Stalking Detroit by Orlando Hill

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.

attention. This activity required equal parts persistence and ambivalenc . It m nl'f obsessive, self-indulgent, yet ultimately indifferent interest in recording th

tIt

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

If,

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snap judgements. The Committee for Urban Thinking: Detroit was established in 1994 as research on the conditional nature of Detroit's urbanism. Since that time, th

v hi I

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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足 solving posture that pervades many established modes of urban inquiry. The Committ

'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足 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足 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揃 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

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 aggresÂ 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 relaÂ 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 gutsÂˇand 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.

No building construction permits were issued in Detroit in 1988, then the 7th largest city in the U.S.

Between 1978 and 1998 only 9000 building per足 mits were issued for new homes in Detroit, while over 108,ooo demolition permits were issued.

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

In 1998, 79% of the population in Detroit was African American.

In 1998, 78% of the population in the surrounding suburbs was White.

In 1998, the average income in the city was 47% of that in the surrounding suburbs.

In the 1990's, Detroit had the largest percentage of single-family homes in the U.S.

In the 1990's, the city lost 1% of its housing stock each year to arson.

In 1990, the city spent $25 million on the removal of abandoned houses and other structures.

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.

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Detroit downtown figure-ground diagrams, Richard Plum, "Detroit is Everywhere,"

Architecture Magazine, AprillggG, vol. 85, no. 4, pp. 55_61.

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足 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 suecess 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 a productive system of incessantly self-refining functionality in which nothing was original except the system itself. ...1

1. Terry Smith,

Mal1ing the

Design in America

Press, 1993),

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 f unctionality." 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

15.

adem.: industry, Art, and

(Chicago: University of Chicago

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

lost collective Other of history. The question is for whom and to what extent Sennett's

6.4 (I 987), 7.

For an introduction to Fordism and post-li'ordism in the context of Detroit, see Pa rik Schumache•· and Chris-

once-upon-a-time Other has been dispersed. An oppositional history was characteristic not only of the privileged subjects of

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

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

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

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

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

Melvin G Holli, ed. Detroi (New York: New Viewpoints,

Fredric Jameson, Postm.odernism or, the Cultural Logic

expressed but one thing, and that was delirium.5

1976), 134.

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.

opposition both to its own past and to those societies of the present that are premodern Dean MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Schockcn Books,

Ibid, 7.

1976), 7-8.

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 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

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

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

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.

Detroit, that most classically representative of cities, which proves attractive to great

1995>. 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 touristi

cally, "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 down town 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 translate into marketable souvenirs. These sights are offered for sale to the supposedly disauthenticated, post-modern populace for whom "the fading splendor of the buildings" and the "anguished cries of those who try to make a home among them" have alike

12· MacCanneJJ, 158-59· 13· Vergara, 33· 14. Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection

<Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press,

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

1993), 133.

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."

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

15. Vergara, 36.

work, many of them in conditions of enforced desperation. (Vergara's photographs,

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

offered as souvenirs from a theme park that will probably never be built, rarely include

New American City and the End of Public Space, ed. Michael Sorkin (New York: Hill and Wang, 1992), 231.

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 entertain足 ment. 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 post足 mortem) "urbanism without... a city."

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-

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路 Camilo Jose Vergara, "Visible City," Metropolis (April

Perhaps what is at stake is a native grasp of the danger implicit in his fantasy. All too

1995), 38.

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颅 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 F irst World War. S. S. K resge (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) Rackham 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. Rackham'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: Some have night-blooming grocery stores in their front yards. Some have boarded wi ndows. 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.

18. Russell McLaucblin,Aifred Street (Detroit: Conjure

But once, within a clear middle-aged

memory, Alfred Street was a lovely place.18

House, 1946), xi.

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足 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-

ing Class (NewYork : Random House, 1966).

20. RD. McKenzie, "Detroit's Substantial Families:

1900-1930," in Detroit, ed. Melvin G Rolli (NewYork:

New Viewpoints, 1976), 122-123.

modernity is no less invisible, except when it is in motion.19 Such mobility is what made 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 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"

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 farmboy 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: the Lodge/I-94 interchange north of the Wayne State University campus, and the

21. M. M. Quaife, This is Detroit, ed. William White

(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.

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, obv iously, 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 That is what the city did. Now, to presume

unprecedented in the long history of human societies.

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

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足 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足 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,

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

23. John Brinckerhoff Jackson, A Sense of Place, A Sense of

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

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

VliJ.

CAN HOFFMAN

the best the world has to offer If Detroit is to be called "The Capital of the Twentieth Century,"

it is not because of its archi足

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

Ruins of Detroit," in this collection.

architecture in the form of the latest production idea. 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.

In this interview, Lutz described

how a diverse group representing the many aspects of a new car's realization could 2.

Bob Lutz, interviewed in The Automobile Story (Princeton, N.J.: Films for the Humanities and Sciences, 1992).

design a single part of a car simultaneously. These aspects included basic engineering, design, marketing, fabrication sub-contractors, cost accounting, and a limitless array 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

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足 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.

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.

its application to the assembly of automobiles brings the process to its true conceptual Siegfried Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1948), 216.

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 Detroit, see Patrik Schumacher and Christian Rogner, "After Ford," in this collection. For a general in troducÂˇ tion toTaylorism andTaylor's principles of scientific management, see Robert Kan igel, The One Best Way: Frederick Winslow Taylor and the Enigma of Efficiency

(New York: Penguin Books, 1997).

image. An older idea, the division of labor, is applied with a ruthless precision as every stage in the assembly process is organized around the logic of the moving line. The line is divided into an infinite number of serialized and individually optimized motions. This is Taylorism: the analysis of human motion according to principles of efficient 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 pragÂ 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 supÂ 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.

Order produced order. Straight lines produced more straight lines in a seemingly endless expendi颅 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 an integrated structural and saw-tooth skylight frame permitting the easy addition

Frederico Bucci, Albert Kahn, (New York: Princeton 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 fig

delirium of density. Tall towers were constructed in the downtown area he appropriate expression he Fordist corporate reaucracy. Albert Kahn, neral Motors Headquarters, 路troit, 1917-1921.

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足 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足 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? W here 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-

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颅 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路 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.

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颅 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路 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

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

t.ecture (London: 1977).

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

Post-Fordism 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), a n d Post·Fordism: A il<"odc••; eel. Ash A m i n (Oxford/Ca mbridge, Ma ss. : 1994).

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 -

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

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

and "detournement" of the historical city, not merely as brandable commodity, but as

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

a necessary communication hub for the new economy.3 Jane Jacobs rendered a critical

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).

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

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

'1.

Jane Jacobs, '/'he Death a .d Life of Great American Citi<•.> (New York: Random Ho use, 1961).

imposed u pon 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

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-

;,.

tecture, as personified by the collaboration between Henry Ford and Albert Kahn. 5

t(, hn l99:J).

Frederico Bucci, illl"'rt Architecture Press,

(New York: Princeton

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

Hen ry F'ord, "Mass Product jon," in EncyclopecUa Bd· tannica, voi.J5 0929), 40, cited in Federico Bucci, A l 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,

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

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.

receptacle for a series of universal mass consumer goods: living room, dining set, (Frankfurt-) kitchen, bathroom, washing machine, and later the refrigera tor, 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 organiza tion 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 sepa rately 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 exposi tions 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, commu nication, 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 on s Industrial Oeuclopmenl

Organization), Sr.ru.cl.u.ral Change in

Indus try (Vienna:

1979), a n d OECD (Orga n ization of E:conomic Co·OiJCra tion a n d D evelopment), Positt:ue Adjustment Policie.<>:

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

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

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 f lexibility rather than simple cost reduction achieved through mass market 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 micro electronic 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 economies, stagnated or declined while class disparity increased.11 fig

The modern design principles

of de-composition, spatial specialization, and serial repetition. Walter Gropius, Bauhaus Dessau, Germany, 1926. fig

Organizational Principles of

Differentiation and Repetition applied to the city. Le Corbusier, La Ville Radieuse, Zoning Diagram, 1933.

11. Overall productivity suffe s as long as the world allocation of material and labor resources remains driven by an irrational, militarily guaranteed, and thus ultimately very costly "cheapness" of labor, which allows the squandering of millions of potentially much more 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

labor became the norm, replacing regular employment with increasingly f lexible 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

12. See among others: T. Cannon, WelcOme t.o th

•

Urvulution: 1\1aiiOI-fi"J..! f.Jara

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).

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

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

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. 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 Matrix Organization

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- U rbanism 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

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

•' .

• •

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

•

� .

•

t•.:�� , \1

••

' • ' • !•M O '

• •• •• •

.. \"..);!;"''"

: l �� 'ii � I

•- .-.

•

:;:; ;� . . ..

·· � ·

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 j uxtapositions are the epitomiz ing features... - One can find in Los Ang eles not only the hig h technology industrial compl exes of the Silicon Valley and the erratic sun belt economy of Houston, but also

14 . Edward W. Soja,

l'oslmodern Geographies (London/

NY : 1989).

15. With this internal ization o f the periphery comes the largest homeless populati n, soaring rates o f violent

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

crime and the largest prison population within the US.

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

The militarization or the world economy finds itself' rep

Bronx, a Sao Paulo and a Singapore.14

l icated here in the rule of a militarized LAPD. The anti mcist explosion of 1.992 testi fi es to this.

16. Edward W. Soja,

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

N.Y. : 1989), 2 1 2.

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 1 0. Organizational Models, Gareth Morgan, Creative

Org anization Theory, 1989.

fig 1 1 . Diagram study of "loosely coupled network," Patrik Schu macher,

1999.

described as "an amorphous regional complex that confounds traditional definitions of both city and suburb." 16 This post-Fordist landscape inte-

Poslmoclern

Geographies (London/

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 Detroit's downtown. Some already find delight in the ruins, indulging in a voyeuristic 17. See Jerry Herron , "Three Meditati ons on the Ruins of Detroit" in this collection

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 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. PAT R I K S C HUMA C HE R AND C H R I S T I AN RDGNER

Ill

What attitude, what "state of soul" will permit the

assign meanings, we may obviate that potent moment of observation; we may forget to pause and simply

architect or the urban designer to see, think, and

experience the immediacy of this reality we are so des

project the space of the contracting city? The philos

perately trying to master, to appropriate. We may not

opher, Richard Rorty, in the final essay of his book,

see it at all. And in the moment of our inattention,

Achieving Our Country, titled "The Inspirational Value

these expectant voids will have been re-colonized and

of Great Works of Literature,''20 refers to a particular

dressed with a recognizable identity, either hastily

kind of thought currently prevalent in the teaching and

returned to an unambiguous pre-urban "nature" or rea

production of philosophy and literary criticism which he

bsorbed into the latest productive cycles as strip malls,

denominates "knowingness." "Knowingness," he says "is a state of soul which prevents shudders of awe."21

dia and convention centers.

Knowingness departs from an analytical, a scientific

suburban housing and large-scale projects such as sta The terrain vague has inspirational value; it has the

spirit that seeks understanding through explanation; it

capacity to produce "shudders of awe,'' that strange

arrives at judgment and critique, but devoid of hope

mingling of dread and wonder that can move our intel

and futurity. Deprived of inspiration, of the imaginative

lect and our emotions, and can motivate and incite

spirit, "knowingness" leaves behin?, , in Rorty's words,

us. Its sheer magnitude, pervasiveness, and otherness

"only professional competence and intellectual sophis tication."22

force us to recontextualize what we thought we knew.

According to Rorty, the ability of a text, for exam

It shatters pre-established categories for thought and action. It disorients us. The terrain vague cannot be

ple, to produce "shudders of awe" is its inspirational

fully integrated into our understanding. As an atypical

value. Although, in his argument, he specifically refer

phenomenon, it cannot be easily explained by the situ

ences the inspirational value of works of literature and

ation that gave rise to it. The terrain vague leaves a

philosophy, we can extend this thought to the inspira

vital gap in "knowingness" that can be activated. The

tional value of a place, a situation, to what surrounds

shock of otherness may permit us to create new ways

us, to the terrain vague. If we view these radicalized

of thinking, seeing, and feeling for this yet unchartered

spaces primarily as the products of a mechanism of social, political, and economic forces, we may not

territory, to slip outside what is familiar and reassuring. Inspiration begins in "wild, unreflective"25 fascination,

see their inspirational value. "Knowingness" offers us

enthusiasm, and awe.

understanding and kr:10wledge, but not inspiration,

To think or project Detroit is a coming to terms,

hope, or vision. Extrapolating Rorty's thought again,

not with the angst and despair of congestion, velocity,

knowledge is _ about placing something "in a familiar context - relating_ it to things already known."23 But

and chaos imposed by the early 2oth century metro

if so_mething is to have inspirational value, it "must

ated by the progressive silence and emptiness of this

politan experience, but rather with the anxiety propiti

be allowed to recontextualize much of what you previ

post-industrial metropolis at the turn of the millenium.

ously-thought you knew; it cannot, at least at first, be itself recontextualized by what you already believe."24

To speculate in and on the city today involves not only

"Knowingness" has given us a necessary under

the awareness of a discordant and aleatory reality, but also the determination of an horizon of attention capa

standing of the mechanisms of the unfolding of moder

ble of provoking an (impossible) event, of creating a

nity and post-modernity in our cities; it has theorized

visibility, within the indeterminacy of the terrain vague.

2 0 Richard Rorty, "The Inspirational

Value of Great Works of Literature,"

the movement from an industrial to a post-industrial

Achieving Our Country: Leftist

landscape, from Fordism to post-Fordism, from coloni

ica (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univer

alism 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

Thought in Twentieth-Century Amer sity Press,1gg8), 125-140.

Ibid., 126.

Ibid., 132

23 Ibid., 133. 241bid., 133· 25 Ibid., 134.

26 5ola-Morales, 123.

plane leans over the landscape, constructing its entire

ing street; access off the highway is woven into this

length. The variegated glass surface: clear, opaque or

sloped plane, repeatedly disrupted by surface undu足

translucent; open or closed; textured or smooth, is

lations. Light suggests shadows faintly on the faded,

imprinted with reflections, perceptions, and orders of

compressed forms, dividing the slope visually into mul足

the past, present, and future city. The vectors act as

tiple outlines of upper and lower grounds, overlapping

virtual mirrors that cite the phenomena of a reality that

pedestrian and vehicular zones. The land rises and falls

escapes our apprehension; they register a multitude of

in elongated broken parallels until it reaches a point

pure sensations. They do not explain but rather expose

of tangency with the trench incised in the longitudinal

or bear witness to the erasure of the city. A suspended,

axis of the site: a patch of nature; trees hovering at eye

undulating path sits alongside the inclined plane: an

level; a shadow or reflection of the path suspended at

inhabitable trajectory traversing the amplitude of the

some distance above.

place. The restless path mirrors the movement of the indentations and rises of the landscape beneath and prompts transitive relations with the appearing and

far east end of the site, meeting the embankment

disappearing city.

of the web of highway interchanges. It projects unin足

These two suspended gestures vaguely connect speculative programs to existing ones and prompt or

{left) General plan and sections, and model: composite plan view. {below) Photomontages of the landscape and vectors.

At the edge of the depressed freeway, the second vector passes by the Fox Theatre and stretches to the

terrupted over the new and existing topography: an encounter of disconnected points in space. The raised

insinuate new uses. The topographical event to the far

pedestrian concourse meets the oblique plane of an

west end of the site doubles as a drive-in theatre. It

amphitheater: the spatial inverse and programmatic

initiates the trajectory of the first vector that begins

double of the Fox Theatre. A volume of the continuous

as the projection screens for the drive-in and stretches

voided three-dimensional space of the city is tenta足

to the cultural anchor of the city, the Fox Theatre.

tively captured within its translucent shell.

At the drive-in, the ground bends down from the exist-

The perspectival crossing and convergence of the

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Dislocation

The first revision of the territories involves the voluntary relocation of those remaining residents 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.

Erasure

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 ofthe 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足 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足 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 T hesis 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.

r •

11 11 9 '788495 273772

Architectural Association School of Architecture

Co-Director, Research Design Laboratory,

PATRIK SCHUMACHER

from fifty years of modernist development."

tion of heterogeneity mark a radical departure

ence, and completeness, and the explicit celebra

The postmodern rejection of homogeneity, coher

much more than a new aesthetic sensibility.

sweeping the market in the eighties, represents

architecture and urbanism in the seventies,

no coincidence. The emergence of postmodern

announced by Charles Jencks in 1977. This is

with the "Death of Modern Architecture" as

"The moment of Detroit's deepest crisis coincides

Professor of Architecture, Arizona State University

DAN HOFFMAN

the face of every modern city."

technology and product that has transformed

production, investing all of its resources into a

of its singular devotion to the idea of industrial

achievements. Detroit is the 'Capital' because

its architecture, monuments, or great cultural

the twentieth century, it is not because of

"If Detroit is to be called the 'Capital' of

Director of American Studies, Wayne State University

JERRY HERRON

with people and place alike."

American modernity so completely had its way

other words, a total success. Nowhere else has

fore distinctive of our national culture: in

it is the most unequivocally modern and there

the United States for the simple reason that

place. Detroit is the most relevant city in

"Forget what you think you know. about this

Detroit in the 1990's.

offering a purchase from the urban milieu of

images, design projects and critiques, each

Stalking Detroit is an anthology of essays,