that animate vacant homes by various sorts of artistic or cultural ambitions; these projects, all in the Power House's neighborhood, include Filter Detroit and the Full Scale Design Lab.

The city of unreal estate is a city of apparent vacancy, emptiness and abandonment. And yet, to a gaze that sees not much left, what's left over assumes new significance. Remnants, traces, bits and pieces, odds and ends: all these can assume a newly vivid materiality and accommodate a newly expanded set of use values.

Some of this leftover detritus is spatial. Down an alley, in a garage, parties are thrown on spring and summer evenings; in a vacant lot, a crowd gathers to watch a performance; in a former union hall, in a city with less and less unionized work, music is made and played. Spaces empty out, lie abandoned, and are then re-discovered. These re-discoveries may in turn be discovered as scavengers of events, pastimes, and entertainments come across them.