With apologies and respect to many other extremely talented architects not included on this list, here are five of America’s greatest living architects:

Stanley Tigerman

Now 85 years old and based in Chicago, Stanley Tigerman received a Lifetime Achievement Award in October 2015 from the American Institute of Architects. He is known for his blunt personality and his participation in the ‘Chicago Seven,’ who protested the predominance of modernism in architecture. Lesser known by many, he has a nurturing and socially-minded side, as evidenced by his design of the Pacific Garden Mission and the Illinois Holocaust Museum.

Thom Mayne

Los Angeles architect Thom Mayne is revered in the world of academia for teaching at some of the world’s most prestigious architectural schools. These include the Bartlett School of Architecture in London, Columbia University, Harvard University, and Yale University. He currently teaches at UCLA School of Arts and Architecture where he is fully tenured.

As the principal architect for the Santa Monica company Morphosis, some of his most well-known projects include the New Academic Building in New York City, the Wayne L. Morse U.S. Courthouse in Oregon, and the Sun Tower in Seoul, South Korea.

Jonathan Segal

This San Diego architect is unique in that he builds every project himself and he doesn’t wait until he has clients to do so. He has changed the appearance and livability of the downtown San Diego area by creating unique, efficient buildings with extraordinary attention to detail. His building, the North Parker, won a 2015 AIA Housing Award in the multifamily housing category.

Jonathan Segal started his own company to teach other architects how to affect their surroundings in a positive way through design-based development.

Frank Gehry

Born in Canada in 1929, Frank Gehry emigrated to the United States with his family at age 18 and has remained in the Los Angeles area ever since. Several years ago, Vanity Fair magazine stated that Gehry is the most influential architect of the modern age. Indeed, his innovative and distinctive architecture draws people from all over the world as he is known for his ability to manipulate surfaces and form.

Some of Gehry’s most popular projects include the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, the Marques de Riscal Vineyard Hotel in Elciego, the Der Neue Zollhof in Dusseldorf, and the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles.

James Polshek

For more than 40 years, James Polshek served as the Principal Design Partner for Ennead Architects. He currently oversees the firm he created as part of its Design Council and remains active in numerous projects. From 1972 to 1987, Polshek was the dean of the Graduate School at Columbia University.

In addition to receiving three honorary degrees from the college, the American Institute of Architects has bestowed its Gold Medal Award of Honor on him. Two of his most well-known projects include the Rose Center for Earth and Space and the William Jefferson Clinton Presidential Center.

Following in the footsteps of such extraordinary creative minds such as the ones listed above, it will be exciting to see what the next generation of American architects will contribute in the years ahead.

Street Movement’s work is based on the art of movement – a lifestyle which nurtures the simple joy of movement. Mikkel aspires to add new dimensions to the man-made environment.; to define, shape and re-interpret future spaces, landscapes and objects to ensure they become inspirational and invitational towards physical activity and movement – without compromising artistic vision and aesthetic value.

Below is an interview with Mikkel:

LB: What is your definition of parkour?

MR: My “first” definition is classic, but long; Parkour focuses on developing the fundamental attributes required for movement, which include balance, strength, dynamism, endurance, precision, spatial awareness and creative vision. It is a way of training the body and mind in order to be as completely functional, effective and liberated as possible in the physical realm. Parkour is a way of thinking based on rigorous self-discipline, autonomous action and self-will.

My “second” definition of parkour is a discipline of self-improvement on all levels. Parkour is an art that reveals to the practitioner his or her own physical and mental limitations and simultaneously offers a new method to surpass them.

A practitioner of parkour aims to be self-reliant and physically capable; fit, strong and healthy, honest and sincere, disciplined, focussed, creative and always useful and helpful to others.

I also believe that all of the above provides me with a method and a set of values and ethics that I apply to my professional work. I insist on exploring and challenging the end outcome, even if I don’t know if and how it will successful. This mentality is the only way to keep evolving my work and my movement. If the space becomes too predictable it has no meaning and no justification in a parkour sense. That is what I call the paradox of designing for parkour – why design for something that evolved from the lack of sameness, right? Unless you add something completely new at some level.

Below is an great video introducing the design philosophy, ideas and works of Mikkel.

LB: Did architecture or parkour come first?

MR: It is difficult to say – It is very circumstantial, I guess, and then again maybe not so much… It’s the same as when people ask you for how long you been doing parkour. The cliché answer is “forever” as it’s really about re-learning the physicality that we were basically born to do (but forgot through age and the rules of society) and then refining, challenging and exploring. It is similar to the architecture design process.

I’ve been moving all my life and I guess I’m one of those people that movement comes naturally to – you know, the type of person who seems to be pretty good at almost any sport. I trained capoeira for about 8 years and through that got into the full-body, playful, exploratory and acrobatic style of movement. This eventually led to meeting people who did something they called “parkour” which movement-wise had many similarities, but also a lot more, which got my attention!

At the same time, in the year 2000, I got into architecture school at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen, not really knowing what I was getting into and not taking it very seriously in the first couple of years – but I was interested in design! I started out doing large scale architecture but gradually became more interested in the smaller scale and detailing. I took a year off in the middle of my degree and did a PE teachers training program – I guess I wasn’t quite sure which part of the brain should be more involved in my education. When I returned to architecture school my focus was designing.

My graduate project was a series of sculptural and spatial furniture pieces for schools to invoke our inert curiosity to play and explore movement. These pieces would be placed around the schools’ leftover space, especially those that are transitory or intended for transportation. The idea was to create an alternative route and make you want to move in a different way through the space – adding new dimensions in terms of movement including a new spatial, emotional and aesthetic understanding.  Below is a short video of a full scale test piece:

As you can probably guess this was very much inspired by the movement basics that parkour is also built upon – balance, strength and coordination – and it very quickly led me and my parkour friends at the time to believe there was another potential.

I guess being at that point in that time and in a young discipline, led us carve our own niche. A few years later, it seems like other architects, planners and landscape architects welcome the alternative to generic, out of context products, and appreciate someone who understands their own ambition as well as the actual physicality of the activities that they are often faced with. Also, our main user group is one that is often left out and at times difficult to connect with or provide for.

LB: How does parkour change your experience of the city? How is this different to a regular pedestrian?

MR: I think in general, as practitioners, we perceive the environment differently, mainly looking for options and challenges. This is also a bit of a cliché, but true. We look around and search for “movement problems” that could have interesting and challenging solutions. I don’t think the average pedestrian does this as culture and society has (unfortunately) reduced much of our physicality to simply being a means of transportation – and the faster and more convenient the better. For the same reason I don’t believe we will ever see someone actually “parkour” their way to or from work as it would simply be too impractical and ineffective compared to the alternatives.

This “parkour vision” is shared by pretty much all practitioners but I think I look a little deeper, taking into consideration the material and the vertical space as much as the street level space. I also think about how our movement and the use of the built environment affects our understanding and surrounding – positively and negatively.

When thinking about why architects are sometimes fascinated by parkour a lot of immediate and logical conclusions come to mind. In the documentary “My Playground” Bjarke Ingels states that there is a relation between how parkour practitioners try to reach the unreachable areas of the built environment, and how he, through his work will make accessible, normally inaccessible areas. This is somewhat true, but also a little banal and a very cliché perception of what parkour is: Jumping from roof-top to roof-top, it is here that so many clichés surrounding our activity, and unfortunately most people don’t get further than this level of thinking.

I’m not sure what it is, but I think one of the most interesting things in relation to architecture, is that we physically engage the full spectrum of scale, from talking about how one moves and flows through a space or series of spaces at the largest scale, to how our bodies meet, interact, touch and feel the objects and surfaces – and this, mind you, in ways, planes and levels not intended or planned for by the designer. I wish I knew how to synthesise this and make it a tool.

Below is a short video about a project entitled DRIK VAND; a campaign supported by the Danish National Platform for Street Sports. The campaign is a counter-reaction to the outside commercial influences that try to take control of our culture and use it to push their highly questionable products for the sole purpose of personal financial gain:

LB: How does parkour change the way you perceive and design architecture?

MR: Sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn’t – obviously when designing specifically for parkour it does! But I actually think it’s more fair to say that architecture affects the way I design for parkour. We’re almost always going to be able to find movement challenges in any design, but the hard part is coming up with something that brings something new, adds to the space and has more value for more people. For this I believe we need to understand at least the basic rules of not only architecture, but also culture and society. Once all of this comes together, we can start pushing back and challenge what is accepted in a manner that is sensible and effective.

For years I have wanted to create a project that is a temporary art installation, or social and cultural commentary. It will be called “The Inconvenience Store” and it is designed in a manner that will make the user work hard and diligently to get their groceries and other items (organic, of course) – like we had to in the before the industrial revolution. The body needs to be put under physical stress and strain in order to keep regenerating. Today, almost everything we produce does the opposite, which is to make everything easier for us. So basically we’ve been designing our own physical degeneration and we are repeatedly trying to patch this with new designs and medicine, but we are only making it worse by targeting the problem and not the source. It is very negative spiral only leading down… But cheer up and fear not; “The Inconvenience Store” is coming to a place near you in the future! I claim all copyrights to the concept, by the way

LB: Does parkour have a political and/or social agenda? If so what is it and how does it affect your role in architecture? 

MR: For some people it does, but for the average practitioner I would say no. Most people simply enjoy moving, which is perfectly fine, because that is in the end outcome what drives us – the simple joy!

For us (Street Movement) there is definitely several agendas and they are all connected to the potential that we believe lies within the approach towards our discipline, that we’ve been raised with through our close relationship among the founders. In Denmark, as well as in many other countries, a lot of traditional and organised sports receive financial support from the government. We believe that just because we are not organised or structured like everything else we should still be taken just as seriously – in fact, the lack of formal structure and organisation is a big part of why we are able to reach a group of people who otherwise are left out of the system. We work politically to better not only for ourselves but also for other activities with similar challenges. In order to help things grow you sometimes need to create a better physical framework and facilities, and sometimes it’s simply about doing things right.

Socially and culturally, we believe that we need to be out there and be visible, in order to push towards a society where it is socially accepted to be actively physical in public spaces. We believe that we can inspire others through the visible joy of movement – maybe even to the point where others will want to spectate or join in. Sometimes, to achieve this we create the spaces that allow people to meet on their own terms and within their own comfort zone, and generate spaces that allow for cultural, social and physical exchanges – without limiting the functionality for the activities. This requires  careful consideration and an understanding of the elements that are suddenly in play – this is when it becomes complex, difficult and interesting. Designing for one thing only, like parkour functionality is quite easy and fairly boring as you only have to solve one problem that you pretty much already know the solution for. I know the potential is much bigger and I have the opportunity for a bigger ambition and connection through my work.

I’d like to thank Mikkel Rugaard for participating in the interview, it was an absolute pleasure. If you’re interested in getting in touch or finding out more about Mikkel, visit their website. (streetmovement.dk)

If you are interested in being interviewed or featured on archi-ninja, please contact me.

Left: Alper Derinboğaz, Right: Tri Fold Furniture, Madrid. 

Interview with Alper Derinbogaz, Salon Architects

1. Which of your projects has been the most rewarding and why?

AD: Augmented Structures, City Museum of Istanbul, and Istanbul Antenna Tower are among the projects that I think were and still are rewarding. Each building had a different scale and context but the common theme is that they are public buildings. It is an honour for an architect to inspire and design for the public.

Augmented Structures

2. How do you think design will change in the next 50 years?

AD: I believe that the boundaries between our professions are about to melt. This does not necessarily mean the end of these fields of work but it does indicate the need for common knowledge to create and produce. Architecture seemingly had distinguished itself from engineering in the past decades, however today this is not the situation.

There is also an alarming situation that I observe on the future of design that will most likely cause a paradigm shift on design and architecture. Emerging applications and design customization software is inviting the user to DIY design. The main goal of this is to make everybody his or her own designer. Although it is still underdeveloped, I assume this is just the beginning and computation is going to progress in the near future.

The term sustainability is also being consumed excessively, however it does not mean that it is sustainable most of the time. Practically we do not have another opportunity to be really sustainable. Architecture and design will need to think of this problem more and more.

Denktas Mausoleum and Museum

3. What changes would you like to see in the design profession?

AD: We will face a rapid change in the coming years which I believe is necessary. Those fields and tools that cannot adapt will be pushed out of the game. When I say this it sounds cruel, but it is indeed a sort of natural selection we visit frequently. What I would like to see in the design profession is a more adaptive and flexible know-how as we remain deeply motivated and ambitious of design tradition.

4. Do you think that design tends to be trendy today?

AD: Yes it is but this is not what I hope for. Being trendy means being ephemeral, moreover most of the time it lacks value.

Design is about creating value nothing else; I hate the non-committed, faceless flexibility and open endedness of the present architecture. I also hate show-off buildings. It should not be about creating forms or shapes. It is about creating meaning and it needs to connect to the people, the location and the idea; it needs to live even it is a frozen body.

5. What would students learn from reviewing the body of projects you have completed?

AD: Our designs are site and question specific. We try to keep our work as diverse as possible. I can comment them to look for new tectonics, and ask questions about the fundamentals of architecture; to understand what they are and to question them.

Gate

6. What aspect of Architecture do you find most important?

AD: The fact is that architecture does not exist without a client. The clients are important in principal. But I think it is more important to know why you are designing. So please spend time to understand what is fundamental for you. And once you find it, stick with it.

I can say the quality of the research and how we prepare for the design phase is the most important aspect or what we do. It is the time you gather the ingredients and feed your brain. When the inputs are fulfilling, the intuitive process begins. And this is what guides us until the end. Intuition is important, but it does not comes itself and never works alone.

From a practical point of view, the most important aspect in the workflow depends on the project. Sometimes the site and landscape, sometimes the idea or technology we integrate and sometimes the climate.

Panaroma

7. What inspired you to become involved in design?

AD: I used to paint when I was young and being a painter was the only direction I could think of my future. Then I saw the power of space and its infinite possibilities, and that brought me to where I am today.

I am inspired mostly by the fields that are not about design or architecture. Story telling is what attracts me most of the time. Either cinema or literature. I believe every project and its process is a story that has a beginning and an end, that cannot exist unless several characters are involved, but it always has a protagonist.

Besides the overall approach, I find many things that I pursue, in nature. In a way it is like an enigma and the system embedded in it is hard for us to decipher. An infinite organization that constantly impairs itself where everything is essential and irreplaceable. I like to think about these cycles and facts when I create without noticing the scale.

8. What is your favourite time of the day?

AD: My favourite time of the day is when the phone stops calling, that is when I can be productive.

Antalya Hub

9. What would be your ultimate design project?

AD: I am fine with the limitations. They make life a nicer place to live; either you obey or fight.

10. What are you doing at the moment?

AD: Heading to Beirut for Arch Maraton Award; an architecture award organized by the Mediterranean countries.

Sisli Tower

I’d like to thank Alper Derinbogaz for participating in the interview, it was a pleasure. If you’re interested in getting in touch or finding out more about Salon, visit their website.

If you are interested in being interviewed or featured on archi-ninja, please contact me.

Eric is an Architect from Melbourne, currently living and working in Hong Kong. Below is an interview with Eric who first came across our project on ArchDaily:

AC: We love your ring design which maximises the surface area of exposed concrete. What inspired your ring design?

EC: The materiality of the concrete ring, of a normally rough material used in a refined way for jewellery, initially drew me to this project.  Finding out that it came as a DIY kit won me over (i love designing-making-redesigning things).  I saw the DIY concrete ring as an exciting new material and process to explore.

The design of the shape came from my desire for something minimal that sits flat on my hand, but with enough exposed surface to show off its texture. The result was a simple ring loop with a band that extends over the adjacent finger.

AC: We often express the joy that comes with designing, making and wearing something that is crafted through DIY. Can you describe the process? 

EC: I got the most enjoyment from the process of making and learning about the material – the apprehension of making the ring for the first time, the gut wrenching feeling of finding large air voids in the ring after taking it out of the mould, and the relief from knowing that it can be fixed easily (following the well written instructions from Architact Collective).

With the reusable mould, an additional batch of concrete pigment mixtures, and the extra supply of epoxy resin left over from the repairing process, I had enough material to keep experimenting.  As I didn’t know any silversmiths, I decided to have the new metal inner 3d printed (withshapeways).  In order to take full advantage of the 3d printing process, I created a new inner ring design.

I spent some time playing with different colour and texture mixes and also figured out how to best prevent air voids from forming (by leaving the silicone mould open when casting). After some fun exploration, I made another concrete ring (version 2).

AC. We hope you continue to experiment. Do you have plans to do further rings or other products?

EC: I really like the surface texture of this material, with flakes of aggregate showing on one side and tiny bubbles on the other, and will definitely keep experimenting.  Apart from rings, I will also be looking for other interesting containers to use as moulds.

AC. We are constantly designing, redesigning and refining our products. What do you like most about our DIY Concrete Ring Kits? 

EC: The DIY kit is very nicely assembled.  The instructions are clear and well presented, the packaging design is really neat, and the quality components in the kit means they can be reused again to make many additional rings.  I love the hands-on crafting process that the DIY kit promotes and would recommend this to anyone.

I’d like to thank Eric for sharing and documenting his story and process. In order for Eric to create his own design we casted a one-off silicone mould. If you would like to design your very own ring please send an email to [email protected]. We would love to work with you! 

When talking with these designers we learnt some things about their journey that we wanted to share with you. Each journey however is similar; creative people with no business background finding happiness, personality and identity through hand-crafted design.

We found inspiration from the following designers:

MIMAW

We met MIMWAR at the Melbourne Mystery Market on Sunday December 14. MIMWAR design and create fun, 3D printed and handmade homewares. They create functional design products which seek extend their functionality by enhancing and creating character. The makers behinds MIMAW have a passion for combining emerging technologies and handcrafted design, treating different materials, techniques and using them to add our touch and colours on 3d printed objects. Head over to the MIMAW website to checkout their work. Each piece is made to order and filled with personality!

LITTLE LUMBERJACK

We also Met LITTLE LUMBERJACK at the Melbourne Mystery Market on Sunday December 14. Little Lumberjack was founded Jen Yani, a graphic designer turned woodworker. Little Lumberjack design and create simple and natural products that celebrate the food we eat and the moments when they are eaten. The wood is locally sourced and handcrafted. Head over to the Little Lumberjack website to checkout their work. Each product not only has a unique personality but a name!

OLIO

We met OLIO at the New Craft Market on Sunday December 7. Olio was founded by Georgina Lewis with an overwhelming urge to create new products and ways to communicate ideas. Olio creates homewares and objects that are collapsible, easy to assemble, desirable and affordable. Olio is motivated by good design that is not exclusive to people with disposable incomes. Head over to the Olio Website to checkout Georgina’s work. Each piece is stunning!

Kathleen O’Neill

Kathleen is a talented silversmith and designer. She creates beautiful jewellery from her rural home overlooking equally stunning ocean views. Her pieces are hand made, equally organic and graphic. Primarily made from silver, titanium, gold and copper each piece is inspired by a rich narrative. Head over to the Kathleen O’Neill Blogspot to checkout her latest products and adventures.

Thank you to everyone who shared their experiences! We hope to see you again soon.

The hand-crafted rings by Sarra are the exploration of surface embellishment and texture, using our natural and built landscapes as a source of inspiration. The design reflects raw elements, natural surroundings and a connection to our immediate environment. Each ring is hand-crafted to ensure it maintains a personal, unique aesthetic.
Left: Silver Mountain Ring entitled Growth, Right: Silver Mountain Ring entitled Ground

Together Linda and Sarra have created a series of 4 limited edition sterling silver mountain rings. The rings are available via the Architact Collective website where you can choose your favourite design and ring size before Sarra creates your ring to order.
Left: Silver Mountain Ring entitled Sun, Right: Silver Mountain Ring entitled Water

To create each ring a wax mould is made of the Original DIY Concrete Mountain Ring and then cast in sterling silver. The silver ring is repeatedly filed with various tools to create an even and flat surface. The ring is covered with a resist layer, the design is then cut out from this resist layer. The metal is then placed in an acid solution where the exposed areas will react and slowly begin to degrade the silver, leaving a unique etched surface pattern. The ring is then refined with emery paper until a soft matte finish is produced, creating a contrasting surface to the textured grooves.
Left: Silver Mountain Ring entitled Growth, Right: Silver Mountain Ring entitled Ground

Left: Elena Orte Largo and Guillermo Sevillano, Right: Play-time apartments, Madrid. Photo Credits: Jesús Granada

Interview with Elena Orte Largo & Guillermo Sevillano, SUMA

1. Which of your projects has been the most rewarding and why?

SUMA: In economical terms, the most exciting and adventurous are always the worst paid. For example, the Play-time apartments have been so far a great adventure and they have brought a lot of attention to our work. But it has been a long and hard process. The project collects the aspirations of the developer as well as multiple disciplinary obsessions (the vertical garden, the spiral organisation, typological subversions, and the apparently free and in-formal envelope shape) but it does so in a way we felt that we had to learn everything along the way. The project has become a sort of consistent and precise system in which we can’t disregard any of the elements without sacrificing the whole thing. Pre-fixed fees (before even we started the conversation with the client!) never pay for these efforts but there are multiple rewards beyond that.

We can speak in similar masochist terms (“if it’s easy, we don’t like it”) of the Library in Fuerteventura (Canary Islands), which has been painful and rewarding in multiple ways.

Play-time apartments, Madrid. Photo Credits: Jesús Granada

2. How do you think architecture will change in the next 50 years?

SUMA: We indeed live relativist times. For some time now, we have witnessed the rise and fall of a lot of different platforms of thought, both in politics, philosophy and architecture. Apparently no system of ideas or methodology can be considered as a “stable ground”. As humanists, we have become perpetual nomads. As architects, instead, we like to think that the absence of a “solid ground” on which to settle has made explicit that only the constant endeavour to consolidate, modify and construct on a given territory can provide a stable condition to it. In other words, for the human “construct”, whatever that is, it is the construction that paradoxically sustains its foundation and not the other way around!

Consequently, for the future it does not seem so relevant to us to bet on a specific idea on which to “construct” as to understand and promote the processes of “construction” per se that are able to sustain it. To do this, we always like to claim a term borrowed from the social sciences of the 60’s, Socioconstructivism. The term socio is not merely “social”, in its old-fashion meaning. It refers to the bonds and networks of “associations” that any innovation must activate and trigger ex-novo as the only way to endure. These processes, such as live, communicate and reproduce architecture, as well as an undetermined number of actions made by a myriad of agents, create the sphere outside of which our products would not survive a moment. The term constructivism, in turn, points out the artificial nature of the process of establishing associations, an artificiality that we don’t reject as designers/constructors, but embrace as a condition sine qua non to produce sustainable initiatives in the broadest sense of the word.

Thus, we can imagine architects becoming in the next decades less solitary heroic builders and more “socio-constructors” of ideas. By doing so, we think we can keep some of our proverbial audacity and vindicate our expertise while holding hands intensively with the rest of the world.

Library in Canary Islands

3. What changes would you like to see in the architectural profession?

SUMA: Independently of who we serve in a more and more democratic and participatory world, we would like to see how our profession finds the place in it that accommodates our common will to serve others and construct a better place, to implement our passion and expertise and our capacity to work in intricate contexts and ensemble things. And we would like to get rid out of fetishes, trends and mantras and our guilty-complex along the way. We imagine an architect more aware and connected, more open and daring, and, above all, more necessary.

4. Do you think that architecture tends to be trendy today?

SUMA: “Fashion is what becomes old-fashioned”, while we all aspire to some type of transcendence. The condition of the present is important to us as a way to avoid prejudices and prefixed solutions, and always keep a fresh view to learn things and start any endeavour. Beyond that, we find that trying to be on top of the waves is only significant because it makes us feel more alive (probably because of the void beneath) and is a much better place to enjoy the trip. Every project is a new adventure!

5. What would students learn from reviewing the body of projects you have completed?

SUMA: We have always tried to keep a foot on the field of pure practice and a foot in the academic realm. As Design Studio professors in the Polytechnic University of Madrid, we always tell our students that it doesn’t matter the idea or point of departure and it doesn’t matter how unstable the ground is. Moreover, the bigger the challenge, the better (always enjoy the feeling of climbing your own Everests, no matter how many times others have been there before!). However, only by constructing onto it they will achieve a design able to be sustained. In that sense, we like to think that our projects may exemplify what  “constructing ideas” in architecture means to us. Sometimes we come across the concept responding to a given context (as the Public Housing we have just finished in Madrid). Sometimes we incubate the project in a laboratory and look desperately for the proper place to implement it (as the libraries we have design for the Canary Islands and the Helsinki Central Library, in which we were shortlisted for the second stage among 550 proposals). Sometimes the point of departure is not even ours (as in the Play-time Apartments)! Of course, we don’t work in the outer space. Acrobatics are exciting but not a way of sustainment. Every sketch unveils genealogy lines, enrols and dismiss actors, opens and closes narratives and summons memories and attachments. Some things become explicit, while others run unconsciously.

What we try is to clean our mind out of prejudices or preconceived thoughts and put all our resources to best sustain the project to be constructed. Or to sum up, always keep the feet on the ground and the mind pointing the sky.

6. Who do you think is the most overrated architect, and who do you think deserves more credit/recognition?

SUMA: That is unfair to say. The most overrated architects are probably the best connected; those who have better constructed the network of associations that sustain their works. That deserves a lot of recognition and we could all learn a lot from them beyond despising their work with our overblown egos. They are great “constructors”, maybe not the ones we´d like to be, but probably the sort we need to become.

Helsinki Central Library

7. What aspect of Architecture do you find most important?

Lately, we have found ourselves more concerned with the problem of how enrolling actors to better sustain our initiatives. We have found that what we learned is only helpful if it makes explicit how others may associate and create networks around our proposals. If we want to preserve our field of expertise, we need to add more layers to it. Which is basically a problem of Translation, to put it in linguistic terms. The basic implication is that there is no association/enrolment of any agent without a vehicle of translation, as the Actor-Network theorists would put it. A translation is a way of transporting an effect (or initiative). While some characteristics remain, there is no transportation without a transformation on both sides (for example: house + inhabitants = family home). Finally it is actually these vehicles that keep connected the architectural form to the actors that provide its sustain.

However, instead of looking at the issue as a single-way road in which either the proposal respond to actors, actors alter the proposal or the proposal collapses, we like to think that the process of design can actually preserve its integrity and trigger new enrolments at the same time by means of the adequate and explicit vehicles of translation. We would like to melt the architectural and the social in our design practice as two elements that have actually never been separated and, at the same time, regain the initiative and the capacity of preserving our field of expertise while triggering new and better associations.

Public Housing in San Sebastian de los Reyes, Madrid

8. What inspired you to become involved in Architecture?

SUMA: What moves us is the vertigo towards the voids to be filled. From the necessities others require to be covered, the places that it seems no one has been before, through the multiple lacks we find in our discipline, the gap we try to jump and the space we need to develop our emotions; it seems that what puts us in motion is not what fulfils us but what unveils an empty space in front of our eyes.

9. What other interests do you have?

SUMA: We lived in NY for two years, while doing a Master at Columbia University, and we assume something from us remain there. We expect to have the chance to return someday, but not as tourists, which is a nice way of consumption, but definitely not a way of live a place! Regarding other interests, we are very eclectic and open-minded. It seems that our obsessions relate more with processes (daily routines), sceneries (our house and office, the city we walk and the architecture we produce) and feelings (family circle and friends) and that we are not that interested in erecting our identities with things and fetishes others can recognise. In that sense, we feel more like diluting into the world as their spectators.

Public Housing in Vallecas, Madrid. Photo Credits: Jesús Granada

10. What would be your ultimate design project?

SUMA: We are still at that stage of our careers, as Groucho Marx would put it, in which we should not accept a client that requires our services as architects. If they come to us is typically a bad sign! But the client is someone to be constructed, too. We always expect the latest project to be the best opportunity.

11. What are you doing at the moment?

SUMA: After some years finishing our latest projects, building our own house and office, obtaining academic positions at the University and extending our family we have got to a point in which we feel that we have finished many of the things we started some years ago (and reached many of the things we could have ever dream of!) and we now wonder what to do. We stand in front of a crossroads. We either struggle to preserve what we have achieved or we go up to the trapeze again. If anyone has followed this questionnaire so far, they can probably expect where we are heading at the moment.

I’d like to thank Elena and Guillermo for participating in the interview, it was a pleasure. If you’re interested in getting in touch or finding out more about SUMA, visit their website or stay up to date via their blog. 

If you are interested in being interviewed or featured on archi-ninja, please contact me.

Together Linda and Kaitlin have created a series of 6 limited edition hand-painted laser-cut wooden rings. The rings are available via the Architact Collective website where you can choose your favourite design and ring size before Kaitlin creates your ring to order.

Left: ARMOURED BIRD GABLE ROOF, Middle: THE HEART GABLE ROOF, Right: SKULLFISH GABLE ROOF

Kaitlin’s love for the fantastic and the imaginary are evident in each unique and beautiful design where she perfectly depicts the unusual engaged alongside the everyday. If you love Kaitlin’s art then these rings are for you!

Left: ANGLERFISH SALTBOX ROOF, Middle: DRAGONFLY SALTBOX ROOF, Right: BEAKFACE SALTBOX ROOF

Kaitlin work is inspired by the natural world, odd dreams, cryptozoology, literature and science fiction. She encourages those that see her creatures to invent their own narratives, allowing them to take on a life of its own beyond that of its original making.

Kaitlin seals each ring with a polymer prior to painting. Layers of ink, fluid acrylics and chalk pastel are built up to create the colour and background texture before the design is refined with black and white ink for detail and highlights. The ring is then varnished with 2 coats of polymer and 3 layers of glossy UV-protecting archival varnish.

Head over to the Architact Collective to learn more about Kaitlin, checkout some more images or to get your very own piece of wearable art!

Drew, thank you for the education and incredible inspiration. This artistically drafted article is without an agenda and speaks solely of truth; a spiritual reclaiming of Detroit through the notion of home. Below is what Drew contributes on BuzzFeed:

My first job out of college was working for a construction company in Detroit.

“We’re an all-black company and I need a clean-cut white boy,” my boss told me over drinks in a downtown bar when he hired me. “Customers in the suburbs don’t want to hire a black man.”

When a service call would come in, we would ask, “Does he sound white or black?” If it was the former, I would bid the job. If the latter, my boss would. Detroit is one of the most segregated metro areas in the nation, and for the first time I was getting what it felt like to be on the other side of that line. In contrast to the abstract verbal yoga students at the University of Michigan would perform when speaking about race, this was refreshing. And terrifying. I couldn’t hide behind fancy words any longer.

Drew Philp in his home during the early stages of renovation. Photograph by Garrett MacLean

I grew up in rural Michigan, 45 minutes away from any freeway. I’m the first male member of my family in three generations never to have worked in front of a lathe, and aside from one uncle, I’m the oldest with all of my fingers intact. The university had given me some grandiose ideas like “true solidarity with the oppressed,” and I figured “the oppressed” lived in Detroit, never mind the patrimony. I thought I was making a sacrifice. I thought moving here was staying home when everyone else was leaving the state. I thought I was going to change the world and had some vague notions of starting a school. I cringe at how naive I was. I first rented an apartment in the city, sight unseen, that didn’t have a kitchen sink, so I did my dishes in the bathtub.

Aside from bidding jobs, I spent my days like everyone else: sanding floors in cheap rentals for $8.50 an hour, which got me thinking: I could buy a house and fix it up myself. Not that I was sure how to go about buying, let alone renovating a house. It was just an inexplicit dream, some trick that would keep me from leaving like everyone else, make me a true Detroiter.

Not long after, I went to a Halloween party dressed as an organ grinder. At one point I set my cardboard organ down in a corner to dance, and when I went back to get a beer I’d hidden inside it, sitting next to the organ, all knotted up and looking out of place, was a guy named Will dressed as an organ grinder’s monkey. Between his fingers he held a hand-rolled cigarette.

“You want to go outside and have a smoke?”

After the usual pleasantries, him looking nervous and fidgety, me overeager to make friends, I told him I wanted to buy a house on the city’s east side.

He answered, “I just did.”

Will told me that the best way to buy a house here is to find one you like and then figure out who owns it. He had lived in Detroit a decade before, but moved out to travel the country. This was his homecoming. He purchased the house for $3,000 from the son of a woman who had died. It had been abandoned for years, but there was an upstairs room full of her possessions — steamer trunks, furniture, family pictures. Some of her photographs still hung on the walls, including a portrait of the first black mayor of Detroit, Coleman Young, and a painting of a white Jesus Christ. She had them arranged so the Christ appeared to be praying to Young. Only half the rooms in the house had electricity; he lit the rest with oil lamps. He let me live with him that summer.

There were almost no other homes around Will’s, just scrubland and a few scraggly houses standing against the odds. Once they were packed in together like cardboard matches; only a five-minute bike ride from downtown, it was now the country in the city. The only other house nearby was a hideous cinderblock project house built by an architecture student from Cranbrook, the private school Mitt Romney attended as a teenager. It was abandoned, the frozen pipes burst from the cold.

Behind Will’s house was a paradise of wretched forestland. Any homes or buildings had been torn or fallen down, nature reclaiming what it had lost more than a century ago. Full-grown trees stood between dumped boats and hot tubs and railroad ties and piles of rubble, smack-dab on top of where houses used to be. A sextuplet of abandoned grain silos towered over the neighborhood. Scrappers would burn the insulation off copper wire at the bottom, and a rather congenial gentleman, since killed in a fistfight, lived in one of the boats. Occasionally Will and I would climb the towers and look out over the city, smoking cigarettes and drinking cheap beer. I’d try not to fall through the crumbling roof, and we’d point out landmarks, churches, schools, empty factories, trying to figure our place in it all.

“It’s like the pilgrims,” he told me, looking out over the city. “They came to America for religious freedom and got along with the Native Americans pretty well. It wasn’t perfect, but they ate Thanksgiving together, you know. It was the people who came after. They said, ‘I can make money from this.’ They were the ones with the smallpox blankets, not the pilgrims.”

“That sounds like a total bastardization of history.”

“It may be. But it rings true.”

Abutting the silos was the Dequindre Cut, a railroad trench dug from the earth during Detroit’s manufacturing days. It had long since ceased to be a functional railroad and was teeming with flora and fauna: pheasants big as chickens, rabbits, the odd sapling, little red foxes, tawny waist-high grass. It was beautiful. Will swears he saw a deer down there once — five minutes from downtown — staring at him with glistening eyes before bounding off. After we cooked dinner from what we grew in his garden — lettuce, tomatoes, radishes, peas, beans, cabbage — we would take walks with his dog during that time on summer evenings when the sun rakes across the earth just right. We could walk for hours and not see a soul.

We would ride our bikes around the city ducking into wide-open shells, houses with hanging porches and forgotten rose bushes, naked and ragged and proud, trash seeping from the orifices where windows used to be. We could walk right in, not even plywood covering the doors, stepping on glass and broken tile and abandoned dreams. I also looked into some move-in-ready foreclosures, pert brick homes in Detroit’s stable and well-populated areas. I could have purchased many of these for less than the price of a 20-year-old car. I just couldn’t bring myself to profit off of someone else’s misery. All I could think of were the families once living in these homes and the day the banks and sheriff put them on the street.

I wanted something nobody wanted, something that was impossible. The city is filled with these structures, houses whose yellowy eyes seem to follow you. It would be only one house out of thousands, but I wanted to prove it could be done, prove that this American vision of torment could be built back into a home. I also decided I would do it the old-fashioned way, without grants or loans or the foundation money pouring into the city. I would work for everything that went into the house, because not everyone has access to those resources. I also wanted to prove to myself and my family I was a man. While they were building things, I had been writing poems.

One day Will and I rode past a white Queen Anne in Poletown on a quiet corner. Next to it sat two empty lots, plenty of space for a dog and a garden, a shed and a pond. The neighbors were friendly and kept their homes well-maintained, but there were four other abandoned houses on the block. The neighbors said the Queen Anne had been abandoned for a decade, simply left behind by the previous owner like a shredded tire on the highway, anything of value stolen long ago. It had a mangy wraparound porch and a big kitchen, but no chimney — I could build one of those — and the first time I cautiously walked inside, I knew it would be my home.

When I told the neighbors I wanted to buy it, they looked at me like I was insane. A young white kid stuck out like a snowball in Texas, and I was self-conscious and very aware of my color, stumbling over my replies for the first time in my life. When I was moving in, most other people, white and black, were moving out.

“Just looking at it, it’s a lot of work,” the neighbor across the street said, figuring I would give up after a month or two. There were no doors or windows, plumbing or electricity, nothing. There was a pornographic hole in the roof. It was just a clapboard shell filled with trash on a crumbling foundation. I’m talking chest-high piles of clothing, yard waste, empty tin cans, toys, diapers, those white Styrofoam trays that raw meat comes in, used auto parts, construction debris, liquor store plastic bags and bottles, rolls of old carpeting, broken furniture and glass, literal piles of human shit, uncapped needles. When I was clearing the house — which took me three months, with a pitchfork and a snow shovel — I also found the better part of a Dodge Caravan inside, cut into chunks with a reciprocating saw. From what folks who grew up around here told me, it was an “insurance job.” Someone had needed the money, so they reported the van stolen and paid a couple of guys to cut it apart and deposit it around the city. The backyard was a jungle of invasive plants and more trash, trash so old it had turned to dirt.

 I purchased the house in October 2009 at a live county auction for $500 cash. I was 23 years old.

Drew’s home in 2009. Photograph by Mike Williams

Detroit is the true 20th-century boomtown, the most American of stories. In 100 years, we went from a backwater hamlet to one of the richest cities in the United States. Referred to as the “Paris of the Midwest,” it was the city with the most theater seats in the U.S. outside of Broadway, the silicon valley of the ’60s, the highest rate of homeownership in the nation. We boomed and we busted, hard and early, and like an alcoholic drunk on 20th-century capitalism, we hit rock bottom first and hardest. My neighborhood is representative.

Poletown was originally settled in the 1860s and ’70s by Polish immigrants, and it grew steadily through the 1940s thanks to the immigration of more Poles, Italians, Jews, and blacks looking for jobs in the factories, slaughterhouses, and auto plants. It was a hardworking and faithful community, the kind of place where people would take out second mortgages on their homes to build the half-dozen massive churches of stone, marble, and gold leaf that were built to rival cathedrals in Europe.

In the ’50s the neighborhood was bisected, north and south, by Interstate 94. In the ’60s, Interstate 75 cut through the neighborhood. It was run straight through Black Bottom and Paradise Valley, two of the most economically and culturally important black neighborhoods in the United States, both of which bled into Poletown. What was left was replaced with a model community, and the rest of the people moved to towering projects, the Jefferies and the Brewster-Douglass, where Diana Ross grew up.In the early ’80s, the entire north half of the neighborhood was demolished to make way for a 362-acre auto plant, heavily subsidized by the city, state, and federal governments. More than 4,000 residents were eminent-domained from their property; 1,400 homes, several churches, and 140 businesses were razed to make way for the promise of three shifts of work a day. (A Jewish cemetery is located inside the plant’s grounds, as it was illegal to move it. If relatives wish to visit their ancestors, they can do so on two days a year.)The Detroit-Hamtramck Assembly Plant, as it’s officially known, sits just down the street from the massive abandoned Packard Automotive Plant, a 40-acre trash heap designed by Albert Kahn and the largest abandoned factory in the world. It’s often on fire, and people mention it like it’s the weather. Trees grow from the roof, and tourists come from all over the world to take photographs. Aside from the 18-story abandoned train station, it’s the best ruin porn in the city.

Left: Hamtramck section of Detroit in 1955, prior to the plant’s construction. John Dominis//Time Life Pictures / Getty Images. Right: The Hamtramck Plant. Michigan Bell Telephone Company courtesy of the University of Michigan Library

Approximately 6,500 jobs were promised at the Poletown plant in exchange for demolishing half the neighborhood. At its peak employment, roughly 3,500 people worked there, less than the number of people kicked out of their homes to build it. It was the death rattle of American manufacturing, the last attempt at making cars in Detroit for anything more than lip service or sentiment. Fewer than 1,500 people work there today, manufacturing the Chevy Volt, among other vehicles.

The churches are almost all closed. The Catholic archdiocese agreed to sell two of them to General Motors to make way for the Poletown plant, and the rest are left unsupported by the church so the tithing of the faithful can be used elsewhere, the towering monuments to God falling into disrepair like the rest of the neighborhood. St. Stanislaus gave up the ghost in 1989, St. Albertus in 1990. Both are listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The projects are being demolished. It’s costing the city $8 million — not because they are unsafe, but because they look bad to investors driving along the same freeway that helped create them in the first place. I-75 continues to facilitate corpulent suburban sprawl. The Packard plant is a toxic landfill. Most of the people who once lived in Poletown are gone, left for the suburbs.

Left: St. Albertus Catholic Church. Photograph by Garrett MacLean. Right: Sweetest Heart of Mary Polish Catholic Church. Photograph by Garrett MacLean

When people speak about “bringing Detroit back,” is this what we want to go back to?

There was no way I could live in the house when I first bought it, so I moved out of Will’s to Forestdale, a verdant block in Poletown that was walking distance from my new home. Twenty-five years ago, a wild and virtuous teacher named Paul Weertz bought a house on Forestdale after his downtown home burned down. Through the years, he’s transformed the block into an arcadian oasis on Detroit’s east side, where old Poles and young white artists live next to black doctors and immigrant mothers from Hungary or Mexico. He raised his now-grown children there, convinced friends and colleagues to move in, and saved the block from crack houses, fire, and neglect. Nearly all the homes still stand, a rather incredible accomplishment considering much of the rest of the neighborhood looks like a mouth full of broken teeth.

All but two of the houses on the block behind Forestdale are gone. Instead of letting it slowly fill up with trash and despair, Paul planted an orchard. In the summer peaches and pears and apples and plums grow on the trees, and vegetables of every make and model grow in the soil. Neighbors care for bees and collect honey in autumn. In the winter, Paul floods it to make a backyard ice rink. He’s still tinkering with a homemade way to groom the ice, and recently I found him back there on his knees with a clothing iron plugged into an extension cord, trying to iron the ice smooth. That didn’t work. He’ll figure something out eventually.

Down the street from Forestdale, Paul seeded a hay field on a lot a school once stood. Twice a summer we bale hay for the animals to eat over winter — 400 bales each time in a good year, heaved into hay wagons and pickup trucks by the neighbors. Paul taught at the Catherine Ferguson Academy, a school for pregnant and nursing teenagers, which at one time had a graduation rate of over 90% (when the national average for pregnant teens is 40%). He started a farm at the school to help teach the young women about science and mothering by caring for crops and livestock. The hay fed these animals too. One day I visited him in class, and he stopped mid-sentence during a lecture. One of the baby chickens was hatching in a fish tank and he gathered his students around to watch the tiny beak protrude from the shell and the new life emerge. In 2011 his school was closed by the city, citing cost, and was purchased by a charter school. Paul lost his job and the school is now run for profit.

Children run the length of Forestdale playing tag, riding skateboards, cross-country skiing on snow-covered streets — all the while in Detroit’s east side, which reporters describe as “bombed out” and like “Mogadishu“— even the police say it’s “war-like… unsafe for visitors.” Which is the truth and it isn’t. Because Forestdale is a special place, where people want to be left alone to live their lives and raise their children and tend the soil. Paul just wants to drive his tractor. They’re people who value their privacy. (I’ve changed the name of the block.) On the whole, it’s an incredible testament to the power of vision and community over anarchy.

Left: Some goats of Catherine Ferguson Academy. Photograph by Garrett MacLean. Right: A girl skates on the Forestdale ice rink. Photograph by Garrett MacLean

The house I stayed in was on the corner and had been purchased from an old Polish family who had left for Florida. It had no running water, walls, or heat. I could stay there free in exchange for looking after the place and doing a bit of upkeep and repairs. I worked on my house as long into the autumn as I could, swapping plywood boards for windows, demolishing walls, hanging doors. I bought a chainsaw with a neighbor, and when the summer storms came and the city left the downed trees lying where they may, we cut the logs from the road and stacked them on the porch.

The place where I was staying had a wood-burning stove but no furnace, and it became the first of two Detroit winters I lived without any real heat. Which isn’t unusual. People told me their stories about frozen toilets, burst pipes, and small fires started by space heaters. Dozens and dozens of people without heat: ministers, artists, the elderly. It’s one of the first things to go, and January averages in the teens.

I could never get the fire in the stove to burn all night, and I could see my breath all day, even with the fire going. I slept in a wool cap and sometimes my coat, under so many blankets my father thought I might asphyxiate. One morning I sat on the toilet and an icicle the size of a carrot hung from my faucet. When my pens froze, I thawed them out in a pot of water on the stove. I didn’t have hot water.

A neighbor down the street — I’ll call her Sophie — would let me shower in her house. She’s the kind of person who once found two baby pheasants abandoned by their mother and built an entire room on her first floor into a habitat for them. It was complete with tree branches and grass where they could grow and run free. She would leave her front door unlocked so I could go in and shower whenever I wanted. Most people have bars on their windows.

Her roommate was a musician with the voice of a towheaded angel. She would sometimes strum on her guitar and sing sad, soft songs while I let the steaming water wash away the cold and filth from my unwinding body. “You never know how good it feels to be clean,” she sang as she smiled at me, “until you’ve been really dirty.”

Gunshots pierced the night, halting conversation with a shock. The talk resumed without comment, and nobody sitting around the fire ever thought to call the cops. Their average response time is about an hour. We would hear them two or three times a week at that point. It never stops being sickeningly, plainly, frightening.

That summer, 2010, the United States Social Forum, a sort of ideological precursor to Occupy Wall Street, was held for a week in Detroit. More than 20,000 people came into the city from around the world, slept in tents, went to classes and discussions, drank and partied, networked. I would have liked to see more of the Social Forum, but I was working on my house and cooking at a French restaurant. I was also damn-the-consequences in love with a Greek woman who was about to get on a plane back across the Atlantic.

One of the events I did see was a march staged by professional protest coordinators who had come in from California opposing Detroit’s trash incinerator, the largest in the United States. It’s located in Poletown. We have an asthma hospitalization rate three times the national average. If you would like an inside look at Detroit’s Third-World level of corruption, a good place to start is the incinerator. You can safely say there is a culture of corruption in your city when the top two politicians, including a former mayor and city council president pro tem, have been, or are currently in, prison for corruption, racketeering, and the like. One former city councilwoman allegedly requested a bribe including 17 pounds of sausages.

The protest would march down Detroit’s main thoroughfare and past the incinerator, presumably raising holy hell and sticking it to the man. They needed a place to stage the making of the props — hundreds of spray-painted sunflower pickets, miniature incinerators, signs. One of my well-meaning neighbors offered The Yes Farm, an abandoned apothecary where we occasionally staged art and music shows.

I guess no one saw the irony in cutting down real pine trees to make fake sunflowers. Or that a protest to demand clean air would use so much aerosol spray paint. But the real irony came when the Social Forum was over and it was time for the out-of-towners to leave for the next protest.

“What are you going to do with all this stuff?” we asked.

“Why don’t you just recycle it?” they said.

“Where?”

They left it all in The Yes Farm and split, leaving it for us to deal with. Now we had another pile of trash to clean up and nowhere for it to go. So while they were gallivanting off to the next good deed, that shit went into the incinerator and into our lungs.

This was the first time I heard, “I love it here! I think I’m going to move next summer.”

Left: Subtle commentary along Detroit’s Grand River Creative Corridor on the west side of the city. Photograph by Garrett MacLean. Right: The author’s dog, Gratiot, in his backyard. Photograph by Garrett MacLean

I made my kitchen counters out of century-old maple floors, rock-hard and pried from an abandoned soda-pop factory by a neighbor. I plucked my kitchen cabinets from a school that was being demolished. Aside from the cabinets made from old-growth oak, strewn about the school were beakers and other science equipment, books splayed open like dead birds, desks, marble slabs in the bathroom, granite tables, chalkboards that still contained notes. It looked like some catastrophic event had stricken the nation, nuclear war perhaps, and the teachers and students had fled at a moment’s notice. After I got out what I could, it was all pushed into the ground with a backhoe. They say the functional illiteracy rate in Detroit is nearly 50%.

I replaced a load-bearing wall in the house with a laminated beam I got from a collapsed recycling center down the street. During Labor Day weekend, eight of my friends, all of whom have built abandoned houses into homes, helped me lift it into place. It got stuck as everyone was holding it above their heads. I used a bottle jack to lift the ceiling and as I hit the beam with a sledgehammer, my friends cheered with every inch it moved until it slid home. It now holds the entire house up.

I got an 8-pound puppy and named him Gratiot, after the main boulevard that runs up the east side. The date I set to move in was the day after Forestdale’s annual block party to celebrate that year’s harvest, which includes drunken hayrides, pressing our homegrown apples into cider, and bonfires. I moved in with a hangover. I didn’t think it was safe to put anything in my house that was salvageable — plumbing, wires, or heating ducts — before living there, so I had no electricity, water, or heat. The abandoned and wide-open house next door was close enough to touch from an upstairs window. I slept on top of my workbench.

I had a friend staying with me those first few weeks, Chris, a native Detroiter, and his dog Dana. He had a bad breakup and needed somewhere to crash. He’s the rare soul whose vast and hard-won personal knowledge of the world hasn’t beaten him down and made him cynical. When I was heartsick for that Greek girl he told me, “The best way to get over a woman is to get over a woman.”

My house’s original electrical box and all the wires had been stolen, so I set up a new box in the basement. I hooked serpentine wires into the top that would be connected by the power company to the electrical pole in the alley. On top of the box is a switch used to turn the whole system on and off, like Frankenstein awakening his monster. There’s easily enough energy flowing through there to kill a buffalo. I had studied carefully how to set it up, talked to a few electricians, and the power company came and inspected it before hooking up the juice. But ultimately you never know. Plumbing leaks if done improperly, carpentry looks out of joint, tile feels uneven. There’s always a moment of truth, and it came for me when the lines got hooked into the pole by a gruff suburban electrician who looked like he drinks cheap six-packs in an aluminum lawn chair in the backyard. He snickered at my house as he bolted the live wires to the service cable.

“You’re either brave as hell,” he said, looking down at me from the ladder, “or crazy as a loon.”

When he left, I put on rubber gloves thinking they might offer some protection against the current, and told Chris to follow me downstairs. We stood in front of the box like we were going to dismantle a bomb. He held a flashlight and looked serious. (He would later be the one to convince me to buy a gun.)

“All right, man,” I told him. “If something happens, you’re going to have to tackle me off of here because I’ll get stuck by the current, but I’ll probably be dead before you can get to me. It might blow up and kill us both.”

Chris held the light in front of the box and solemnly hunched himself to strike. I said a little prayer and took a deep breath, blowing it out slowly through pursed lips.

“You ready?”

He nodded once.

I stepped up to the box and touched the switch quickly with my fingertip like testing a skillet.

Safe.

I put my index finger on the switch. I looked over at Chris. He nodded.

Click.

It flipped.

Nothing.

I looked down at my chest and at my hands, then over at Chris. He straightened up and took a deep breath. Everybody still alive. Curiously we walked upstairs.

“It’s your house, you do the honors.”

Watching the bulb on the ceiling, I flipped a switch.

Light.

We didn’t say anything for a moment, looking at the shining bulb. Then Chris burst into laughter. We ran around the house turning lights on and off in jubilation, one little victory against the darkness. He leaned back and outstretched his arms, pumping his legs in a happy dance, and I shuffled around the room twirling my hips to the silent music of success. It was the first time I really felt I was bringing something back to life, like performing CPR on a corpse that just took its first greedy gasp of air.

Left: The Detroit Fire Department battle a Poletown fire. Photograph by Garrett MacLean. Right: A wedding party arranges for group photos in front of the trash incinerator. Photograph by Garrett MacLean.

I’ve lived in the house for more than three years now. The neighbors don’t think I’m so crazy. They’ve brought me lemonade while I was working on my house, or they’ve cut my lawn when my mower was broken. They’ve invited me to barbecues and into their homes. I guess they’re happy there’s one more set of eyes looking out. “We’re glad you’re here,” is a refrain I hear often. I’m still very aware I am a young white kid in a mostly black neighborhood, but for the most part people have made me feel welcome. I’m grateful and feel an even deeper sense of responsibility to stay.

The house is comfortable, and I have heat, plumbing, and all the other modern amenities, but there are still rooms to be fixed, still boards on some of the windows, still a basement that floods. Someone keeps breaking into the abandoned house next door and I keep boarding it up. I’m terrified it’s going to burn and take my house with it. That puppy turned into a 90-pound dog who roared as someone tried to kick in my door late one night. I stood at the top of the stairs, wearing little but my boots, shotgun braced, knowing I would end a human life had he tried to come inside. He didn’t.

I built a 34-foot-tall chimney out of bricks I collected from an exploded building. I worked 64 days in a row to afford an $8,000 roof, more money than I’ve ever had at once. On weekends I worked in a restaurant, and during the week I was a substitute teacher in an ultra-high-security juvenile prison.

At the school, I started a program where the students wrote a newspaper. The day before we were to go to our first print, one of my favorite students stayed up all night to finish a picture he drew for the paper, handing it to me just before I walked out the door. It was a pencil drawing with a jagged streak cutting diagonally across the picture plane. On one side of the line was a depiction of what his neighborhood “on the outs,” in Detroit, looked like: broken beer bottles and windows, overgrown grass, gloom. On the other was what he imagined it could have looked like, the place he wanted to live: shining sun, nice clean homes, neighbors, flowers.

Just weeks after he was released from the prison, he was shot and paralyzed.

Last year Detroit became the largest municipality in the U.S. to declare bankruptcy. Our debt is about $18 billion and there is talk about cutting the pensions of people who worked for the city for 30 years and selling the masterpieces from the city’s publicly held fine art museum, the Detroit Institute of Arts. The governor of Michigan, Rick Snyder, appointed Detroit an emergency financial manager with autocratic control over the city’s finances and major decisions; almost half of the African-Americans in Michigan have lost the option to select who will represent them on the local level. The Detroit NAACP recently filed suit in federal court challenging the law as a threat to voting rights and democracy. This bears repeating: In the United States of America, I am not, nor are any of my neighbors, able to select who will lead us locally. We have a mayor, but he can’t do anything aside from what the emergency manager tells him he can. During Word War II, when the auto factories were retooled to make the bombing planes and tanks that won the war against fascism, Detroit was nicknamed the “Arsenal of Democracy.”In the last year or two, though, Detroit has also become fashionable. The New York Times called it a “Midwestern TriBeCa,” The Atlantic a “Magnet… for young, creative people.” Thousands of young, mostly white educated people are moving in. The first chain grocery store in the city since 2007 just opened, a Whole Foods, subsidized by the city, state, and federal governments. The Write a House organization recently made headlines for giving away renovated homes to writers. The boomtown is back.

A nice young couple from Brooklyn just moved in down the street. Bars that were once gritty and dark now look like after-hours Starbucks. Tour buses full of people show up in my neighborhood to gawk at the devastation and the people that live amidst it. People from all over come to take photos, even wedding parties.

Dan Gilbert, the owner of Quicken Loans, has moved more than 7,600 employees downtown. He also just sent a notice to one of my ex-girlfriends, explaining he has purchased the apartment building she’s lived in for the last 16 years and his future plans don’t include her. The city is talking of disinvesting in entire neighborhoods such as mine — literally letting the neighborhood go to seed and removing city services, shrinking the city in what some have termed as “white-sizing”; upstarts backed with foundation money are talking abouttransforming an entire neighborhood into an 2,475-acre urban farm. The state just approved a $350 million subsidized giveaway for a hockey stadium with a suburban fan base that’s going to tear down another portion of the city and push more people out. Of course, the divide between the gentrifying Detroit downtown and the bankrupt Detroit that is the rest of the city mirrors what is happening in a lot of this country.

These changes are making me feel a bit threatened and defensive. Instead of a lone weird white kid buying a house in Detroit, now I’m part of a movement. I shop at the Whole Foods, knowing every step into that store is a step away from a brand-new city that could be. And if someone tries to break into my house again I will not hesitate to defend myself and someday my family. Some days I feel caught in a tide I cannot row against, but these are the realities. Maybe I’m feeling a bit like the good people of Detroit must have felt to be counted amongst the citizens of “Murder City.”

But there’s another Detroit, too, of which I am but a small part. It’s been happening quietly and for some time, between transplants and natives, black and white and Latino, city and country — tiny acts of kindness repeated thousands of times over, little gardens and lots of space, long meetings and mowing grass that isn’t yours. It’s baling hay.

It’s the Detroit that’s saving itself. The Detroit that’s building something brand-new out of the cinders of consumerism and racism and escape. I’ve attended a four-person funeral for a stillborn baby that could have been saved but for poverty. I’ve nearly been shot by the police during a stop-and-frisk. I’ve seen three structure fires within a block of my house. But I’ve also walked out of my house to see hundreds of tiny snowmen built by neighborhood children. I’ve seen tears in the eyes of a grown man releasing a baby raccoon into a city park that he had saved from being beaten to death by teenagers. Some scrappy teachers just opened a school in a formerly abandoned building behind my house. I stretched a ladder through the missing window of the abandoned house next door and nailed it to the kitchen floor to reach the peak of my own roof.

As we rebuild this ashen city, we’re deciding on an epic scale what we value as Americans in the 21st century. The American Dream is alive in Detroit, even if it flickers. I hope this time it includes that kid who drew a picture of two neighborhoods and was shot in the one he went back to.

I’m not certain I’ve accomplished anything other than taking one abandoned home off the street, teaching a few kids how to read, or bearing witness to a something larger than myself. I’m not certain I’ve become an example to anyone or necessarily changed a whole lot for the better. But I’m still here. I go to bed and I wake up every day in Detroit, in a house I built with my own hands. Sometimes success means just holding on.

As a friend who grew up in Poletown put it, “We want things to flourish, but we want them to have roots.”

I recently interviewed Oliver who contributed to an article entitled ‘Why Architects Need To Get Back Onto The Construction Site’. Below is my full interview with Oliver who talks about his experience of working within the dual industries of Architecture and building.

An interview with Clinton Cole founder of CplusC, also a successful Architect and Builder can be found here. Both Clinton and Oliver raise a number of interesting questions, themes, opportunities, advantages and liabilities that exist when operating in his unique position.

LB: Rather than separating the two trades, why do you practice as both an Architect and Builder? 

OS: By the end of high school I knew I wanted to do something around design and sustainability. I’d written off architecture because I was terrible at maths (in my last test I answered every question and got zero…) but I now realize this was because it was taught in such an abstract way, I couldn’t pin the concepts to anything. I have quite strong views on mathematics education, but that’s another story.

About two hours after my last HSC exam, a friend called me and said his Mums friends son was building a house and wanted a labourer for a day tomorrow. Was I interested? I had nothing better to do and turned up the next morning to do 12 hours of hard work which I loved. Dan, my boss had studied three years of architecture and was building this pair of houses he’d designed for his eccentric parents in Vine St, Chippendale. He didn’t know much about building, so over the next year, we figured it out together. I still can’t believe I survived that year. Hanging one handed from a tree I was cutting down with a circular saw (with the guard tied back because it annoyed Dan) buzzing furiously in the other hand, installing 60kg lintels on milk crates balancing on a 200mm wide wall with a 3 story drop below us, and having Dan drop a sheet of formply three stories about a foot from my head were some of the highlights.

During those heady times I decided I wanted to design, build and develop benchmark sustainable properties to demonstrate to the development industry that environmental and economic prerogatives can co-exist, even complement each other. The dream hasn’t changed, its just taken a lot longer than I had anticipated with various distractions along the way.

Architect: Utz Sanby Architects, Builder: Steele Associates. Image Source

LB: Can you describe your work and the most rewarding aspect operating in both Architecture and building?

OS: My work can be loosely divided into 4 categories. Design, construction, people, and money. What I enjoy most about each is:

Design: This is the creative stimulation I feel so lucky t have as part of my job. Architects tend to bemoan their lot, but how much fun is this? Construction: Such a joy to be a part of making something so tangible, especially when you’re pushing boundaries and it works beautifully. People: work will never be dull when they’re involved. I really value many of the relationships I’ve formed through work. Money: To me, it’s a tool, a means not an end. Money is distilled energy that can be released in almost any form (except love, of course) and I enjoy doing things I believe in with money.

My favourite project is 88 Angel St Newtown. This is my first development project we’ve designed and will build and market. It’s a manifestation of my original dream – 18 years on…

88 Angel Street, Exterior Rendering

88 Angel Street, Interior Rendering

LB: What are the advantages and disadvantages of both designing and building? 

LB. You currently operate primarily in the realm of residential works. With the understanding that your buildings inform your Architecture and your Architecture informs your building where do you hope to take Steele Associates? 

OS: I’d love to do a rammed earth shopping centre, naturally lit and self-sufficient in energy and water. Ando and Calatrava can join the design team if they like.

LB. Where do you see the architectural industry heading in Australia?

OS: I see the industry as at risk of being increasingly marginalised and focussed on designing the project as a series of digital ‘artists impression’ style models and images for the purpose of approval by authorities and other stakeholders. There’s every chance that architects’ involvement with construction documentation and detailing will continue to decline, and an architects’ involvement with the actual construction process will be a rarity.There’s also a growing place for architects as the ‘GPs’ of design being the node for care of the patient (building), referring to specialists (engineers, project managers and other consultants) for more detailed work.But who can say what the future holds? Perhaps trends will change and architecture will be able to successfully build a stronger role in bringing quality to a greater proportion of buildings.

I’d like to thank Oliver for participating in the interview. If you’re interested in getting in touch or finding out more about Steele Associates, visit their website.