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Artist X. As part of this blog’s ongoing mission to raise the level of design discourse, rogueHAA has created a new series of posts entitled, “Artist X”. This series will highlight local artists, showcasing unique and innovative projects found within the city. By presenting multiple creative disciplines, we hope to build community relationships, spark Detroit specific design dialogue, encourage multi-disciplinary collaboration, and ultimately, strengthen the existing Detroit creative class.
Noah Resnick currently teaches and practices in the city of Detroit, Michigan. He is a full-time professor of architecture at the University of Detroit Mercy, and a principal of uRbanDetail, a small research based architecture and urban design studio that operates under the interrelated concepts of the architectonics of multiple scales; the architect as urban collaborator; and the architect as community builder.
Noah grew up in Miami, Florida, where he attended the Design and Architecture Senior High magnet school (D.A.S.H.). He earned his BArch from the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, and completed his Masters of Science in Architecture Studies (SMarchS) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the Architecture + Urbanism stream. In addition to Detroit, Noah has lived and practiced in Chicago, Boston, and New York, as well as Berlin, Germany where he worked in the studio of Daniel Libeskind.
His professional experience in architecture and urban design ranges from the conceptual and design development of a two hundred thousand sq ft mall/ spa complex in Switzerland, to in depth urban design studies and proposals for very high profile Central Artery sites above the ‘Big Dig’ in Downtown Boston, to the full service design and construction administration of a high-end townhouse building in New York City, to the landscape design of the City Hall Plaza and nearby park in Downtown Brockton, Massachusetts. Most recently, Noah has been a founding member of the design team working to transform Roosevelt Park in Detroit through the design and implementation of a new master plan. uRbanDetail is also currently designing the 2nd location of Slows Barbecue, in Midtown.
Describe your work in three sentences.
I approach my practice under the theory that the entire city wants to be a building. One that is designed and constructed organically with an amalgam of architectural and landscape interventions, as an emergent solution to a community’s needs. Through this viewpoint, I strive to exploit the potential for a detail at the human scale to create a new type of public space at the urban scale.
How do you collaborate with other Detroit artists?
One concept at the core of my practice is to accept architecture as a predominantly collaborative endeavor. I appreciate that my design efforts can only be manifested as architecture through an engagement with those who will engineer, construct, finance, and use the building. And, just as the designer must work in concert with these agents, so should the architectural intervention engage with its surrounding urban condition and its cultural, historical, economic, and philosophical context – which is achieved by working with artists and other creative individuals outside of the construction industry.
What other creative disciplines would you like to work with in the future?
With regards to the ongoing Roosevelt Park project, my goal would be to engage landscape artists in developing the physical presence of the space, as well as musicians and other performers who would help activate the program via our proposed bandshell.
Why Detroit? Has the city (people, place, economy, etc) influenced your work? Please give at least one specific example.
Detroit, to me, is the only really interesting city in America. It is conceptually the most advanced city in the country, consistently 50 years ahead of all the urban trends. At the height of national industrial urban growth in the fifties, Detroit was already becoming a post-industrial landscape with a declining population. And now, the city has the opportunity to reconceptualize the notions of a modern urban landscape, both physically and programmatically. Within these conditions, architects and designers also have he potential to reinvent the nature of our practice.
How can the artistic community help regenerate Detroit?
The city government, as a bureaucratic body, is incapable of finding programmatic solutions for most of the vacant land and structures throughout Detroit. It is up to the creative community to propose and implement innovative and sustainable adaptive reuse strategies for this vacancy, that can usurp the city’s former reliance on manufacturing and single-family housing.
If you could design one thing for Detroit, what would that be?
A viable mass transit system comprised of multiple modes of transportation. Without this, no city has any hope of long-term economic, cultural, and ecological sustainability.
Contact:
noahresnick@urban-detail.com
