rogueHAA is pleased to announce the next event in its 2011-2012 panel discussion series: Provocations: Challenging Detroit’s Design Discourse

PANEL DISCUSSION 04: “INCENTIVES – Funding Advocacy”
November 15, 2011 – Panel Discussion: 6pm-8pm, reception to follow
Cass City Cinema at The Burton Theatre
3420 Cass Avenue

Detroit’s deep history  of commercial innovation and industrial production has created innumerable stories of prosperity and devastation.  From this spectrum of aspiration and consequence has emerged a fertile environment that gives root to new creativity and opportunity, while establishing a remarkable legacy of philanthropic and institutional support. This environment has created a sophisticated network of resources, where large scale national foundations, anchor institutions, and influential local leaders work alongside small scale arts groups, community development coalitions, entrepreneurs, and development advocates to cultivate locally focused programs. 

In the space of this network, numerous projects are underway, and many more are yet to come.  Our discussion will catalogue these efforts, discuss their impact, and outline new and innovative strategies for grants, incentives and other programs in the future. 

Participants:
Melinda Anderson – Detroit Creative Corridor Center
Heather Carmona – Woodward Avenue Action Association
George Jacobsen – Kresge Foundation
Rishi Jaitly – Knight Foundation
Sue Mosey – Midtown Detroit Inc
Dan Kinkead – Event Moderator, HAA

Following the panel discussion we will post a video and written summary of the event.  We will also provide an open comment board for others to share their thoughts on the dialogue.  As always, this event is open and free to the public.

DICH{2}OTOMY: Architectural Installation – Opening Reception

September 23 | Lafayette Garden | 6-9pm

As part of the Detroit Design Festival presented by the Detroit Creative Corridor Center, rogueHAA is pleased to announce, DICH{2}OTOMY, an interactive architectural installation set in the dynamic context of Detroit’s Lafayette Garden.  The piece is composed of an interactive field of clear columns filled with liquid which simultaneously reflect, frame, and distort one’s view of the surrounding environment. These ‘illuminated shadows’ multiply, overlap, and converge creating a vibrant and dynamic experience through which to re-imagine the city.  While the opening reception will be held on Friday, September 23^rd, the installation will remain in the Lafayette Garden until Wednesday, September 28^th.

As part of the Detroit Design Festival presented by the Detroit Creative Corridor Center, rogueHAA is pleased to announce the third event in its 2011/2012 series: PROVOCATIONS: Challenging Detroit’s Design Discourse. This bi-monthly lecture series began in June and will continue through the end of 2012.  Each panel discussion will invite local, regional, and national figures to discuss what makes Detroit provocative.  Set in a variety of under-utilized, contested, and historically charged spaces throughout our city, each event seeks to challenge the participants through candid discourse and direct engagement of the built environment.  It is the aim of each panel discussion to explore new urban strategies that promote social equity and advocacy.  We believe good design (and good design discourse) is a proactive and critical act, toeing the line between conflict and resolution.  While each event exists for only a moment, the entire series will provide a lasting catalogue of constructive dialogue, informing Detroit’s shared creative consciousness.

Event 03 DEFIANCE : Disobedient Design.

“My agenda is a dislocation of architecture from the narrow confines of professionalism and its development within an expanded cultural field.” – Jonathon Hill’s essay An Other Architect

In Jonathon Hill’s essay, An Other Architect, he outlines a program for supporting the development of illegal architects: creatives that question and subvert the precedents, codes, and laws of professional architecture. An illegal architect may very well be licensed, but deliberately operates in the “luminal space” at the edge of traditional architectural activity, an interstitial creative practice where architecture can be made of anything, anywhere, anyhow, and by anyone.

The Detroit creative community exemplifies the edge of design. For our proposed panel discussion, we will discard the preconceived boundaries of professional creative practice to explore disobedient design. Where, at times, one must operate at the fringes of convention and law to initiate new perspectives on our cultural, socio-economic, and political condition. In cities such as Detroit, conventional means for generating change, reinvestment, and opportunity have had limited traction, and such subversive acts may arguably effect change faster than through standard capital investment or bureaucratic policy.

For this panel, we invited five designers who operate within the vague edge of illegal design activity. The panelist invitations are topically specific, and diverse, to garner multiple perspectives on the issues. In addition, our panelists’ motivations and interventions range in scale and scope. Whether exploring such strategies as tactical urbanism, ephemeral architecture, or urban pranksters… all perspectives will be valued.

Panel Discussion

September 27
6:00 – 8:00 pm
District VII
Detroit River Town District
2690 Wight St, Detroit

Reception to follow
8:00 – 9:00 pm

Participants presenting in the “DEFIANCE” panel discussion include:

• Steve Coy hygienic dress league | detroit projection project
• Mike Han street culture mash
• Erin Kelly lambert, rotherstien, & associates
  
• Justin Langlois research director | broken city lab
• Catie Newell principal | *alibi studio | taubman college
  
• Melissa Dittmer Event moderator/rogueHAA

You can also follow all of our events through our Facebook page.

This Friday, rogueHAA will join hundreds from around the world to celebrate Park(ing) Day, a one day event that highlights the need for more livable and vibrant public spaces in our cities.

During last year’s installtion, pavers and sod where placed on a parking spot at the corner of Gratiot and Woodward. Soon, there was a green patch of space, an unusual site especially when one is accustomed to see a car in its place inste…ad. Onlookers were curious. Drivers paused. Parking enforcement stopped, then questioned, and questioned some more, but finally drove off.

This was the idea — to get people to notice, ask questions, and interact. For those that stopped by, they got the message and left with a smile on their faces.

This year’s theme is Urban Beach. Our Woodward beach will be located between Gratio + Grand River. Take off your shoes, dip your toes in the water, and just relax for a moment. 

We will be grilling at the beach from noon until 2pm.  Join our facebook page and mention it at the beach…get a free hotdog. 

For more information on Parking Day: http://parkingday.org/

To view photos of last year’s installation: http://www.roguehaa.com/tag/parking-day/

For additional Detroit PARKing Day Events: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=158018997616431

lecturesHAA is pleased to announce the second event in its 2011/2012 series: PROVOCATIONS: Challenging Detroit’s Design Discourse. This bi-monthly lecture series began in June and will continue through the end of 2012.  Each panel discussion will invite local, regional, and national figures to discuss what makes Detroit provocative.  Set in a variety of under-utilized, contested, and historically charged spaces throughout our city, each event seeks to challenge the participants through candid discourse and direct engagement of the built environment.  It is the aim of each panel discussion to explore new urban strategies that promote social equity and advocacy.  We believe good design (and good design discourse) is a proactive and critical act, toeing the line between conflict and resolution.  While each event exists for only a moment, the entire series will provide a lasting catalogue of constructive dialogue, informing Detroit’s shared creative consciousness.

­Event 02 MOTIVATIONS: Design Instigators. In today’s trying economic and political climate it is often difficult to continuously produce thoughtful, provocative, and engaging design. Particularly in Detroit, which can be an equally frustrating and rewarding design environment, it is easy to question one’s creative motives. Yet as challenges mount, we have an opportunity to redefine our personal and civic means and methods, to refocus on why these creative initiatives have an even more important role to play.

For this discussion we ask our panelists to give us their motives, their reasons, and their hidden agendas as a way to foreground what inspires them to do what they do. We will focus on process over product, looking at the ways design can incite change through multiple trajectories. These are individuals who have, in one way or another, become catalysts for productive change in their communities and their City. Ultimately, we hope to uncover what their collective motives say about Detroit, its unique challenges, and how the City serves as a critical motivator for substantive dialogue within the City and beyond.

What’s your motivation?

What are your Ulterior Motives?

Panel Discussion

August 16, 2011

6:30 – 8:30 pm

2:1 Gallery

1480 Gratiot Ave, Detroit

Reception to follow

8:30 – 9:00 pm

Participants presenting in the “MOTIVATIONS” panel discussion include:

• Milton S.F. Curry Associate Dean/Associate Professor of Architecture U of M Taubman College
• Kate Daughdrill Artist /Co-Founder of Detroit SOUP
• Gregory Holm Artist/Photographer/2:1 Gallery
• Claire Nelson Owner of Bureau of Urban Living
• Stephen Vogel Professor of Architecture University of Detroit Mercy School of Architecture
• Jamie Witherspoon Event moderator/rogueHAA

You can also follow all events through our Facebook page.

Cass Park Spit & Shine. Join us for a morning of site improvements to Cass Park, including weeding, pruning, general maintenance, and furniture assemblage.  Learn about the history of Cass Park.  Stay for a special surprise appearance at the end of the work day.  Following the morning’s activities, lunch will be served to all volunteers.   If you are able to volunteer, please RSVP on the facebook event page or email cassparkdetroit@gmail.com.

Event Details are as follows:

Cass Park (2nd Ave & Temple)
Detroit, MI
Saturday, July 30 | 8am-1pm

NOW DOCKING.  Recognizing the potential influence of the cruise industry upon Detroit, the Detroit / Wayne County Port Authority commissioned HAA to design a new 22,000 square foot international ship passenger terminal. Officially opening next week at the foot of Bates Street, between Atwater Street and the Detroit River, The Port Authority Terminal is designed to function as both a domestic and international facility, including associated functions such as customs, border patrol, baggage handling, ticketing, and queuing. The building and dock will accommodate Great Lakes cruise ships, tall ships, and other large vessels, as well as the offices for the Port Authority. 

The Port Authority anticipates this terminal will serve as a port of call for the many cruise vessels that sail the Great Lakes each summer, some providing accommodations for over 400 passengers.   Mid-way through construction, the American Recovery and Reinvestment act provided additional funding for the construction of a wharf and an extension to the building, allowing even larger ships to dock at the facility. 

These cruise lines, tall ships, and vessels will ideally make Detroit one of their premier urban ports, bringing tourists and their dollars directly into downtown Detroit. Detroit will offer a unique counterpoint to other ports of more rural locales.  In this capacity, the terminal serves its most important function; a pristine gateway, welcoming visitors with a gleaming reception and ultimately providing direction to the region’s greatest assets.

Additional terminal programming could include:

Cruising the Great Lakes:  Great Lakes and St Lawrence Seaway cruise ships tour international tourists through the Fall color season in late August through September.

Water Taxi Service: The DWCPA has proposed a cross-border water taxi service between Detroit and Windsor. This ferry service could also be extended to domestic port communities up and down the Detroit River.

Conference Facility: The terminal offers spectacular views and flexible meeting spaces for special events or educational opportunities.

Eco-Tourism: As part of the 2008 U.S. EPA Brownfields Conference, of which the DWCPA resided on the Host Committee, eco-tours were conducted as part of a unique mobile workshop. Long-term, the Port Authority would like to link the facility to the International Wildlife Refuge and Belle Isle, via water-based tours.

Eco-Industrial Tourism:  The introduction of Eco-Industrial Tourism via an Eco-Industrial Cruise Line. See previous rogueHAA post outlining this concept.  

Hydrokinetic Energy Generation: The DWCPA, through a DTE Energy Foundation grant, has been studying the feasibility of generating hydrokinetic energy at its facility in partnership with a University of Michigan start-up company called Vortex Hydro Energy. Other partners include the Detroit Riverfront Conservancy and NextEnergy.

For additional information, media links, and cruiseline concepts:

Click here for previous post on the Detroit/Wayne County Port Authority

Detroit/Wayne County Port Authority

Port Authority To Open, CBS

Cruising Towards Eco-Industrial Tourism

NOW DOCKING: Detroit’s evolving waterfront gets new terminal building.

Hamilton Anderson Associates (HAA) is a multi-disciplinary Detroit design firm dedicated to improving the built environment through creative, contemporary design. The counterpart to HAA’s architectural practice is rogueHAA, a design and research studio based in our Detroit office. While HAA focuses on the thoughtful design and construction of buildings and landscapes, rogueHAA operates beyond the traditional practice boundaries to consider post-industrial strategies, branding, media, pop-culture, publishing, the facilitation of design discourse, and the promotion of urban advocacy.

Started in 2008 as an after-hours voluntary design forum, rogueHAA maintains one single goal:  To raise the level of design discourse in Detroit by challenging the public to practice critical, creative thinking.  As architectural advocates, we can provide more for our city’s design community by encouraging creative discourse than through the design and construction of any building type.  We have implemented two complementary efforts that have begun to instigate change within the Detroit community: www.roguehaa.com, an urbanism blog, and lecturesHAA, a multi-topic speaker series.   A third initiative, installationsHAA, is currently being explored by a multi-disciplinary collaborative team.

Our second initiative, lecturesHAA, is dedicated to creating broad, creative discourse through open and collaborative dialogue. Our inaugural lecture program (2009-2010) utilized a common theme: “CHALLENGING DETROIT: (Re)generating Urbanism” and resulted in nine bi-monthly lecture events.  The first six events featured Detroit artists (Design99, Sweet Juniper, Phil Cooley, Craig Wilkens and others) sharing their personal regeneration strategies.  As the events passed, we established quite a following; audiences grew from fifteen to two hundred.  Transitioning to panel discussions, in lieu of single speakers, extended our audience diversity beyond the design community into the community-at-large.  Each event was free, open to the public, and held within a different city space, raising awareness of forgotten sites, and those that illustrated adaptive reuse opportunities. A summary of these nine events can be found on rogueHAA.

lecturesHAA is pleased to announce its 2011/2012 program: “PROVOCATIONS: Challenging Detroit’s Design Discourse”. This bi-monthly lecture series will begin in June and continue through the end of 2012.  Each panel discussion will invite local, regional, and national figures to discuss what makes Detroit provocative.  Set in a variety of under-utilized, contested, and historically charged spaces throughout our city, each event seeks to challenge the participants through candid discourse and direct engagement of the built environment.  It is the aim of each panel discussion to explore new urban strategies that promote social equity and advocacy.  We believe good design (and good design discourse) is a proactive and critical act, toeing the line between conflict and resolution.  While each event exists for only a moment, the entire series will provide a lasting catalogue of constructive dialogue, informing Detroit’s shared creative consciousness.

An onslaught of recent international catastrophes and dogged economic strife has begun to teach the broader design community empathy, compassion, and perhaps, selflessness.  These reactions have bettered a majority of the profession and fundamentally transformed recent design graduates.  Not coincidentally, the market for super-starchitecture is waning. The profession has gravitated toward social equity, conscientious investment, and advocacy.

An alternate mode of practice is on the horizon.  Current moods are shifting towards a more aggressive “public”.  One that passionately argues or fights for what they want, for what they believe in.  Instead of waiting for a catalytic trigger to better their environment, the public is forcing our hands and demanding to be heard.  Egypt…  Tea Party…  Robocop statues…

The design profession is following suit by becoming less reactive in the name of the “public” and more proactive towards producing socially-conscious design.  Sometimes provocative discourse wavers between conflict and solution, but the found space in between can foster a unifying trajectory, allowing everyone to take control of our shared design destiny.

So, we ask you…who’s looking for a fight?

Centered on this theme, we will host nine panel discussions; each event will focus on a provocative sub-theme.

June 2011:                            “AWAKENINGS: Who are you fighting for?”
August 2011:                       “MOTIVATIONS: Design Instigators”
October 2011:                     “DEFIANCE: Designing towards Disobedience”
December 2011:                “INCENTIVES: Extorting Design Funds from a Post Industrial City”
February 2012:                  “CHALLENGES: Designing the Intentional Conflict”
April 2012:                            “TEMPTATIONS: Design as Decoy”
June 2012:                            “FRENZY: Hysterical Detroit”
August 2012:                        “FUEL: Nourishing Urbanism”
October 2012:                     “PROVOCATIONS: Closing Commonalities”

Our inaugural panel discussion is titled, “AWAKENINGS: WHO is Detroit’s design public?  WHO are you designing for?  WHO are you fighting for?” Our panelist invitations are always very specific, and deliberately diverse, in hopes of garnering different perspectives on the issues.  In addition, our panelists and their interventions will range in scale and scope.  Whether exploring creative population strategies, to regional discourse initiatives, to the artistic curation  of a post-industrial city… all perspectives are valued.

EVENT 01 – AWAKENINGS:

Panel Discussion
June 28, 2011
6:00 – 8:00 pm
2:1 Gallery
1480 Gratiot Ave, Detroit

Reception to follow
8:00 – 9:00 pm

Participants presenting in the “AWAKENINGS” panel discussion include:

·  Margarita Barry, Founder + Publisher of I AM YOUNG DETROIT, Founder of 71 POP
·  Matt Clayson, Director of Detroit Creative Corridor Center
·  Eleanore Eveleth, Community Development Program Manager of Data Driven Detroit
·  Megan Heeres, Art Curator + Community Garden + Arts Program Manager of Compuware Corporation
·  Sarah Szurpicki, Director of Great Lakes Urban Exchange (GLUE)

We have updated our website, www.roguehaa.com, by posting lecture videos and summaries of all of our previous events. You will note that the comments portions of all event articles are open to the public, as we welcome the continuation of any public design discourse.  You can also follow all of our events by becoming fans of our Facebook page.

Sunday was the last day of Art X Detroit: Kresge’s five-day multidisciplinary Arts Experience that presented newly commissioned works created by the 2008-2010 Kresge Eminent Artists and Artists Fellows.  A five day artistic celebration that spanned from April 6-10, the program featured dance and musical performances, literary readings, workshops, panel discussions, public art, and special exhibitions.  Located throughout Detroit’s Midtown Cultural Center, the entire event was free and open to the public.  The images above represent only a small portion of the creative pieces seen within one afternoon’s stroll through Detroit art.