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HYBRID URBANISM.
Landscape Urbanism advocates a purposeful discourse between ecological systems, human activities, and the post-industrial landscape, ultimately manifesting in the deliberate celebration of the urban void. This celebration glorifies the interstitial, so that the void is inevitably romanticized by, and is necessary to, the burgeoning Landscape Urbanism profession. Reliance on the void introduces a basic set of dilemmas: In order to focus on the space between buildings, there must be buildings; planning creative programming between infrastructural systems requires existing infrastructure; implementing a proposed hybrid ecology between urban eco-systems and human eco-systems requires human eco-systems. All of these very specific examples result in a single common statement: In order to have an urban void, there first needs to be an urban, or rather a recognizable urban density.
What if the relationship between building density and void are reversed and the void is now the primary urban component? What does it mean to reclaim a contaminated post-industrial site within a post urban city, a city whose built fabric has devolved into vast stretches of rural landscape? Operating within the current design process parameters, Landscape Urbanism succeeds primarily in high-density urban fabrics such as New York City, Boston, and Chicago. In these cities, individual brownfield sites are easily identifiable as precious, rare interstitial spaces. These voids are ultimately reclaimed, remediated, and creatively stitched back into the dense urban fabric to be utilized by their host city. In post-industrial cities such as Detroit however, the urban condition (building density) has dissolved as the metropolis has decentralized. Neither the city nor the suburbs sustain the density required to find the contaminated land valuable, and thus lack a desire to stitch these abandoned outposts into their community. Combine all of these individual outposts together and the metropolitan region is scarred by larger swaths of contaminated land, further compartmentalizing dissipated downtowns from their thriving suburban counterparts. On the national scale, we can recognize a larger post-industrial megalopolis landscape: shrinking cities left to die back into a growing contaminated terrain. For the City of Detroit, the void is now the majority on a multiplicity of scales. This presents the fundamental challenge of practicing a type of Landscape Urbanism appropriate to Detroit’s post urban condition.
With the Detroit River International Wildlife Refuge Gateway, Hamilton Anderson Associates (HAA), seeks to broaden the Landscape Urbanism discourse by implementing a strategic, multi-scalar design process that reexamines urban and redefines the void.
DETROIT RIVER INTERNATIONAL WILDLIFE REFUGE.
Long known for industry and its environmental consequences, the Detroit area entered the 21st Century a changed region. More than thirty years of committed pollution prevention and conservation yielded waterways and shorelines that once again support wildlife and inspire people. To mark this change in regional philosophy, State Representative John D Dingell proposed legislation establishing The Detroit River International Wildlife Refuge (DRIWR). The creation of this uniquely urban, wildlife refuge reclaimed over 5,000 acres of contaminated soil, diminished wetlands, and disintegrated shorelines once used to fuel the great Detroit Industrial machine. Managed by the US Fish and Wildlife Service since its 2001 inception, the refuge includes islands, coastal wetlands, marshes, shoals, and riverfront lands stretching 48 miles of combined Detroit River and western Lake Erie waterfront.
Charged with the planning and design of the DRIWR Gateway Master Plan and Welcome Center, HAA’s multi-disciplinary design team asserted its sustainability commitment by persuading all active community and client participants of the fundamental value of integrated ecological design. As a result, the Gateway Master Plan and Welcome Center is a living demonstration of this principle which, when constructed, will act as a cultural and ecological mitigator between disparate social and environmental forces. The Gateway Master Plan operates as an ecological threshold on multiple levels.
THE PROJECT: Gateway Master Plan and Welcome Center
A Regional Void. Initially, HAA’s master-plan approach entailed defining void at the meta-urban scale. Prior to the master-planning effort, the former 44 acre Chrysler automotive paint facility site was a regional void, divisive physically (geographically) and psychologically (socio-economically) between Detroit and its surrounding suburbs. Through the proposed transformation of this former paint facility into a park-like setting, the DRIWR Gateway Master Plan recognized the region’s natural and industrial history while proposing an open-educational framework within a hybrid naturalized, post-industrial landscape. HAA’s design process was strategic, deliberately forging relationships between key community leaders, grass roots organizations, and state representatives. HAA conducted design charrettes that engaged all stakeholders in consensus building sessions to establish a budget, program, and vision. Now, the comprehensive Gateway Master Plan calls for a restoration of woodlands and wetlands, open prairie, a new Welcome Center facility, nature trails, a fishing access pier, a canoe/kayak launch area, connections to existing waterways and greenways, and various other site amenities. The Gateway Master Plan bridges the regional metaphorical void, actively pursuing a process in which to cleanse on a multiplicity of scales: re-education of human interaction with soil, water filtration through deliberate site design, and REFUGE for visitors from the urban industrial context and the Detroit metropolitan region.
Void as Threshold. Once constructed, the Gateway Master Plan will create a hybrid void. In a physical sense, the wildlife refuge is an interstial space, inviting the return and co-existence of contradictory eco-systems. The Welcome Center reinforces the performative void by acting as tendon, linking the 5000 acre DRIWR between the city and its suburbs. As physical threshold, the Refuge Welcome Center explores Detroit specific relationships between industry and wilderness, urban and suburban, contamination and regeneration. All elements, regardless of scale, are designed to demonstrate sustainability. Paved surfaces are minimized and porous, lighting is minimal, recycled local materials are used, and stormwater is managed and reused on site. The existing Monguagon Drain is daylighted and naturally filtered before releasing into its historical route through Humbug Marsh. A settling basin and wetland biologically cleans storm water emitted from the drain while providing visual interest to the site arrival sequence. The threshold between water and land is blurred by carving out a new 10 foot high riverbank, giving way to a new emergent marsh backed by a scrub/shrub habitat which slowly transitions as the elevation changes. Excavated material from the settling basin, wetland, and riverbank areas are shaped and then capped with clean fill and topsoil to create new areas of prairie and upland forests, similar to those that inhabited the site in pre-settlement times.
Programming the Void. At the architectural scale, the urban void is perhaps Detroit’s most recognizable symptom of post-industrial decline. Nearly 75% of previously built urban fabric now exists as vacant lots. Although much of the existing factory on the DRIWR site was previously demolished, the remaining foundations and structure were utilized by the proposed master plan and building design. This decision was made not only for the ecological benefits, but to reinforce the site’s historic industrial narrative. The resultant is a proposed hybrid catalyst, a facility that bridges past, present, ecology, industry, density, and void. Designed to represent these contradictory conditions, HAA’s 24,000 square foot multi-level Welcome Center is planned to accommodate multiple stewardship programs; classrooms, laboratories, demonstration facilities, multipurpose areas, offices, exhibition space, and scenic lookouts all aid in ecological education. While the previous factory campus dominated the site with little regard to its ecological surroundings, the proposed building nestles into the new topography, minimizing its visual impact while emphasizing views to the marsh and river. A site-wide pedestrian circulation system tangents toward the Welcome Center, over the earth sheltered construction, along the living green roof, and culminates at a scenic vista. This physical procession builds on the transformation narrative, gently guiding visitors through the site’s heritage and regeneration. Similar to the Gateway Master Plan, the Welcome Center respects both the natural and post-industrial eco-systems; the building is a fluid extension of this new hybrid landscape.
Architecture as Ecology. The DRIWR Welcome Center showcases green technologies as building blocks to repair a damaged landscape. Designed for a LEED platinum certification rating from the U.S. Green Building Council, the Welcome Center plans to be a net zero energy facility through the use of natural ventilation, site orientation, a geothermal well, natural lighting, and automatic lighting control. Additionally, on-site renewable energy sources such as micro-hydro turbines and photovoltaic arrays will produce more electricity than required by the site. The project also aims to incorporate emerging fuel cell technology with local energy provider DTE Energy. The building will meet strict water conservation requirements through the use of captured rainwater for non-potable uses, waterless urinals, and low-flow fixtures. Storm water runoff will be managed on-site through the use of porous paving and green roofs. As a temporal threshold, the Refuge Welcome Center intentionally reveals past industrial errors through strategic landscape architecture and architectural interventions while simultaneously presenting the desired socio-ecological intentions of the same region.
CONCLUSION.
HAA’s approach to landscape urbanism entails, among other aspects, a metaphorical, physical, and temporal filling of the urban void. In Detroit, the void is contradictory and always dynamic.
Conversely, the void also has both spatial and psychological constraints. Therefore, a post-industrial void must be filled by raised public awareness and the ensuing dialogue. The Gateway Master Plan and Welcome Center design utilizes the public participatory process, an education focused programmatic objective, and the narrative of the transformation of post-industrial decay as catalysts to inspire change and promote a new type of sustainable urbanism. As part of the project’s community outreach, HAA was involved in the curation of an exhibit at the Museum Of Contemporary Art Detroit entitled Considering Architecture: Sustainable Designs from Detroit. Included in this show was an HAA designed exhibit displaying the outcomes of this masterplan and architectural design. Just as the Gateway Welcome Center was designed as a catalyst, the exhibit was designed to engage the public on an intimate scale. In effect, the Gateway Master Plan design process is the hybrid, a performative intervention equipped to help people navigate multi-scalar, multi-dimensional urban voids.
