9

Foreword: A Dedication

We dedicate this book, with great sadness, but also joy, to the memory of lgnasi de Sola-Morales. At

the moment of his untimely death, he was thoughtfully, generously, and enthusiastically initiating

the foreword for this publication. As we complete the final work for this project, we find ourselves

grappling not only with this great personal loss, but equally with a deep regret for the common

void created by his absence and shared by all of us who form part of the discipline of architecture.

lgnasi himself referred, in his book Differences, Topographies of Contemporary Architecture, to the

impression made upon him by the death of Deleuze, who was clearly an intellectual stimulus.

Likewise, lgnasi, with his intense creative energy, has served and continues to serve, using Deleuze's

own term, as a "mediator" for many of us. With great ability to "construct intellectually mobile

concepts," he forms part of that series of thinkers, events, or things, that open the possibility for

each of us to express ourselves with that same spirit of creativity.

Beyond the obvious and immediate inspiration for our research found in his essay, Terrain Vague, he continuously generated multiple and fertile grounds of meaningful inquiry, always with

an abundance of profound insights into the rhythms and flows of contemporaneity. He had a

unique capacity to trace beautiful and powerful, open and liberating, contours of thought captured

by others and projected in multiple and unforeseeable directions. He was a profoundly generous

thinker, architect, teacher, mentor, and friend. The great body of work he leaves behind offers

endless opportunities for resonance, exchange, dispute, and creative projection. Many of us will

continue to talk to lgnasi through his work, to play with it, to engage the force of its freedom, and

perhaps to ask of it strange and new questions never imagined by lgnasi himself.

12

attention. This activity required equal parts persistence and ambivalenc . It m nl'f tIt If, n

obsessive, self-indulgent, yet ultimately indifferent interest in recording th ondltl n f urb nl m

in Detroit in lieu of providing engineering solutions, putting forth nostalgic I m nt, r pr vldln

snap judgements.

The Committee for Urban Thinking: Detroit was established in 1994 as v hi I to nduct

research on the conditional nature of Detroit's urbanism. Since that time, th Com mitt h b n

stalking the city: pursuing it by keeping track of it in a quiet, stealthy mann r. N v r int nding

to save it, solve it, or spin it, the Committee has effectively operated by rejecting th probl m­

solving posture that pervades many established modes of urban inquiry. The Com mitt 's t ctics

explicate the mode of urbanism at work in Detroit and simultaneously implicat the terms of its

own involvement with the city. Stalking Detroit can be seen as a book about the city or as a book

about the disciplines that try to make sense of it.

Of seminal importance to this anthology, the photographs of Jordi Bernado and Monica

Rosello construct documentary evidence of the material and spatial conditions of Detroit in the

1990's. These photographs capture the fantastic, poetic, factual, and sober reality of the city and

infuse the primary essays with visual openings onto the city itself. The three primary essays place

the study of Detroit in a larger historical and theoretical context. They work the thesis of the

collection from multiple station points and ground the work in scholarly foundations. Jerry Herron's

essay problematizes the touristic appropriation of Detroit's ruins and offers critical positions for

the engagement of Detroit as a cultural product. Dan Hoffman relates the material history of the

city to historical models of production and chronicles the exhaustion of the cycle of modernity.

Patrik Schumacher and Christian Rogner articulate the relationship between Fordism and Modern­

ism, and speculate on Detroit's role in offering a glimpse of post-Fordist urbanism in other cities

internationally.

Three photographic essays are included to draw particular attention to the exceptional

and extraordinary architectural results of Detroit's peculiar urbanism while providing a scalar break

between the larger urban projects. Kent Kleinman and Leslie van Duzer's documentation of the

renovation of the Michigan Theater for use as a parking garage exemplifies the opportunistic inva­

sion of the automobile into what had been the space of architecture in the city. Dan Hoffman's

description of Detroit's demolition at the scale of the house and the city provides an index of the

city's rapidly deteriorating material conditions. Bob Arens' description of the Heidelberg Project and

Tyree Guyton's appropriation of abandoned houses as sites for cultural commentary illustrates the

extraordinary cultural production attendant to the city's abandonment.

Three design projects respond to and are developed directly from the specific cultural,

historic, and material conditions of Detroit in the 1990's. The primary intention in including this

work has been to· reveal those conditions by representing them using multiple means. An allied goal

has been to offer an alternative to nee-traditional models of planning and urban design and their

naive revisionist strategies for the recuperation of the pre-industrial city. Finally, and perhaps most

importantly, we include this work to speculate on the role of architectural practice in the absence

13

of traditional urbanism. Not coincidentally, each of the three projects, in differing ways, posits

the importance of landscape (in lieu of architecture) as the primary media for the conception and

the construction of the contemporary city. Daskalakis and Perez's "Projecting Detroit" articulates

the surface of the ground as a framework for new modes of experience, activity, and inhabitation

at what had been Detroit's center. Waldheim and Santos-Munne's "Decamping Detroit" takes the

city's proposal to abandon large portions of itself at face value and speculates on the future

status of Detroit's newly depopulated landscapes. Young's "Line Frustration" delineates the political

contrivance of the city's Federal Empowerment Zone boundary while gaming with those territories

tangent to it.

Taken together, the projects are meant to be at once both critical and propositional. They

can be read as critical urban propositions for Detroit's near future, as well as attempts to illuminate

the conditions for practice in cities like it. Collectively, the three diverse strategies pose large

questions about the nature of establishing a meaningful and useful practice in the contemporary

city. The critical responses by Joan Roig, Jim Corner, and Santiago Colas are included to reflect on ,

the strategies for practice implicated in the design projects and to thematize the issues raised by

them in a broader theoretical and critical context. Alex Maclean's aerial photographs afford a rare

synoptic view of Detroit's disappearance.

Increasingly, Detroit is more evident in broadcast reception than lived experience. The

media, real estate, and business interests, as well as the city administration itself have invested in

an urbanism of the simulacra: the ongoing myth of Detroit's resurgence. Despite a recurring history

of recent attempts to solve or save Detroit, the city persists in a spontaneous ev.olution of aggres­

sive dismantling. In spite of the most recent (and several historical} public relations campaigns

designed to spin Detroit's long-awaited resuscitation as a site for destination entertainment and

speculative investment, the ongoing annexation of the city by its own suburbs continues apace,

obscuring the material fact of the city's ongoing demolition. Among the most recent public rela­

tions campaigns has been the expenditure of millions of dollars of public funds to augment the

federal government's 2000 census count of the city's population in an attempt to recuperate

Detroit's image nationally as a site for speculative investment. Developed with publicly subsidized

tax incentives, new sports stadia and casinos serve the growing suburban populace by recasting the

redundant city as an a-historical destination theme park banking on Detroit's historical name brand.

These projects can be understood as tactically deployed coalitions between corporate culture, land

speculators, the media, and various political players interested in declaring Detroit's recuperation.

Only a block deep and intended for easy access from suburban highway systems, these superficial

surfaces of urban refacement work to simultaneously erase both the guts·and guilt of what ha.d

been one of the largest and wealthiest cities in the modern world. Behind these new public facades

and their attendant media campaigns proclaiming Detroit is back, the city continues to disappear,

leaving behind extraordinary landscapes and an increasingly indeterminate urbanism.

GEORGIA OASKALAKIS, CHARLES WALOHEIM AND JASON YOUNG, editors.

Facts

, From 1900 to 1950 the population of Detroit grew

from under 285,700 to over 1.8 million.

2 From 1950 to 2000 the population of Detroit

decreased from over 1.8 million to 951,270.

3 No building construction permits were issued in

Detroit in 1988, then the 7th largest city in the U.S.

4 Between 1978 and 1998 only 9000 building per­

mits were issued for new homes in Detroit, while

over 108,ooo demolition permits were issued.

5 In 1998, Detroit was the 11th largest city in the US.

6 In 1998, 79% of the population in Detroit was

African American.

7 In 1998, 78% of the population in the surrounding

suburbs was White.

8 In 1998, the average income in the city was 47% of

that in the surrounding suburbs.

9 In the 1990's, Detroit had the largest percentage

of single-family homes in the U.S.

10 In the 1990's, the city lost 1% of its housing stock

each year to arson.

11 In 1990, the city spent $25 million on the removal

of abandoned houses and other structures.

12 Between 1990 and 1992, the city spent $250

million on the removal of toxic waste on property

the city was donating to Chrysler Corporation for

the construction of a new Jeep Factory.

Sources:

1 - 2, 5 - 8. U.S. Census Bureau.

3, g- 12. Dan Hoffman, "The Best the World has to Offer," Public lecture at Union of International Architects Congress XIX, Barcelona, July 1996.

4. Sanford Kwinter and Daniela Fabricius, "Contract with America," Mutations, (Barcelona: ACTAR, 2000), p. 6oo.

32

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--

Detroit downtown figure-ground diagrams, Richard Plum, "Detroit is Everywhere," Architecture Magazine, AprillggG, vol. 85, no. 4, pp. 55_61.

33

JERRY HERRON

three meditations on the ruins of Detroit

First the Facts

Forget what you think you know about this place. Detroit is the most relevant city in the United

States for the simple reason that it is the most unequivocally modern and therefore distinctive of

our national culture: in other words, a total success. Nowhere else has American modernity

so completely had its way with people and place alike. Reputedly "historic" towns, like Philadel­

phia, New Orleans, and San F rancisco, merely seem old by comparison. Others, such as New

York, Los Angeles, and Miami, are not American at all, but more like small, poorly run foreign

countries with insufficient fresh water and arable land. And Chicago, no less than its sun-belt

reflex, Houston, has been forced to compensate with high-rise architecture for the general lack

of autochthonous culture. This makes Detroit the revealed "Capital of the Twentieth Century,"

and likely the century ahead, because this is the place, more than any other, where the native

history of modernity has been written. This same modernity has made Americans collectively,

and globally, what we are all still becoming today, bringing along with us the rest of the so-called

"developed" world.

The genius of this becoming was our genius (for those fortunate enough to live in Detroit): a

native son. "Nothing original, yet everything new," as Terry Smith has characterized the modernity

of Henry Ford:

Not one of thousands of engineering and other tooling discoveries that attended the sue-

cess of the new processes was his creation. The inventive genius represented by his name

was above all an organizational one: elements developed elsewhere were shaped into 1. Terry Smith, Mal1ing the adem.: industry, Art, and

Design in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 15.

a productive system of incessantly self-refining functionality in which nothing was

original except the system itself . ... 1

What is lost to us now, perhaps, is the liberatory moment of Ford's systemic modernity, the

perpetual making new, which has become conventional to reduce to a panoptic regime of idiotic,

duplicable production, an "incessantly self-refining functionality."

But to stop there is to lapse into the worst kind of Foucauldian nostalgia: a longing for

lost discipline that makes post-modern punishment seem a relief. That is to say, it is missing the

34

point. At least, it is missing a point that remained crucial to the emergent structure of feeling

that made modernity seem desirable and therefore worth buying (at frequently exorbitant rates).

The problem of the modernist subject now, at any rate, the problem invented by some aspiring

post-historians of modernity, is the Joss of that defining, historical Other: the time-bound we that

all of us once knew ourselves really to be, as opposed to some modernist ideal. "The practical

problem of urban design now," Richard Sennett has written, for example, with reference to the

plate-glass architecture inspired by Mies, "is how men and women can cope with the solitude

imposed upon them by modernism." 2 One could make such a statement only in the absence of that

2. Richard Sennett, "Plate Glass," Haritar1 6.4 (I 987), 7. lost collective Other of history. The question is for whom and to what extent Sennett's

once-upon-a-time Other has been dispersed. 3. For an introduction to Ford ism and post-li'ordism in the

context of Detroit, see Pa rik Schumache•· and Chris- An oppositional history was characteristic not only of the privileged subjects of

modernist "high" culture, along with middle-class aspirants to simulacra) entitlement; it

seems to have defined the working-class subjects of "Fordism" as weJJ.3 The modernity

tian Rogner, "After Fm·d," in this collection.

4. Robert Lacey, Ford: The Me11 and the Machine (BoRton:

Little Brown, 1986), 109. of their labor, looked back at now, consisted of the mechanical equivalent of Sennett's

isolation: the day spent in tasks so idiotically small as to refer to nothing outside their repetitive,

mindless simplicity, with the necessary speed of the line executing a kind of noisy, mechanical

"solitude imposed upon them by modernism." "The man who places a part does not fasten it,"

Ford decreed, "The man who puts in a bolt does not put on the nut; the man who puts on the nut

does not tighten it." 4 "Imagine it if you can," a writer for Colliers magazine began his description

of Henry Ford's Highland Park assembly line in 1914 during the peak production years of the

Model T:

... its endless rows of writhing machinery, its shrieking, hammering, and clatter, its smell

of oil, its autumn haze of smoke, its savage-looking foreign population-to my mind it

expressed but one thing, and that was delirium.5 5. Melvin G Holli, ed. Detroi (New York: New Viewpoints,

1976), 134.

6. Fredric Jameson, Postm.odernism or, the Cultural Logic

of Late Capitalism (Durh>pn, N.C.: Duke University

Press, 1991), 34-5.

Seventy years later, Fredric Jameson would imagine he had discovered in post­

modernity the "savage" self-fragmenting subjectivity described here, which he would

dub the "hysterical sublime." 6 Those two moments of hysterical projection share the

same strategy, which, like Sennett's, reduces to unintelligible ruin any subject position not pre­

cisely supervised by their own prescriptive nostalgias. Each yearning for a moment of historicist

repression that may never have existed, at least not in those terms.

How Not To Visit Detroit

First the facts. Now a thesis. A ruin is not found, it is made: an anti-historical compound of

nostalgia and merchandising. This collusion is suggested in the sociologist Dean MacCannell's

formulation, from his book, The Tourist (subtitled "A New Theory of the Leisure Class"): "The

deep structure of modernity is a totalizing idea, a modern mentality that sets modern society in

7. Dean MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the

Leisure Class (New York: Schockcn Books, 1976), 7-8.

opposition both to its own past and to those societies of the present that are premodern

or un(der) developed." 7 Elsewhere, MacCannell concludes, quite beautifully, in fact,

"As a tourist, the individual may step out into the universal drama of modernity." 8 I 8. Ibid, 7.

would say he has things about right, except in reverse, rather like Fredric Jameson

writing under the influence of his politically nostalgic unconscious. As a tourist, the individual does not step into, but out of the historically negotiated drama of modernity. The totalizing impulse

MacCannell ascribes to modernity is, in other words, more nearly post-modern in its origins. With

35

post-modernity it shares an academic, institutionalizing urge to control history; reducing memory

to sites of corporate supervision by merchandizing history as nostalgic ruin. But to who does a ruin first appear as a ruin? Not to native inhabitants, surely, for whom

history is not a holiday diversion, but a continuous, if haphazard, way of living. When did Romans, for example, first realize that they no longer lived in a city, but in a ruin? Perhaps not until English gentlemen, taking the Grand Tour, found themselves in need of souvenirs. What those souvenirs spoke to genteel collectors was not history, but the humiliation of history; not the "lessons" of the past, but the mastery of ownership, as if consumption had taken the place of self-knowledge, because in fact it had.

"A world ended in Detroit," Camilo Jose Vergara has declared, connoisseur-like, in Metropo·

lis magazine,9 with his article serving both as advertisement for a recently published coffee-table book (The New American Ghetto), and a traveling exhibition of his photographs. Vergara has been dining out on Detroit for a number of years, as a matter of fact, in the pages of such journals as the Nation, the Washington Post, and the New York Times. He has devised a version of

9. Camilo Jose Vergara, "Visible City," Metropolis (April Detroit, that most classically representative of cities, which proves attractive to great 1995>. 38_ numbers of middle-class Americans who share his urge to get over the responsibility of 10_ Ibid, 33_ history by reducing its memory to nostalgic ruins. Vergara's "solution" to the problems 11. Ibid, 38. of the city, and his nominal reason for writing his now much reproduced article in Metropolis magazine, was to propose that a large chunk of downtown Detroit be turned into a kind of dystopian theme park: "a dozen city blocks of pre-Depression skyscrapers be stabilized and left standing as ruins: an American Acropolis." 10 "All I can do," Vergara confesses touristi­cally, "is to record the fading splendor of the buildings and the disjointed and anguished cries of those who try to make a home among them." 11 This high-mindedness is perhaps all well and good, liberal romanticism notwithstanding. It is the naive tourism implicit in Vergara's proposals that is both more consequential, and also representative of post-modern souvenir taking and the down-sizing nostalgias that reduce the cause-and-effect of history to the disjointed stuff of coffee-table publication.

"The tourists," MacCannell writes in his un-self-regarding characterization, "return home carrying souvenirs and talking of their experiences, spreading, wherever they go, a vicarious experience of the sight. Authentic experiences are believed to be available only to those moderns who try to break the bonds of their everyday existence and begin to 'live."' 12 "Just back from Detroit," the self-authenticating Vergara assures his readers, "which I visit every year. Its down­town moves me like no other place." 13 Vergara acts out a vicarious self-authentication. He is "moved" by the spectacular "ruin" of the city, which his own photographs trans- 12· MacCanneJJ, 158-59·

late into marketable souvenirs. These sights are offered for sale to the supposedly 13· Vergara, 33· 14. Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Min-

disauthenticated, post-modern populace for whom "the fading splendor of the buildings" iature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection

and the "anguished cries of those who try to make a home among them" have alike <Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993), 133.

been translated to aestheticized curios. "As experience is increasingly mediated and abstracted," Susan Stewart points out in her description of souvenirs, "the lived relation of the body to the phenomenological world is replaced by a nostalgic myth of contact and presence." 14

Vergara's sight-seeing, his vicarious "myth of contact and presence," replaces the reader/citizen's actual bodily v isit to the city, and records (as souvenir trope) an abandonment of urban space, both real and imaginary, that is of great historical consequence.

As MacCannell suggests, it is the "authenticity of the self," Vergara's prototypical self, that is really the question. Vergara's concern with an aesthetic of feeling renders history not so much impossible as irrelevant: "All I can do is to record the fading splendor." Of course, that is not all he can do, but all he wants to do. He is shrewd, if not precisely original in his wish both to remember

15. Vergara, 36.

Detroit, and at the same time to know nothing whatsoever about it: "[W]e could transform the

nearly 100 troubled buildings [downtown] into a grand national historic park of play and wonder, an urban Monument Valley." 15 Here, the potential for aesthetic "play and wonder" entitles the

connoisseur to make an empty "ruin" of the place where a million people still live and

16. Michael Sorkin, Variations on a Theme Park: The

New American City and the End of Public Space, ed.

Michael Sorkin (New York: Hill and Wang, 1992), 231.

work, many of them in conditions of enforced desperation. (Vergara's photographs, offered as souvenirs from a theme park that will probably never be built, rarely include human figures, regardless of his rhetorical sensitivity to the "anguished cries" of the invisible citizenry.) The historic "solitude" imposed by modernity, to which Richard

Sennett refers, is not so much solved as it is thematized, Disneyfied, as consumable entertain­ment. If "Detroit is everywhere," as Vergara proposes, then so too is his conveniently packaged "Disneyzone" anodyne, to use Michael Sorkin's dismissive term for a post-modern (and post­mortem) "urbanism without ... a city." 16 Vergara's is a perfectly un-historical space, wherein the politics of middle-class feeling take the place of understanding, responsibility, and action. That is a solution of sorts, I suppose, and one that has kept Vergara consistently in the news, as if to confirm the wish of Americans to generally escape the old modernist stand-offs: memory versus desire, history versus utopia. If we could only just get rid of the one, then we would be free to enjoy the other.

Meditation One: Do You Remember Hudson's?

Perhaps the greatest of all the "ruins" in Detroit is the now leveled structure that once housed the J. L. Hudson Company, Detroit's premier downtown retailer. At its completion in 1929, it was the world's largest department store. The building, demolished in 1998, represented an architectural consolidation undertaken in stages between 1924 and 1929 under the supervision of Smith, Hinchman, and Grylls. The structure was twenty-five stories, with four additional stories below ground; it encompassed 2.2 million square feet of f loor space. There were 5,000 windows, 700

dressing rooms, and 51 passenger elevators each with their own white-gloved attendant. Hudson's had storage space for 83,000 furs. A seven-story f lagpole topped the structure. This mercantile enormity displaced the former high points of civic culture: the church steeples and city hall tower. The lives of citizens would no longer be triangulated by those outmoded referents; instead, people were invited to discover themselves in relation to a commercial culture that they could buy and dispose of piecemeal, as they pleased. It was the modern way.

The enormous building was vacated in 1983, when Hudson's (by then a subsidiary of a Minneapolis retail chain) closed its doors in Detroit forever. Only downsized suburban outposts remain. The old downtown store was never too far out of the public mind, however. At holidays it served as a gigantic reminder of all the good times that people (who invariably no longer lived there) say they used to have in Detroit, but which the city (abandoned by more than half of its former residents) now seemingly makes impossible. The fact is that Hudson's was not a ruin of anything, except a sentimental wish to impose on someone else a kind of life that modernity has taught us all, collectively, to leave behind.

The suburbs did not kill Hudson's, in other words, we simply outgrew it, just as we were intended to. The J. L. Hudson Company built the first suburban shopping center in the United States (called Northland), and, along with other "downtown" interests, developed (at enormous profit) the housing and transportation routes required to make suburbia viable. Not incidentally, the year of Northland's completion (1954) was the same year that previously growing sales at the downtown store began an irreversible decline. And no surprise, Hudson's taught consum-

37

ers how to master and ultimately condescend to the many-storied plot that was once crucial to

the pedagogy of department-store consuming: the omniscient, commercial narrative that moved shoppers through the store and into lives defined in imitation of its disciplinary regime. Just as

labor unions ceased to script the enfranchisement of individual workers, centralized shopping became anachronistic to the mature desires of fully individuated consumers who preferred the

come-as-you-are populism of shopping mall entry. In both instances, "we" outgrew the master

narratives, those training wheels on our ideological bicycle, and now feel sufficiently confident to

go forward on our own. And that represents not a ruin of modernity, but its on-going vitality, a vitality vouchsafed not only to those who have left the city behind.

"I am disappointed by the reaction against the ruins park," Vergara muses, in a state

of disingenuous incredulity. He seems unable to fathom the preference of homeless citizens, for

example, when they say they would prefer heat, shelter, and jobs, instead of his Motown Acropolis which "would occupy only a minuscule fraction of the city's idle space." 17

17· Camilo Jose Vergara, "Visible City," Metropolis (April

1995), 38. Perhaps what is at stake is a native grasp of the danger implicit in his fantasy. All too easily, the poor and disenfranchised are reduced to souvenir extras when "we" who are not poor

execute our nostalgic "contract" with America, as if history were subject to periodic renegotiation.

That opportune figuration simply cannot be sustained at ground level, surely not around the old

Hudson's store, in this city of desperate (if illegal) modernity. Here the illicit economy is, for some cohorts of the population, the main employer, especially of young men. They seem not to require a

public monument to "our throwaway cities," to use Vergara's terminology. Their lives prove suf­

ficient reminders of where and who they are, and of the value yet to be discovered in a history that others would prefer to blame on resident "indifference" and then simply leave behind.

Meditation Two: Horace Rackham's Doorknob

On both sides of Woodward Avenue, just north of Detroit's so-called New Center (a semi-successful

attempt to relocate the city's overcongested downtown in the 1920's) is a neighborhood that was

once home to some of the richest and most powerful men in the United States. Boston-Edison, it is called, after two of its main streets. Henry Ford, then a recently minted billionaire, built

his first mansion here in the years just before the First World War. S. S. Kresge (founder of K-Mart) lived in a great house, the grounds of which occupied a full city block. J. L. Hudson, who

created the Hudson's department store, lived only a street away. Ranged around them were the

less wealthy and elite of Detroit: retailers and car magnates and manufacturers. Even Ty Cobb

was a resident, if not precisely a neighbor. On Edison Avenue, just a couple of houses down from where Ford would one day make his home, Horace Rackham built his house. Before he became rich and philanthropic (endowing among other things the University of Michigan's graduate school)

Rack ham was an attorney and investor who, along with a small group of Detroiters, loaned Henry

Ford the money he needed to build his first commercially successful car: the original Model A.

This was Ford's third try at auto manufacturing. The first two attempts having ended in financial

wreck, investors were hard to come by. "The horse is here to stay," a banker friend of Rackham's advised, "the automobile is only a novelty-a fad." Nevertheless, Rackham bought 50 shares of

Ford stock, at a cost of $5,000. Between 1903 and 1919, he was paid $4,750,000 in dividends

on that investment. When Ford bought him out in 1919, taking the company private, Rackham's

shares were redeemed for $12,500,000. He became, on the spot, an immensely wealthy man.

Rack ham's house still stands, like most of the houses in this district. It is a modest place,

by local standards, not nearly so fine as many of his neighbors'. I know the people who Jive there

now, a mathematician and an artist. The first time they invited me over, before ringing the bell,

I put my hand on their front doorknob, which appeared to be original. I imagined Rackham doing the same thing, then opening the door on that April afternoon, eighty years before, after he had

collected his check from Henry Ford: "Honey, I'm home, and here's the 12.5 million." It is doubtful this little vignette ever got played out. Rackham was probably driven home, arriving not in front,

but at the side or the rear, greeted by a servant. No wonder I get things wrong; it is hard for me to

imagine his life, except as the wish-fulfilling fantasy, the retro-souvenir, of a West-Texas used-car dealer's son who grew up knowing very little about wealth, or servants, or porte cocheres.

Not that my friends who own Rackham's house are any more knowledgeable about such things. Like virtually all the current residents in the neighborhood, they inhabit places (often near

palaces) never intended for people like themselves. But then who could have guessed that one day,

half the city's population and most of its wealth would just walk away? Before that happened, people of the class, or race, of the neighborhood's current homeowners would likely have been

consigned to the back stairs, the third floors, the cottages of tradesmen and domestics. Sometimes present-day Detroiters buy the great houses as if to get even for their prior exclusion. They make a payment or two, strip out the doors and fixtures and sell these to dealers; then they default on

the mortgage loan. Many of the homes have been wasted that way, and then abandoned to the

next stage in their devolution. Here impromptu recyclers ply their trade, day and night, with old

shopping carts and rattletrap pick-ups, for the most part unmolested by the law, making their way

up and down Detroit's un-maintained streets. Inevitably, these houses reach the final stage in this

process of controlled decay, becoming yet another crumbling souvenir of the glory that was once

Detroit. "The houses, mostly standing as they stood a half-century ago, are dismal structures,"

Russell McLauchlin wrote, for example, in a reminiscence of his own (even more dilapidated)

childhood neighborhood, not far from Boston-Edison:

18. Russell McLaucblin,Aifred Street (Detroit: Conjure

House, 1946), xi.

Some have night-blooming grocery stores in their front yards. Some have boarded windows.

All stand in bitter need of paint and repair. It is a desolate street; a s::ene of poverty and

chop-fallen gloom; possibly of worse things. But once, within a clear middle-aged

memory, Alfred Street was a lovely place.18

McLauchlin's description was written at the end of the Second World War; the intervening

years have only increased the local appetite for nostalgia. This nostalgic sighting of the past offers a retroactive justification for the very acts of abandonment that produced the "ruins" in the first

place. These ruins are now made to appear, sui generis, as the result of some native deficiency

of culture which those lucky enough to have escaped need to prevent from overtaking their new­

found homes. What is interesting is how little power such grand residences as existed on Alfred Street or,

somewhat later, in Boston-Edison, held over the original owners, who abandoned them long before

the neighborhoods got old. As E. P. Thompson has taught us with regard to social class, 19. Edward P. Thom pson,The Making of the English Worh- modernity is no less invisible, except when it is in motion.19 Such mobility is what made

ing Class (NewYork : Random House, 1966).

20. RD. McKenzie, "Detroit's Substantial Families: the Boston-Edison houses desirable as destinations, and then antiquated them almost

as fast. Because money, especially when newly made, is expressive only on the go, when

it is buying something new. Detroit's "substantial families," as R. D. McKenzie called 1900-1930," in Detroit, ed. Melvin G Rolli (New York:

New Viewpoints, 1976), 122-123.

them in his 1933 study (dealing with the years 1900-1930), had always been moving

away from the past and the central city, out toward, and then into, the suburbs. What McKenzie

discovered is that this pattern of migration was much faster for Detroit's richest citizens than for

similar citizens in New York, Los Angeles, or Chicago. In those cities the population of"notables"

39

in fact increased between 1910 and 1930.20 In Detroit, that population declined because people who had "made it" considered getting out of the city to be a necessary imprimatur of success.

McKenzie's conclusion, in his quaintly snobbish sociology, was that the preponderance of

heavy industry and working class immigrants were responsible for the elite's evacuation of Detroit. But that is to mistake the cause for the effect. Detroit had so many mobile rich people, many of

whom started out as working-class immigrants, because it was and is a place given over entirely

to industrial modernity. That is what created Boston-Edison, and that is what made it available,

almost immediately, to somebody else on the way up. "Nothing original, yet everything new," as

Terry Smith remarked of Henry Ford's modernity. Ford himself, a farm boy turned mechanic, only stayed in his house at 66 Edison Avenue a couple of years before building Fair Lane in suburban

Dearborn, where he moved in 1916. The Boston-Edison houses, even the ones that have been truly

ruined by predation, are not souvenirs of lost elegance, failed culture, depopulation, or something else. Souvenirs are something you bring back from a trip after it is over. For the people who live

here, the trip is far from done, so these historic houses keep getting moved into, and used, because

for somebody they still represent "everything new," no matter how old it may be.

Meditation Three: Romance of the Road

Perhaps the most important historic site in Detroit goes entirely unnoted because it is not marked. A state commemorative plaque is located not at the site itself, but in an historic neighborhood

some distance removed. The stretch of Woodward Avenue between Six and Seven Mile Roads was

the first piece of concrete paved highway in the United States, laid down in 1909, before anybody could have guessed at the importance of what was being done. The paving represents an act of

pure creativity. Like pure science or pure mathematics, it pre-dated the use that would reveal its

premonitory value. Industrial modernity produced the workers who would build the cars, in such

great numbers and so cheaply, that everyone, including the workers themselves, would eventually

be able to buy one. And by then, the value of modern pavement would seem so self-evident as

to merit no special notice of this long-since forgotten moment of foresight. Today, high-velocity

pavement grids the geography of our sight-specific modernity, enabling a schematic wonder that

makes all attendant wonders seem likewise possible by association.

Sight-specific modernity was no less powerful in 1951, when Detroit celebrated its 250th anniversary, which became the occasion for the publication of This Is Detroit: 250 Years in Pictures.

The "Postlude," subtitled "The Vision and the Fulfillment," offers the following recollection of the

city's founder Antoine Laumet de ]a Mothe Cadillac: "On the site of Cadillac's fort of 250 years

ago the imposing buildings of the new Civic Center are now rising. As long as her citizens shall

continue to dream and dare greatly, the future of the City Cadillac founded will remain secure." 21

The final two images in the volume are of then not yet extant freeway interchanges: 21. M. M. Quaife, This is Detroit, ed. William White

the Lodge/I-94 interchange north of the Wayne State University campus, and the (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1951), 197. Lodge/I-75 interchange near Tiger Stadium. The two images are titled, aptly, "Works

in Progress," just as the city itself was, and is, a work still in progress. Each shows an aerial rendering of the city and, superimposed over it, a tracing of the planned f reeways that would

innervate that historic terrain just as a nerve innervates muscle tissue and endows it with the

capacity to move. The future of Detroit will remain secure, the anniversary volume advised, "as

long as her citizens shall continue to dream and dare greatly." That is what these photographs

are all about. They are maps of the dream and wonder of modernity, expressed at the intersection

of pavement and history.

40

But the photographic superimposition gives a false impression, and merely confirms the now

prevalent, and nostalgic, view that freeways laid waste to otherwise vital communities that would

still be vital today if only they had not been submitted to the eminent domain of concrete. These claims are utter nonsense because the freeways did not interrupt the historical logic of American

urbanism. On the contrary, they are its purest, most sublime expression. The photographic image

is a false one because the freeway is not a superimposition, but rather a natural outgrowth, a

fulfillment of the modernity of which the city is the sight-specific expression. And now that we have

arrived at the future always already inscribed in our design, the question is whether we will have

the courage to take responsibility for the results. This is a complicated question, obviously, and

only made more so in a city such as Detroit. In this respect at least (Vergara notwithstanding),

Detroit is an exaggerated paradigm of all American cities. By default, it has been inherited by

populations (many of them poor and poorly-educated minorities) whose attitude toward historic

"preservation" can only be a vexed one. Particularly so, since the history in question was one

scripted to exclude them from the scheme that made modernity so highly profitable to somebody

else, someone who has now moved away. As to what became of our ability to dare and dream greatly, there is no simple or single

answer. Perhaps it is our frustrated national impatience with the future, and our concomitant

wish to devour it ahead of time, before it runs out. "Futurology" displaces history and nostalgia

supplants modernity as "cultural dominant" (to use Fredric Jameson's term): a nostalgia for how

we imagine the by now exhausted future used to make us feel. William Whyte, for example, is

among the most famous and famously nostalgic of city interpreters. In his book City, subtitled

"Rediscovering the Center," he recounts with sociological exactitude his love affair with pedestrian

streets, which are the nostalgic Other of high-speed pavement. He laments the unwillingness of

Americans to walk more than 800 to 1,000 feet before getting in their cars, noting this distance

as approximately that between the anchor stores in a suburban shopping mall. He concludes, "[l]f

Americans could widen their walking radius by only 200 feet, there would be a revolution in U.S.

22. William H. Whyte, City: Rediscovering the Center

(NewYork:Doubleday,l988), 303.

land use. However, there would have to be structural changes. There would have to

be places to walk." 22 It is not as if Whyte is wrong, or not entitled to his nostalgia for

a redemptive future, which of course he is. The problem is his presumption that the

behavior of Americans is evidence of a kind of ignorance, or moral degeneracy, although

these are perhaps highly convenient assumptions to adopt. This strikes me, nevertheless, as the worst kind of pandering. In the name of bringing

things back, of rediscovering our center, "we," whoever that is, are invited to see as ruin that which others might want to call history. The city, in fact, counter to Whyte's presumptions, did produce

places to get to. We got there, by choice, on paved highways. And it is the extraordinary wealth

produced by the city, by this city, Detroit, that made the trip possible for numbers of individuals

unprecedented in the long history of human societies. That is what the city did. Now, to presume its putative exhaustion is evidence of anything but the city's successful design is like blaming

the gas tank for getting empty or the tires for wearing out when somebody drives the family car.

The problem is not that so many people used the city to get to where they wanted to go, which

was someplace else. The problem is that not everybody was allowed to come along for the ride, so

that a population who has been excluded from its entitlements now often inhabits the structural

apparatus of modernity. To blame those people for conditions over which they have had little

control, or to blame the historic city for its insistent, if problematic, witness to its own success

is to miss the fundamental point, only hinted at in Whyte's suggestion of a need for "structural" change. That is precisely what is needed: a structure for changing nostalgia into intelligence,

ruin into history, for recalling the sights of modernity to a still relevant specificity. There will be

41

no arbitrary posting of the Modern, in other words, until we have reached its end, architectural

cartoons notwithstanding. As to what, precisely, that end may be, it is all a matter of arrival. That is to say, it is all about cars.

Conclusion

The automobile is the mechanical summation of our urban predicament: the ultimate love object of our national desire, which renders the city at once accessible, and also outmoded, inconvenient, unnecessary, like the history, supposedly, from which it was born. There is simply nowhere con­

venient to park, in the city or history. Whatever is to become of the metropolis, then, and us along

with it, will be determined by the confrontation of cars with historic space. The most sublime

expression of our national identity was sight specific, to be apprehended behind the wheel. That is where individualist democracy and industrial modernity converge climactically in an embrace

of man (or woman) and machine that is perhaps the supreme moment of fulfillment we will know as a people; with the fit of dream and reality being perfect, or nearly so.

This was all made possible, regardless of how we may feel about the results, through the

logic of the "sunken ditch." This is the origin of the American freeway and also the cause of much

derisive, and mistaken, criticism by architects and urban planners, who presume that some kind

of gigantic mistake was made. Quite the contrary, freeways were the populist fulfillment of an

urban "dream" distinctively our own (to recall the language of the 1950's Detroit commemora­

tive volume). By sinking roadways below street level, civic authorities could control access and

therefore allow greater speed of travel for urban motorists. Not incidentally, this made good on

the sight-specific promise that cars had only been hinting at ever since Henry Ford drove his first

"Quadricycle" through the streets of Detroit on that fateful June morning in 1896: the promise

that automobiles would carry us out of the past and into the modern world.

Quite clearly, Detroit is the Capital of the twentieth century, and probably the century to

come. Here, we built the auto-matic future, and it drove us out of town and into the world beyond,

where it is every American's God-given right to park directly in front of wherever it is we are

going. "The road generates its own patterns of movement and settlement and work," J. B. Jackson

proposes, tantalizingly, in A Sense of Place, A Sense of Time, "without so far producing

its own kind of landscape beauty or its own sense of place." 23 I am not so sure that 23. John Brinckerhoff Jackson, A Sense of Place, A Sense of

Time (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), VliJ.

those conclusions are sustainable, given the witness of Detroit, although the implica-

tion that modernity should yield a traditionally recognizable "beauty" is possibly the problem.

The sense of place that modernity produces, finally, may require new, un-nostalgic categories

to comprehend it. Whatever image we make of the city now, whether we left or stayed behind,

it will be of the city, this city, confronted through a windshield. This is the sight toward which

modernity has driven us: screened by our private nostalgias, protected by an individually service­

able technology, and traveling at speed through the ruins our evacuation has made of Detroit.

JERRY HERRON

42

CAN HOFFMAN

the best the world has to offer

If Detroit is to be called "The Capital of the Twentieth Century," 1 it is not because of its archi­

tecture, monuments, or great cultural achievements. Detroit is the Capital because of its singular

devotion to the idea of industrial production, investing all of its resources into a technology and

product that has transformed the face of every modern city. In the process, Detroit

1. Following Jerry Herron, "Three Meditations on the has allowed itself to be reinvented time and again; recasting its space, culture, and

architecture in the form of the latest production idea. Ruins of Detroit," in this collection.

The "Capital of the Twentieth Century" is not a place but a product; a new style,

a new mode of production, "a better idea." This idea is confirmed in common speech when we refer

to the American automobile industry as "Detroit." Nowhere else do we find a city so completely

dedicated to a single industry and the obsessions of modern technology. Detroit defines itself

through its pursuit of material perfections, and by forgetting the past in order to make way for

technologies that promise greater accuracy and production efficiencies. Perfection is not a spiritual

thing in the Capital. It comes rolling off the line every other second in the form of a new car. Ideas

like the flatness of a plane or the straightness of a line are now considered as practical concerns

rather than spiritual pursuits, organizing industry and science in a never-ending trajectory of

progress and growth.

Practical ideas are the currency of the Capital (Ford has a better idea). They produce their

own economy, re-inscribe space, and transform the city: practical ideas such as the division of

labor, the assembly line, the horizontal factory, yearly model changes, and the "team" model of

design and production. Practical ideas are always simple. They offer a way forward in situations

that are otherwise complex and difficult. The problem is that new ideas produce new complexities.

New conditions that the Capital would rather overlook than confront.

Bob Lutz, while a senior vice-president with Chrysler Corporation, described his firm's

new "team" approach to design in a videotaped interview. 2 In this interview, Lutz described

2. Bob Lutz, interviewed in The Automobile Story (Prin-how a diverse group representing the many aspects of a new car's realization could

design a single part of a car simultaneously. These aspects included basic engineering,

design, marketing, fabrication sub-contractors, cost accounting, and a limitless array ceton, N.J.: Films for the Humanities and Sciences,

1992).

of attendant specialties. He went on to describe how a corporation could be organized around this idea, and consider issues as complex as contractual relationships with suppliers as

well as new procedures to be implemented on the assembly line. The range of applications was

43

enormous and this was precisely Lutz' point: the simpler the idea, the greater its effect. Ultimately, however, there is another side to the excitement that comes with a new idea. This is the shadow of obsolescence that it casts upon the remainder of the city. With every new idea comes the realiza­

tion that a part of the city is now obsolete. Bob Lutz was fully aware of this when he used the

General Motors Headquarters Building in Detroit as an example of the obsolete, linear model of development and production. The old model divided the corporation into separate divisions that

communicated through slow and formalized channels. The three parts of the building represented

the three primary divisions: sales, engineering, and design. With this passing reference, Bob Lutz

relegated this great building to the shadow of history, and denied the efficacy of its presence in

the city. A new idea has great power in the Capital and architecture is always one of the first

casualties. The edge of technology is always happening somewhere out of sight, and beyond the

horizon of the city. It emits signals through casual remarks, subtle advertising campaigns, and stock prices. The General Motors Headquarters is still standing but the psychic locus of the city

has now been shifted.

The faith in new ideas erases the past and eliminates the function of monuments. Think of a

capital without monuments and the collective act of mourning that they evoke. The great capitals

of the nineteenth century are full of them, constantly reminding their citizens of the formative

events in their nation's history and how they are all bound to a common culture. Monuments

stand alone as stable points against the flux of the present, and inspire civic virtues through the

remembrance of the ancestor's sacrifice. According to convention, these virtues rule over civic

life and are the foundation for the patriarchic nature of the nation-state.

However, despite its many imposing structures ornamented with the trappings of civic life,

there are no monuments in the "Capital of the Twentieth Century." Things move too quickly.

Survival is more a matter of forgetting than remembering. Rather than guided by images of the

past, the citizens of the Capital invest their beliefs in the images that promise a stake in the

new. There is no future in the past. Here the complexities of the moment are presented within an

image of desire, and are delivered in the form of media advertising. A recent billboard, installed

along one of the major freeways in the Capital, shows an image of the new Ford Explorer set in

an Arcadian landscape of waterfalls and lush trees. Across the bottom of the image is the phrase

"The Best the World Has to Offer." This image functions on many levels. The "best" the world has

to offer is somewhere beyond the horizon, and the endless entropic sprawl of the Capital. This

place can be reached only by purchasing the other half of what the world has to offer, in this case,

the world of consumption and international techno-capital. Nature and technology are combined

in a transporting picture of delight. The subtext to the image carries the message that the way

forward is the way out. Technology provides a perfected nature, an idealized, and transcendent

aesthetic. The city is simultaneously as unattainable and as close as this late model car.

Advertising succeeds to the degree that it denies the context within which it is placed. The

paradoxical location of advertisements amidst the ruins of the Capital would certainly confirm

this equation. However, there is something more to this image. The pairing of absolute nature

and technology carries with it a difficult truth that we are just now beginning to comprehend.

The fact that the car is placed at the edge of the world shows that the Capital is now staking

claim to the edge of the planet, and also, the horizon of development has come full circle upon

itself and is calling for a more ecological vision. Perhaps the car is about to be mistaken for an

image of nature itself.

As markers, these images are helpful to the citizens, offering ways in which they can direct

their lives in the flux of an ever-changing economy. Advertising encourages the reconciliation

of one's personal desires with the demands of the new idea that is transforming the landscape.

44

These ideas cannot be stopped because they hold the promise of a new life for industry in the form

of greater profits and more growth. The Capital must continue to expand since growth is now

in the interest of all of its citizens. Images help the citizens reconcile this trajectory, they give it

a form, and they offer space.

This growth makes the Capital difficult to pin down. Things are always moving, they are

a blur or a smudge on the map. In the end, it is all movement; the stable reference point was lost

long ago. The images are what we remember, and the images are what we desire. They are the

currency, and the moving reference for this capital on the verge of dreams.

The first of these ideas was the moving assembly line itself, which encapsulates the idea of a

moving reference. Historians place the invention of the moving assembly line in Cincinnati, where

pig carcasses were first moved on hooks through various stages of slaughtering and carving. 3 But

3. Siegfried Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1948), 216.

its application to the assembly of automobiles brings the process to its true conceptual

clarity: moving vehicles produced on a moving assembly line.

The strength of this idea was too powerful to be limited to an industrial process.

Here the dynamism of a relational function is applied in practice: a moving machine

produces a machine that moves. The complexity of movement within the body of a worker is

externalized into a complex array of devices that can sustain that movement at a constant speed.

The static reference of space is now supplanted by the temporal reference of motion. Motion is

now the constant. This idea spawns other ideas and sets in motion a new economy and 4. On the application ofTaylorism to Fordist production in image. An older idea, the division of labor, is applied with a ruthless precision as every

Detroit, see Patrik Schumacher and Christian Rogner,

"After Ford," in this collection. For a general in troduc· stage in the assembly process is organized around the logic of the moving line. The tion toTaylorism and Taylor's principles of scientific line is divided into an infinite number of serialized and individually optimized motions. management, see Robert Kanigel, The One Best Way:

Frederick Winslow Taylor and the Enigma of Efficiency This is Taylorism: the analysis of human motion according to principles of efficient

(New York: Penguin Books, 1997). management.4 The body becomes a component of the machine.

The force of this reduction was a difficult, albeit thrilling, adjustment; and a

great discipline was required to sustain the mechanism. Architecture, until that time, had been

the very symbol of a static, spatial reference. It was called upon to lend balance to this newly

unhinged world. The balance took the form of an explicit, spatial ordering, which served to prepare

the population for the strict precision and hierarchy of the production system. It achieved this by

recalling the virtues of civic duty and propriety, and by giving shape to an important web of

civic institutions such as museums, churches, monuments, and schools. Virtue became a prag­

matic thing, a question of efficiency rather than ethics. Advertising itself played a secondary

role to the projection of civic duty, which,

because of the local nature of the economy

at the time, all businesses actively sup­

ported. One might say that a company's

building was its best form of advertising; it

declared a place in the community through

the fact of its physical presence. One has

a sense of this in the old part of the

city where ordered facades punctuated by

monumental, civic institutions, such as

churches and museums, shape the streets.

Even the Highland Park Model T factory

assumed a civic air, its concrete frame

rendered in the stately air of a one-half

mile long brick and limestone facade.

fig

45

Order produced order. Straight lines produced more straight lines in a seemingly endless expendi­

ture of energy. Building itself was rendered as production, and the crafts of the previous age existed as mass-produced emblems of virtue whose mechanical repetition on facades it both

celebrated and depleted.

Order was power. The order of vertical process shaped both the vertical office and the

(then still vertical) assembly lines. This spatial and operational symmetry was not coincidental,

nor was its extension into the organization of the city or the maintenance of social order. This

socially legible and enforceable order was a necessary aspect of the massing of labor in sufficient

quantities for industrial production. Raw material was delivered to the top of a multi-storied

factory and distributed to the stations along the assembly line by the force of gravity. Another

new idea: order flows from top to bottom. These vertical factories mark the first widespread use

of another top-down method of material distribution: the concrete frame. Ideas travel fast, pulling

along a train of massive industries and their cities.

At this early stage, civic duty was characterized by strict codes of behavior. The division of

labor had not yet worked itself into the division of Lhe psyche, splitting the public from the private

realm, splitting the outer and inner aspects of being. (This was to evolve in the latter history of the

Capital.) At this point in the Capital's history the manner of appearing in public was determined

by codes of behavior actively shaped by the civic institutions. These codes not only addressed the

outward manifestations of style but also were involved in educating the citizens in the disciplines

of writing and geometry, as these forms of order still had to be born by the individual worker.

Machines had not yet learned to run themselves and the line demanded thorough grounding in

geometric and mechanical principles. Precision was still a matter of touch, as evidenced by the

Model T cast iron chassis components and the complex hammered metal adornments on buildings.

All of these were formed by the disciplined precision of hand and eye.

Order was manifest at this time. It was a matter of civic responsibility and pride. The

production economy flowed out of the repetitive efficiencies that such an order brought. The fact

that Ford wanted all of his cars to be black was not simply an aesthetic decision but rather a

statement about the nature of the production economy. Value was to be found in the modes of

production itself, in its repetition, and strict adherence to economic principles. Order begets order,

the acceleration and growth of which is profit.

The myth claims that over time the other car companies took advantage of Ford's rather

stiff approach to production and profited at his expense by offering the new consumer a wide

variety of colors and styles. Like all myths, it contains an historic development in the culture of the city, which also contains a new idea, image and economy. The fact was that the vertical system

of production was approaching its limit. The concrete factories were proving to be too inflexible for

the increasingly frequent changeovers due to new style and model offerings. One could have only

so many holes in the concrete floor slab in order to distribute the parts to the assembly line. The

new idea was to put the entire line on one level and to deliver the parts to it with the use of motorized vehicles. Albert Kahn designed the first such factory for Ford, using 5. Frederico Bucci, Albert Kahn, (New York: Princeton

an integrated structural and saw-tooth skylight frame permitting the easy addition Architecture Press, 1993).

of space in the horizontal dimension. 5

The flexible expansion of the factory was paralleled by the expansion of the paved road

system throughout the city. A new concept of urban transportation was born, one that was free

of the hierarchy of avenues and streets. Houses and factories could be placed anywhere on the

grid. The city was soon filled and, for a short period, it experienced the

he appropriate expression he Fordist corporate

reaucracy. Albert Kahn, neral Motors Headquarters,

·troit, 1917-1921.

delirium of density. Tall towers were constructed in the downtown area

and neighborhoods were built alongside the edges of factories. The Capital

grew at an unprecedented rate. The model of production through interchangeable parts was

taken as a model for the management of production itself, articulating discrete functions for sales,

engineering, and design. These components articulated the built diagram of the aforementioned

General Motors Headquarters. The view from the top extended to the horizon, which offered the

image of an abundant nature.

Images have always played an important role in the city. They fuse irreconcilable forces so

that they may be used to promote and accommodate the latest ideas. The image of the horizon as

nature portrays something immense and sublime. The horizontal expanse now extends into the

far distance: an industry for the world, an industry that consumes the world. Nature comes to

be understood as a resource for production and production is understood as a natural process.

The paintings of Charles Scheeler illustrate this. Those great works that fuse the traditions of

still life and landscape, so still and yet so filled with activity. As beautiful and precise as they

are, they are haunting images that give the feeling of something violated. The large piles of black

coal unloaded from the steamer at the Rouge Iron Works have been scraped up from some other

time. They are charred pieces of the sun that will transform nature once again. Ford conceived the Rouge Plant as a single, organic process. From the raw material to the

finished product, the vision was all-inclusive.

There is also, at this time, the question of human nature. For now,

the place of civic duty becomes the place of civic strife. The mass of urban­

ized workers demand more time. Time is money. The solution is no longer

found in the evocation of civic duty and the construction of spaces of pro­

priety, but in the negotiation of competing interests. The image of the GM

building arises again. It too is an image of conflict. Vertical structures

crack under strain. Centralization reaches its physical limits: mass society,

mass culture, and human being as a collective entity. Maps are drawn

of populations and resources; they all become the same thing. The only

solution is to expand outward, the horizontal solution. The purchase of a

car is the purchase of space, a personal horizon. Now you can control the

earth that moves beneath your feet. The movement of the assembly

line is personalized, and the division of labor into parts begins to enter

into the psyche. Personal life is separated from civic life. The space of the

car is an escape into this personal realm, and we all know what happens

inside. But now the inside becomes the outside: a smooth shell, an organ

of speed. Speed smoothes the differences, and transforms the landscape

into a compressed projected line whose absolute limit is the horizon. The

pain of duty is now balanced by the thrill of escape velocity. A new danger

emerges: weapons of speed in the hands of workers. Where are the limits?

Where are the controls? Density remains a problem. The automobile begins

to claim its own space.

The Second World War offers a small break in the action. Detroit

wins the war; there is not a big difference between a car and a tank.

It won because it out-produced them all. The "Capital of the Twentieth

Century." The big difference comes in the pay back: the solution to the

problem of density. Here is the idea: build roads instead of cities, and

impose a national speed limit. It could not happen at a better time since

the nuclear threat makes density dangerous: the strong image of a city in

flames. Again the image resolves by combining opposing tendencies. Self-

47

defense is equated with self-interest. One can say that the bomb did its work without exploding. Through modern nuclear planning, the city escapes from itself over the horizon. But maybe the

real danger was from inside. There were race riots in the city during the war, and walls were erected between neighborhoods. The pressure was mounting.

Turning towards the end of the century, the horizontal factory has been transformed into

a network of roads extending over the horizon. Production has now been decentralized into a national network that responds to ever changing tastes. Density and flexibility are no longer

problems and automation is now making the worker a secondary player. The big problem, however,

is to maintain consumption at the same rate as production. Because of continual technological advances, new ideas are always increasing production.

Another idea emerges: the fabrication of desire. This is now possible due to the fact that the hierarchic structures of space are no longer in place. A network of media, criss-crossing the city

without leaving a mark, has replaced them. The division of labor has final1y wrestled the psyche

from its civic or public obligation releasing a flood of narcissistic energies over the landscape. The overt structures of domination have been transformed into a net of psychological relations. The

image is now the currency, the flow, and the energy, which transforms production into a second­

ary activity while the tangibility of things is always suggested. Images constitute the fabric that

holds the city together. Indeed there is an economy of images ranging from the vernacular marks made by those who dwell in the absence of the power stream, marks on walls, erasures, inspired

inscriptions, declarations of faith, and stains upon forgotten spaces. As economic power increases the design of the image becomes more deliberate, more planned, and the sign emerges from the

index towards the abstraction of the symbol. The touch of the hand is lost as we ascend through

the economy. Spontaneity becomes a fabrication, sensuousness the result of technique. Images mark the idea of the place though they themselves are placeless. We see them from

the highway: the large billboards, the Goodyear sign that registers the yearly domestic automobile production, the image of number, always changing, a remnant from the age of production. The

twin billboards at Woodward and Eight Mile Road are the gateway to the suburbs, and the landscape of narcissistic pleasures. The general tire sign at the bend ofi-75 displayed the news

and weather and recorded the temperature of the city amidst the blackened shells of houses.

There is another problem, the Capital is becoming weary of its many transformations. There have simply been too many. There is not enough energy in the system to clean away the debris left from the previous cycles. The forces of entropy cannot be exceeded by the illusion of images. We now seem to be moving just to stay in the same place. A new idea is needed.

DAN HOFFMAN

fig 2. The mechanical order of labor. Ford's assembly line at Highland Park. Promotional postcard, circa 1923.

fig 3· The seriality of both process and product. Ford's production plant at Highland Park. Promotional postcard, circa 1923.

fig 4. The overall configuration of the Fordist factory is composed along principles of differentiation and repetition. Ford compound at Highland Park, promotional postcard, circa 1923.

47

defense is equated with self-interest. One can say that the bomb did its work without exploding. Through modern nuclear planning, the city escapes from itself over the horizon. But maybe the

real danger was from inside. There were race riots in the city during the war, and walls were

erected between neighborhoods. The pressure was mounting.

Turning towards the end of the century, the horizontal factory has been transformed into

a network of roads extending over the horizon. Production has now been decentralized into a

national network that responds to ever changing tastes. Density and flexibility are no longer

problems and automation is now making the worker a secondary player. The big problem, however,

is to maintain consumption at the same rate as production. Because of continual technological

advances, new ideas are always increasing production.

Another idea emerges: the fabrication of desire. This is now possible due to the fact that the

hierarchic structures of space are no longer in place. A network of media, criss-crossing the city

without leaving a mark, has replaced them. The division of labor has finally wrestled the psyche

from its civic or public obligation releasing a flood of narcissistic energies over the landscape. The

overt structures of domination have been transformed into a net of psychological relations. The

image is now the currency, the flow, and the energy, which transforms production into a second­

ary activity while the tangibility of things is always suggested. Images constitute the fabric that

holds the city together. Indeed there is an economy of images ranging from the vernacular marks

made by those who dwell in the absence of the power stream, marks on walls, erasures, inspired

inscriptions, declarations of faith, and stains upon forgotten spaces. As economic power increases

the design of the image becomes more deliberate, more planned, and the sign emerges from the

index towards the abstraction of the symbol. The touch of the hand is lost as we ascend through

the economy. Spontaneity becomes a fabrication, sensuousness the result of technique.

Images mark the idea of the place though they themselves are placeless. We see them from

the highway: the large billboards, the Goodyear sign that registers the yearly domestic automobile

production, the image of number, always changing, a remnant from the age of production. The

twin billboards at Woodward and Eight Mile Road are the gateway to the suburbs, and the

landscape of narcissistic pleasures. The general tire sign at the bend ofl-75 displayed the news

and weather and recorded the temperature of the city amidst the blackened shells of houses.

There is another problem, the Capital is becoming weary of its many transformations. There

have simply been too many. There is not enough energy in the system to clean away the debris

left from the previous cycles. The forces of entropy cannot be exceeded by the illusion of images.

We now seem to be moving just to stay in the same place. A new idea is needed.

DAN HOFFMAN

fig 2. The mechanical order of labor. Ford's assembly line at Highland Park. Promotional postcard, circa 1923.

fig 3. The seriality of both process and product. Ford's production plant at Highland Park. Promotional postcard, circa 1923.

fig 4· The overall configuration of the Fordist factory is composed along principles of differentiation and repetition. Ford compound at Highland Park, promotional postcard, circa 1923.

PATRIK SCHUMACHER AND CHRISTIAN ROGNER

after Ford

1. Charles Jencks, 'l'he Languauc of Post-Modern Archi­

t.ecture (London: 1977).

2. Post-Ford ism as a category of socio-economic pcrio-

dization is of Marxist provenance a n d has been the

central term of a wide and fruitful debate. Sec David

Harvey, The Condition of Postmod<"mily <Oxford:

1989), and Post·Fordism: A il<"odc••; eel. Ash A min

(Oxford/Ca mbridge, Ma ss.: 1994).

The moment of Detroit's deepest crisis coincides with the "Death of Modern Architec­

ture" as announced by Charles Jencks in 1977.1 This is no coincidence. The emergence

of postmodern architecture and urbanism in the seventies, sweeping the market in the eighties, represents much more than a new aesthetic sensibility. The postmodern rejection of homogeneity, coherence, and completeness, and the explicit celebration of

heterogeneity mark a radical departure from fifty years of modernist development. The force behind these developments, rather than emerging from within the architec­

tural discipline itself, must be found on the socio-economic level. Postmodern cultural production

coincides with the historical crisis in the regime of mechanical mass-production, first developed by Ford in Detroit. 2

The historical closure of Ford ism as a model of socio-economic progress spelled the demise of Detroit, once the proud origin of modern industrial development. "Detroitism" had become a

globally emulated recipe for economic prosperity. Now Detroit stands devastated, overburdened

by the infrastructural, architectural, and human sediment of its Fordist past. Central parts of

Detroit are empty. Large buildings stand as ruins. Offices, schools, train stations, and vast urban territories have been abandoned. Urban planning proposals counter this drastic situation with equally drastic measures: the demolition of entire urban quarters and their conversion into parks.

Greenbelts are proposed to cut the vast, fragmented field into recognizable "communities", sealing

the ultimate fate of Detroit as a suburb of its own suburbs. Detroit's extended suburbs are alive

and well, forming a polycentric conurbation where typically post-Fordist service industries settle at a safe distance from inner city wastelands.

However, it would be wrong to assume that post-Fordism is the era of suburbia and Fordism

the era of the city. Suburbanization was the general rule of(mature) Fordist urbanization. Post­

Fordism breaks the universality of suburbanization. The new model of post-Fordist urbanism re­

3. "All the elem ents of the cultural past m u st be 'rein -

vested' or disappear." A sgcr Jorn, "Detour ned Paint-

ing", quoted in Guy D ebord, " Dctou rn erncnt as Ncga -

tion a n d Prelude," Internal ion ole Situalionnistc #3

(December 1959), tra n slated in : Silualionisl lntenw­

tionol Anthology, cd. K I na uiJ (Berkel ey: l981).

inhabited the historic city. Postmodern architecture found its market in the rediscovery

and "detournement" of the historical city, not merely as brandable commodity, but as a necessary communication hub for the new economy.3 Jane Jacobs rendered a critical

verdict on Detroit in 1961, at the height of its economic power:

I. l

Virtually all of Detroit is as weak on vitality and diversity as the Bronx. It is ring super­

imposed upon ring of failed gray belts. Even Detroit's downtown itself cannot produce

a respectable amount of diversity. It is dispirited and dull, and almost deserted by seven

o'clock of an evening.4

49

'1. Jane Jacobs, '/'he Death a .d Life of Great American

Citi<•.> (New York: Random Ho use, 1961).

Monotony and lack of diversity are the typical "ills" or "failures" of the modern city. To avoid Jacobs' ahistorical condemnation of the industrial city, one must grasp the economic rationality

underpinning its development. This includes the intentional rationality and social meaning of

urban monotony, zoning, and the various symptoms of industrialized urban arrangement. Over half a century of rationally planned coherent city building could not have been a "mistake". But what was progressive then has indeed become dysfunctional today. The new socio-economic logic of post-Fordism offers a reading of the current prospects of Detroit and other cities caught in

the dynamic of global economic restructuring. Any understanding of Detroit must begin with the

socio-economic logic of Ford ism and its urban implications.

Fordism as a Technical and Spatial System

Detroit served as a visible model of Fordist industrial development during the first half of the twentieth century. As an economic monoculture it mirrored the prosperity, growth, and decline of the automobile industry. Detroit offers a paradigmatic case study of Fordism as an

organizational model of urbanization, and for the collusion between industry and archi- ;, . Frederico Bucci, illl"'rt t(, hn (New York: Princeton

tecture, as personified by the collaboration between Henry Ford and Albert Kahn. 5 Architecture Press, l99:J).

One might speak of three phases of the Fordist revolution:

Phase 1: Taylorization takes Command. Automobile manufacturing in the pioneering days was organized around the work of autonomous artisan engineers. To increase the speed and scale

of production, Ford applied Taylor's principles of scientific management. Work became scientific: observable, controllable, and modifiable. Individual laborer's tasks were recorded, analyzed, and

broken down into elementary movements. Efficiency was optimized by the reconfiguration of tasks within time and space according to the dialectic of differentiation and repetition. Within this concept of order the flow of production over time was the controlling parameter. Albert Kahn provided the required architecture and spatial organization. The Kahn System of Reinforced Concrete enabled wide spaces offering freedom of movement and flexibility for functional adap­

tation to various production lines. Ford's Highland Park plant (1909) offered large expanses of clear space allowing the unconstrained organization of various production

cycles, each on its own floor. Discrete processes were stacked vertically, joined via floor openings, and fed by a flow of material from top to bottom. This vertical organization

enabled the production of the first complex assembly-line product: Ford's Model T.6

Phase 2: The factory under one roof is superceded. The assembly line concept was applied to an overall urban complex. Several single story buildings were joined

6. Hen ry F'ord, "Mass Productjon," in EncyclopecUa Bd· tannica, voi.J5 0929), 40, cited in Federico Bucci,

Al bert. Kahn (New York: rinceton A rchitecture Press,

1993), 12. For A l bert Kahn's description of the division

of labor in architectural production see A. Kahn,

"Archit.cciura\Trcnd", in ou.rnal of the Maryland

ilmdcmy of 8cience8, vol. ll, no. 2 (April 1931), 133,

cited in Federico Bucci, i\ bert Kahn (New York: Prine·

eton Architecture Press, 1993), 126'7.

together, each accommodating a specific task, and extruded to the length desired. Entire build­

ings acted as elements of multi-building assembly lines. At the River Rouge plant (begun 1917)

the flow of materials and sub-components determined the overall "urban" layout as an integrated machine. This was literally the "city as machine" later proclaimed by Le Corbusier and other

ideologues of modernist urbanism.

8

52

receptacle for a series of universal mass consumer goods: living room, dining set, (Frankfurt-) kitchen,

bathroom, washing machine, and later the refrigera­tor, television, and automobile. The new paradigm of

Functionalism implied an objectification and analysis

of the design process and architectural composition was assimilated to the principles of Fordist organi­

zation: decomposition, differentiation, repetition, and integration.

This logic was already evident in the organiza­tion of separate functions into specialized and sepa­

rately optimized volumes in Albert Kahn's General

Motors Headquarters Building (1917-1921). Walter

Gropius's Dessau Bauhaus (1926) was paradigmatic

of modernist work in this respect with residential, administrative, and workshop functions sepa­rately articulated, allowing for depth, height, and facade to be independently determined for each

respective function. The same principles were at work in canonical conceptions of the modernist

city. Le Corbusier's Ville Radieuse (1933) is among the most comprehensive and rigorous exposi­tions of Fordist logics of differentiation (zoning and distinct functionalist articulation of each

zone), repetition (homogeneity of each zone), and hierarchical integration (transport system)

applied to the city. Lafayette Park (1955) by Mies, Hilberseimer, and Caldwell offers the most legible post-war example of these principles of modernist planning applied to the renovation of

Detroit. Hilberseimer's publication of The New Regional Pattern (1949) rendered these same Fordist principles of decentralization and differentiation by intertwining transportation, commu­nication, and production infrastructures across the natural environment of North America.

From Fordism to Post-Fordism

In the late 1960's, the Fordist system of universal mass production, corporate concentration, collective bargaining, and state-regulation was challenged on all fronts. The first serious break in the post-war boom occurred with the recession of 1966-1967. The political struggles of 1968,

the oil-crisis of 1973, the breakdown of the international exchange-rate system, and a

10. See UNIDO (United Nati ons Industrial Oeuclopmenl deepening of the recession in 1974 followed. The automobile industry was in free-fall,

and Detroit, site of the oldest and least competitive plants, was hit hardest. By the

end of the 1970's it was clear that the recession had become a structural (systemic) crisis that called for new political and economic strategies.10

Organization), Sr.ru.cl.u.ral Change in Industry (Vienna:

1979), and OECD (Orga n ization of E:conomic Co·OiJCra-

tion a nd D evelopment), Positt:ue Adjustment Policie.<>:

Managing Stru.ctu.ral Change (Pa•·is: 1983).

9

53

The origins of the crisis in Ford ism and an outline of emergent post-Fordist tendencies can be found in several concurrent socio-economic transformations. Among these are five key

conditions: shifting commodity markets, increasing electronic control of production, decreasing state regulation, increasingly global capital markets, and deteriorating labor relations.

1. Market Stratification: With the growing complexity of labor division and the prolifera­

tion of white-co11ar labor, salary stratification increased. Aff luence beyond the saturation of

the most basic needs meant that markets began to diversify, a11owing for status and identity

consumption to accelerate aesthetically motivated product-cycles. These developments placed a

reward on innovation and flexibility rather than simple cost reduction achieved through mass­market economies of scale. The house, as the main site of consumption, was itself drawn into

the logic of differential identity, status, and income. The Modernist housing standard ("Existen­

zminimum") became the very standard against which market differentiation was measured.

Postmodernist design, architecture, and urbanism catered to this demand and reconceived the "failed" modern city as a site for destination recreation and brandable post-urban tourism.

2. Flexible Production: New computer-based production technologies made possible

greater product diversity (small runs) without the enormous cost of handicraft production that had previously limited deviations from the standard. The crucial material factor was the micro­electronic revolution that offered greater productivity through desired economies of scope, rather

than scale. Flexible specialization became a technological possibility, and the subsequent fluid­

ity of production demanded the dissolution of static Fordist labor and management arrange­

ments.

3. Vanishing State-Regulation: As products and markets differentiated, economies of scale were recuperated through international expansion. The resultant international economic

interdependency had the effect of eroding the economic competence of the nation state, and its ability to smooth out disturbances in the business cycle. As markets globalized, the Jess economi­

cally feasible it became to protect national producers. With the increasing internationalization

of mobile capital, a withdrawal from Keynesian macro-economic regulation and a systematic

dismantling of the social welfare state became inevitable. This process continues to this day, and Detroit serves as one of the most thoroughly developed models of this tendency.

4. Globalization of Capital Markets: Globalization emerged as a new model of interna­

tional integration between production and consumption. Increasing volatility in capital markets resulted from speculation in "emerging" economies. Outsourced labor and offshore production optimized profits by driving down wages through international competition. Globaliza­

tion took the form of a re-emergence of inter-imperialist rivalries, militarism, enforced

austerity programs, the break up of national welfare programs, and a downward pres­

sure on labor-costs. The majority's standard of living, even in the most advanced econo-

11. Overall productivity suffe s as long as the world alloca-

tion of material and labor resources remains driven

by an irrational, militarily guaranteed, and thus ulti-

mately very costly "cheapness" of labor, which allows

the squandering of millions of potentially much more

fig 8. The modern design principles of de-composition, spatial specialization, and serial repetition. Walter Gropius, Bauhaus Dessau, Germany, 1926.

fig g. Organizational Principles of Differentiation and Repetition applied to the city. Le Corbusier, La Ville Radieuse, Zoning Diagram, 1933.

mies, stagnated or declined while class disparity increased.11 productive lives.

5. Exploding Labor Relations: The increasing volatility of glo­

bal markets and the abdication of state responsibility eroded collective bargaining. Capital-labor compromises and state sanctioned collective bargaining agreements were displaced in favor of "free market" neo­

liberalism (Reaganomics and Thatcherism). Downsizing and outsourcing

12. See among others:

54

labor became the norm, replacing regular employment with increasingly flexible arrangements.

This in turn made markets even more unpredictable. Employment contracts became shorter. Mobility increased. "Casual labor" and "self-employment" replaced regular employment.

Patterns of Post-Fordist Production

The historical crisis in Fordist production forced a reorganization of corporate structures as they

faced a new pace of change and the increasingly global competition for markets. The ongoing

organizational revolution tends to render corporate organization non-hierarchical and replaces

command and control mechanisms with participatory and open structures; although, the drive

of corporate restructuring towards discursive cooperation remains compromised by the systemic

barrier of capitalism that hinges authority upon property rather than discourse. The thrust of

development tears and shakes the corporate edifice of Fordism.

The "architecture" of business organization is liquefying. Fordist strategies of rationaliza­

tion and hierarchy are giving way in favor of post-modern production patterns. These patterns

of arrangement ref lect not only a response to the economic and material conditions of produc­

tion, but also portend an equally important transformation in the structure and organization

of corporate space itself. Fordist principles of corporate organization were generalized from their origin

T. Cannon, WelcOme t.o th • Urvulution: 1\1aiiOI-fi"J..! f.Jara­

dox in the 21st Cen/.u.ry (London: 1996);

in industrial production to the organization of the service sector and ultimately served

as a model of state administration. The whole of society was eventually subsumed

within this rigid pattern of hierarchical organization. Everywhere a comprehensive,

bureaucratic, functional hierarchy allocated rigid job-descriptions and repetitive tasks within coherent chains of command. The modernist pattern of urbanization is the

projection of this total social machine into space.

M. Ray and A. Rinzler, The New 1-'aradiJ,!m for /Jusint• . .:;s

(L.A.: 1993);

T. Peters, Liberat.1:on Ma.rw;.JI!IIII!IIf: Necessary Oisvr­

ganisation for Nanosecon Nineties (N.Y.: 199:1);

'1'. Peters, Thriving on Chaos (N.Y.: 1987);

W. Bergquist, 'J'he Postm.odern OrJ..!anizatiun: Master­

ing the Art of irreversible Chanue (New York: 1993);

M. Kilduff, "Deconstructing Organisations," !lcadt·my

of Management Reuiew # 8;

K. Blanchard, and S. Johnson, '/'he One Mi1111l<' Man·

a.ger (New York: 1982);

J. L. B ower, "Disruptive Technol ogies: Catching the

Wave ," J-Jarva.rd IJu.siness Review (Jan/ Feb J995).

13. M. Cas tells & P. Hall, Tech11opo/es of /he World

(Landon/N.Y.: 1994).

With the failure of stable cycles of reproduction and expansion, post-Fordist

production paradigms are increasingly organized around principles of decentraliza­

tion, horizontality, transparency, f luidity, and rapid mutability. Concurrently, the

organization and management of these post-Fordist processes and other forms of

social arrangement are increasingly based on a set of similar post-modern principles.12 The new tendencies evident in corporate restructuring can ultimately be summarized

as follows:

1. flattening of hierarchies into horizontal fields; 2. decentralization, devolution of authority and responsibility;

3. self-organization rather than bureaucratic task allocution;

4. collegial communication and evaluation rather than command and control;

5. dispersal and sharing of information and technologies; 6. team-work, informal or temporary alliances, loosely coupled networks;

7. hybrid conglomerates and ad-hoc assemblages replace integrated entities;

8. increasing reliance on outsourcing, temporary and self�employment;

9. mutability, mobility, and indetermjnacy as positive values;

10. processes analogous to ecological or biological systems.l3

These organizational tendencies are presently evolving in response to the challenge of

permanent innovation in production. One could expect (and can find emergent in contemporary

Model The Rigid Bureaucracy Model The Project Organization

work) an analogous set of developments in the cultural sphere including the

spatialization of these ideas in the making of architecture and urbanism. The possibilities for post-Fordist urbanism are among the many interesting

questions raised by Detroit in general and this anthology in particular.

Post- Urbanism

As for developments in the spatialization of post-Fordist principles, the

work of the so-called "L.A. School" cultural geographers, and Ed Soja in

particular, offers an extensive analysis of the coming posl-Fordist urban­

ism. Soja's exploration of postmodern urbanization focuses on the metro­

politan region of Los Angeles. In as much as L.A. is one of the world's

leading "superprofitable growth poles," it allows us to identify the future of

post-Fordist urbanization. L.A., in this regard, plays the role Detroit once occupied as the "most thoroughly modern (Fordist) city in the world."

Soja's analysis of L.A. suggests that contemporary post-Fordist pat­

terns of urbanization function as a "mesocosm" that reproduces within its

own spatiality the complexity and contradictions of the global economy:

•

•

Seemingly paradoxical but functionally interdependent juxtapositions are the epitomiz­

ing features ... -One can find in Los Ang eles not only the hig h technology industrial

complexes of the Silicon Valley and the erratic sun belt economy of Houston, but also

the far-reaching industrial decline and bankrupt urban neig hborhoods of rust-belted

Detroit or Cleveland. There is a Boston in Los Angeles, a lower Manhattan and a South

Bronx, a Sao Paulo and a Singapore.14

The simultaneity of growth and decline, locating leading high tech industrial

Model The Matrix Organization 10

,. t •' t•.:��� I , \1 •• ·· � · . • .. \" .. );!;"''"

• • .. • ' • ' • !•MO ' •- .-.: l: ��'ii� I • • • ••

� . ., . :; :; ;� . ... •• • 11

14 . Edward W. Soja, l'oslmodern Geographies (London/

NY : 1989).

15. With this internal ization of the periphery comes the

largest homeless populati n, soaring rates of violent

crime and the largest prison population within the US.

The militarization or the world economy finds itself' rep­

l icated here in the rule of a militarized LAPD. The anti­

mcist explosion of 1.992 testi fies to this.

16. Edward W. Soja, Poslmoclern Geographies (London/

N.Y. : 1989), 212.

sectors next to abandoned industrial wastelands, and a growing low-wage economy of

industrial sweatshops, posits an uphill battle for social control and exacerbates the friction of

distance in the "spread city." 15 Soja's postmodern geography (spread city)

differs markedly from the process of post-war suburbanization. It is best

fig 10. Organizational Models, Gareth Morgan, Creative Organization Theory, 1989.

fig 11. Diagram study of "loosely coupled network," Patrik Schumacher, 1999.

described as "an amorphous regional complex that confounds traditional

definitions of both city and suburb." 16 This post-Fordist landscape inte-

grates a loose and open network of research, production, and service systems. Interspersed with

leisure environments are alternating expensive residential developments with enclaves of cheap labor. The interpenetration of different activities succeeds even despite the problems of social

control and the cost of policing caused by the proximity of populations increasingly polarized

along lines of class, race, and ethnicity.

Another marked spatial phenomenon has been superimposed on the polycentric spatiality

of the (L.A.) post-Fordist landscape that is also evident in Detroit: the decisive re-colonization of

corporate headquarters within the downtown core, reversing the trend of the Fordist era. This

revival of the central business district and selective gentrification of the inner city, including

recreational and pseudo-historic tourist events, caters to a largely suburban population. This

reflects the post-Fordist organizational shift in corporate structure along lines of contemporary

production and consumption patterns. The ongoing annexation of Detroit by its own suburbs

continues apace as suburban wealth simultaneously speculates on property values at both the

agricultural perimeter and abandoned industrial center of what remains one of the largest and

most prosperous metropolitan regions in the U.S.

Detroit's precipitous and public demise may have stepped over a kind of critical threshold

(a point of no return?) offering an unequivocal image of post-Fordist dis-investment. In this

sense, Detroit offers the most legible indictment of Fordist patterns of urbanization. The recent

(and by now regular) injections of recuperative capital evident in the Renaissance Center project,

new casinos, sports stadia, and other urban "cures," have failed to promote a revitalization of

17. See Jerry Herron , "Three Meditati ons on the Ruins of

Detroit's downtown. Some already find delight in the ruins, indulging in a voyeuristic

aestheticismY Others are determined to save the city through social missionary work.

Others hope to spin it, using media hype and political spin doctoring to influence Detroit" in this collection

property values through real-estate speculation. Will Detroit benefit from this new

form of development, and what are the possibilities for practicing urbanism in this context? Will

Detroit's already evident future come to pass as a destination tourist commodity and name

brandable recreation center engulfed by pockets of abandonment, disinvestment, and decay? If

so, even this unenviable future will need to overcome a century of rusty prejudices.

PATRIK SCHUMACHER AND C H RISTIAN RDGNER

Ill

What attitude, what "state of soul" will permit the architect or the urban designer to see, think, and

project the space of the contracting city? The philos­

opher, Richard Rorty, in the final essay of his book,

Achieving Our Country, titled "The Inspirational Value

of Great Works of Literature,''20 refers to a particular kind of thought currently prevalent in the teaching and

production of philosophy and literary criticism which he

denominates "knowingness." "Knowingness," he says

"is a state of soul which prevents shudders of awe."21 Knowingness departs from an analytical, a scientific

spirit that seeks understanding through explanation; it

arrives at judgment and critique, but devoid of hope

and futurity. Deprived of inspiration, of the imaginative

spirit, "knowingness" leaves behin?, , in Rorty's words,

"only professional competence and intellectual sophis­

tication."22

According to Rorty, the ability of a text, for exam­

ple, to produce "shudders of awe" is its inspirational value. Although, in his argument, he specifically refer­

ences the inspirational value of works of literature and

philosophy, we can extend this thought to the inspira­

tional value of a place, a situation, to what surrounds us, to the terrain vague. If we view these radicalized

spaces primarily as the products of a mechanism of

social, political, and economic forces, we may not see their inspirational value. "Knowingness" offers us

understanding and kr:10wledge, but not inspiration, hope, or vision. Extrapolating Rorty's thought again,

knowledge i_s about placing something "in a familiar

context - relating_ it to things already known."23 But

if so_mething is to have inspirational value, it "must be allowed to recontextualize much of what you previ­

ously-thought you knew; it cannot, at least at first, be

itself recontextualized by what you already believe."24

"Knowingness" has given us a necessary under­

standing of the mechanisms of the unfolding of moder­nity and post-modernity in our cities; it has theorized

the movement from an industrial to a post-industrial

landscape, from Ford ism to post-Fordism, from coloni­alism to post-colonialism. The terrain vague is being

quantified and objectified; the space of the contracting

city has been and continues to be explained; it is gradu­

ally-b�ing given a less alien or foreign aspect, one that

is more comprehensible, more reassuring. But in our

anxiety to contextualize it, to analyze, interpret and

assign meanings, we may obviate that potent moment

of observation; we may forget to pause and simply experience the immediacy of this reality we are so des­

perately trying to master, to appropriate. We may not

see it at all. And in the moment of our inattention,

these expectant voids will have been re-colonized and dressed with a recognizable identity, either hastily

returned to an unambiguous pre-urban "nature" or rea­

bsorbed into the latest productive cycles as strip malls,

suburban housing and large-scale projects such as sta­

dia and convention centers.

The terrain vague has inspirational value; it has the capacity to produce "shudders of awe,'' that strange

mingling of dread and wonder that can move our intel­

lect and our emotions, and can motivate and incite us. Its sheer magnitude, pervasiveness, and otherness

force us to recontextualize what we thought we knew.

It shatters pre-established categories for thought and

action. It disorients us. The terrain vague cannot be

fully integrated into our understanding. As an atypical

phenomenon, it cannot be easily explained by the situ­ation that gave rise to it. The terrain vague leaves a

vital gap in "knowingness" that can be activated. The

shock of otherness may permit us to create new ways

of thinking, seeing, and feeling for this yet unchartered

territory, to slip outside what is familiar and reassuring.

Inspiration begins in "wild, unreflective"25 fascination,

enthusiasm, and awe.

To think or project Detroit is a coming to terms, not with the angst and despair of congestion, velocity, and chaos imposed by the early 2oth century metro­

politan experience, but rather with the anxiety propiti­ated by the progressive silence and emptiness of this post-industrial metropolis at the turn of the millenium.

To speculate in and on the city today involves not only the awareness of a discordant and aleatory reality, but

also the determination of an horizon of attention capa­ble of provoking an (impossible) event, of creating a

visibility, within the indeterminacy of the terrain vague. 20 Richard Rorty, "The Inspirational

Value of Great Works of Literature," Achieving Our Country: Leftist

Thought in Twentieth-Century Amer­

ica (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univer­sity Press,1gg8), 125-140.

21 Ibid., 126. 22 Ibid., 132 .

23 Ibid., 133.

241bid., 133·

25 Ibid., 134.

26 5ola-Morales, 123.

{left) General plan and sections, and model: composite plan view.

{below) Photomontages of the landscape and vectors.

plane leans over the landscape, constructing its entire

length. The variegated glass surface: clear, opaque or

translucent; open or closed; textured or smooth, is

imprinted with reflections, perceptions, and orders of

the past, present, and future city. The vectors act as

virtual mirrors that cite the phenomena of a reality that

escapes our apprehension; they register a multitude of

pure sensations. They do not explain but rather expose

or bear witness to the erasure of the city. A suspended,

undulating path sits alongside the inclined plane: an

inhabitable trajectory traversing the amplitude of the

place. The restless path mirrors the movement of the

indentations and rises of the landscape beneath and

prompts transitive relations with the appearing and

disappearing city.

These two suspended gestures vaguely connect

speculative programs to existing ones and prompt or

insinuate new uses. The topographical event to the far

west end of the site doubles as a drive-in theatre. It

initiates the trajectory of the first vector that begins

as the projection screens for the drive-in and stretches

to the cultural anchor of the city, the Fox Theatre.

At the drive-in, the ground bends down from the exist-

8g

ing street; access off the highway is woven into this

sloped plane, repeatedly disrupted by surface undu­

lations. Light suggests shadows faintly on the faded,

compressed forms, dividing the slope visually into mul­

tiple outlines of upper and lower grounds, overlapping

pedestrian and vehicular zones. The land rises and falls

in elongated broken parallels until it reaches a point

of tangency with the trench incised in the longitudinal

axis of the site: a patch of nature; trees hovering at eye

level; a shadow or reflection of the path suspended at

some distance above.

At the edge of the depressed freeway, the second

vector passes by the Fox Theatre and stretches to the

far east end of the site, meeting the embankment

of the web of highway interchanges. It projects unin­

terrupted over the new and existing topography: an

encounter of disconnected points in space. The raised

pedestrian concourse meets the oblique plane of an

amphitheater: the spatial inverse and programmatic

double of the Fox Theatre. A volume of the continuous

voided three-dimensional space of the city is tenta­

tively captured within its translucent shell.

The perspectival crossing and convergence of the

Dislocation The first revision of the territories involves the voluntary relocation of those remaining resi-

Erasure

dents wishing to be relocated, the discontinuation of city services, the capping of utilities, and

the spatial demarcation or bounding of the newly constituted zones. This activity is accompanied by the

appropriate political and economic de-commissioning and divestiture and has the effect of altering the

status of the extant ground and building fabric. Once evacuated, these "Zones" effectively sever the arterial

connectivity between the remaining marginally viable portions of the city and ultimately hasten their own

entropic demise.

The second phase of the project concerns the erasure and scrubbing of the newly evacuated

Zones. The proposal authorizes and accelerates the ongoing arson of abandoned houses in

the city. The effective erasure of urban vestiges within the Zones are initiated through the sanctioning of

regularly scheduled large-scale burns as a continuation of Detroit's Devil's Night festivities. These burns are

complemented with the aggressive demolition of selective portions of the Zone, the release of captured

wildlife species, and the insertion of plant species that would effectively hasten the natural deterioration of

the city's building fabric as an effect of weathering.

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The third phase of the project proposes the ecological re-constitution of portions of the Zones through tree farming

and the inundation of the ground through selective flooding. The use of aerially deposited low-grade seed and the

manual insertion of fast-growing seedlings allows portions of the Zones to enter a period of lessened investment and maintenance.

These softwood tree farms can effectively be abandoned for generations and returned to at some future date as ex-urban resource

parks. The presence of the Detroit River, St. Lawrence Seaway, and Great Lakes systems allows for the selective introduction of flood

plane de-regulation and the partial inundation of certain Zones. Using the existing infrastructure for the collection, distribution,

and release of the region's abundant fresh water supply, regularly scheduled soakings are an effective long-term solution to the

contamination of the ground on many sites. These transformations of the urban ecology will have the effect of changing the status

and image of the city's remaining territories while materially enforcing the evacuation of the Zones.

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The final stage in the project speculates on the future re-appropriation of the de-commissioned Zones and their

annexation from agents and constituencies outside the city. These re-programming proposals make a virtue of

the Zone's abandonment, erasure, and relative vacancy by opportunistically occupying the physical residue of Detroit's ex-urban

landscapes. Not insignificantly, these activities are economically viable given ongoing market conditions. Those market conditions

continually present demand for opportunistic incursions by the population of the metropolitan region. The future annexation

of Detroit's zones will continue as open-ended responses to individual or collective demands placed on the landscape and its

infrastructure as ambient absences. Rather than master planning or scripting a particular material and spatial future for these zones,

Decamping Detroit speculates on the process of their decommissioning and the staging of their vacancy.

155

The sensation was very strange. There were hardly any people in the streets, and when someone passed by,

it seemed the landscape became even stranger. Once in a while, I stopped the car to take some photos. I walked

a bit, but not too far, not for fear of anyone, I actually wanted to find some people, but for fear of becoming a

part of those scenes.

I kept driving. I understood what made those scenes so strange was that their reality was very close in time.

These were not ancient ruins. They were contemporary ones, perhaps ruins of the future. This is what made them

impossible and unreal. Suddenly, in the midst of that urban ruin, there appeared bubbles of civilization, floating

happily and completely foreign to all that surrounded them. They did not burst when I passed through their skin.

I realized then the people in that city went from bubble to bubble without worrying about the vacant spaces

between. I thought this space between must be purposeful so that the bubbles, not having direct contact with one

another, would not explode. I kept on driving, entering and leaving the bubbles and crossing the vacant spaces. The

city seems even more impossible when it actually exists and you are there.

I tried to find some logic to be able to foresee what I would find next, but neither the size nor location of the

distinct bubbles was foreseeable. I came across that gigantic and heavy transparent building that had once been

a train station. I saw that strange vision of a former theatre turned parking garage (a species of drive-in theatre)

with cars parked at the level of the dilapidated orchestra pit. One time I stopped in a solitary place where the

sidewalks were completely invaded by vegetation. Returning to my car, I discovered an absurd sign prohibiting

parking located on a totally abandoned street. The sign indicated, with great precision, the months, days, hours,

and other circumstances oft he no parking zone. At the bottom of the sign, it read "no parking anytime during

emergencies." Maybe that was why no one was there. Maybe there was an emergency that I was unaware of.

Evening was approaching, so I decided to return to Chicago.

January 14, 2000, Chicago

There were many photographs on my table. I looked at them, sometimes all at once, sometimes more profoundly

at only one. I was trying to remember those days in Detroit when the photographers, Monica and Jordi, had just

arrived, and began shooting the first photographs, still insecure about how to carry out their work. I had been in

those enormously real scenes, but still, even contemplating the photos, they seemed a fiction. The more I looked,

the more impossible they seemed. I began to confuse reality and fiction as if in a dream. Furthermore, today

photographs no longer certify a reality. Rather they certify the possibilities of technique and the photographer's

creativity and imagination in allowing us to participate in other realities and in other ways to understand and see

things. Jordi and Monica's photographs are apparently quite different from one another, clearly distinct interpreta­

tions of the same reality. What makes them similar is, through different paths, they reach the same conclusions.

They both show us a fictional reality.

The objective, but at the same time, tendentious, presentation of reality in Jordi's photos, with their extreme

hyperrealist desire, makes them all the more unreal. In Monica's, because this reality is presented as an imaginary

dream, both anguished and calm, the scenes are transformed into even more unreal and impossible ones. I

remembered one of the cities Alan Lightman described in his book, Einstein's Dreams, in which there is no time, only

images, a city of memories and therefore a city that does not exist, and has disappeared, but, within its own logic,

continues to function. This city exists. It is a memory or an imagination. Photographs generally evoke memories, not

only memories of past histories, but also, and in this case, they acquire greater value. They provoke the imagination

of possible future histories, of urban deserts, uninhabitable and inhospitable space, but quite attractively open to

visitation because of this very impossible existence.

I kept looking at the photographs, remembering or maybe imagining the future of other cities. Maybe I was

dreaming. Despite all this, it seems Detroit exists. I think I r member I was there one day.

157

Ramon Prat, is a graphic designer and director of ACTAR, a publishing house based in Barcelona,

specializing in architecture, photography and design.

Joan Roig is a practicing architect based in Barcelona.

Chr istian Rogner, a practicing architect based in London, received his Diploma from the Technical

University in Munich. He joined the Design Research Lab at the Architectural Association in

1997 where he has contributed to research on the spatial articulation of contemporary corporate

organization.

Monica Rosello is a photographer based in Barcelona.

Marili Santos-Munne is a practicing architect based in Basel. She was Muschenheim Fellow and

Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan and has taught at the University of Illinois

at Chicago.

Patr ik Schumacher, co-director of the Design Research Laboratory at the Architectural Association

School of Architecture in London, has been visiting professor at Columbia University, Harvard

University, and the University of Illinois at Chicago. He has worked with Zaha Hadid in London

and has been Partner on various recent projects. He recently completed his doctoral thesis at the

University of Klagenfurt on the economic instrumentalization of art.

lgnasi de Sola-Morales was, at the time of his death, an internationally renowned architect educa­

tor, critic, and theorist.

Leslie van Duzer, Associate Professor of Architecture at Arizona State University, has authored two

books with Kent Kleinman: Villa Muller: A Work of Adolf Laos and Rudolf Arnheim: Revealing Vision.

They are currently working on their third, Notes on Almost Nothing: Mies van der Rohe's Haus Lange

and Haus Esters.

Xavier Vendrell, Professor of Architecture at the University of Illinois at Chicago, is a practicing

architect based in Chicago and Barcelona.

Charles Waldheim, Director of Graduate Studies in the School of Architecture at the University of

Illinois at Chicago, is a practicing architect based in Chicago. He is author of Constructed Ground and

editor of Landscape Urbanism: A Reference Manifesto. His research and teaching focus on landscape

as an element of contemporary urbanism. Waldheim was Sanders Fellow and Visiting Assistant

Professor at the University of Michigan, and has taught as a Visiting Critic at the University of

Pennsylvania and the KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm.

Jason Young, Assistant Professor of Architecture at the University of Michigan, is Principal of

the WETSU, a design+build studio in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He is Director of the Graduate Thesis

Option at the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning and researches conditions of

contemporary American urbanism. He is editor of Michigan Architecture Papers 7: Mack & Merrill.

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