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

PANEL DISCUSSION 05: “archiCRITICAL: Evolving Detroit’s Architectural Criticism”
January 26, 2012 – Panel Discussion: 6pm-8pm, Reception to follow: 8pm-9pm
Tech Two (formerly known as Dalgleish Cadillac)
6160 Cass Ave, Detroit

Architectural criticism is a productive and creative literary practice, challenging the architectural profession to consciously examine itself while simultaneously guiding its evolution. Bound in a mutually constructive association, architecture and architectural criticism contribute to each other in reactive and proactive ways.

But what is the function of architectural criticism (and architecture) for societies consumed with economic, social, and environmental crises, which may or may not be directly related to the built environment?  Should architecture (and architectural criticism) focus solely on the built environment, or more actively engage the societies that inhabit and/or fund them?  How does architectural criticism react to a practice (and public) shifting from a desire for superstarchitecture towards socially conscious, equitable design?  Can this symbiotic relationship be more productive towards this end goal?

archiCRITICAL brings together six distinguished architectural critics to expound upon these difficult questions.

Participants:
Frank X. Arvan – President, AIA Detroit
Jennifer Conlin – Contributor, New York Times
Sarah F. Cox – Editor, Curbed Detroit
Michael Hodges – Fine Arts Columnist, Detroit News
Karrie Jacobs – Writer, Architectural Critic, and Editor, Design Observer and Metropolis Magazine
Reed Kroloff – Director, Cranbrook Academy of Art and Art Museum
Melissa Dittmer – Event Moderator, rogueHAA

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.

rogueHAA would like to formally thank TechTown for their contributions towards this event.  More imformation on TechTown can be found on their website, http://techtownwsu.org/.

Dich2otomy from HAA on Vimeo.

As part of the Detroit Design Festival presented by the Detroit Creative Corridor Center, rogueHAA has installed “Dich2otomy” an architectural installation inside Lafayette Greens Urban Garden. It will be open during the remainder of the Detroit Design Festival.

“Waters are spring and origin, the reservoir of all the possibilities of existence; they precede every form and support every creation.”-Mircea Eliade

Waters in their various states are imbued with deep symbolic significance as well as cultural, economic and physical necessity. In whatever form or context, waters invariably retain their greatest natural function; they disintegrate, abolish forms; they are at once purifying and regenerating. This installation seeks to position itself at the center of this tenuous duality of city and nature by celebrating the intricate and ever-changing relationship between the two. The constructed threshold provides a lens through which both historic city and natural environment are simultaneously reflected and distorted, challenging the viewer to engage with these changing layers of complexity.

more imagery

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

Since as early as the 1960’s, there has been a narrow yet persistent thread of architectural design dedicated to inflatable structures. From Rehner Banham’s, Environment Bubble (1965) to the more recent Rem Koolhaas/Cecil Balmond collaboration at the Serpentine Gallery (2007) and Kengo Kuma’s Tea House at the Museum fur Angewandte Kunst in Frankfurt (2008), these bulbous spaces have challenged traditional construction techniques and patterns of occupancy. Without traditional compression supports like walls or columns, the form of these buildings becomes a direct translation of the relationship between the material and air pressure.

At the Amococo installation, this relationship is articulated on a large and complex scale. Architects of Air, a UK based design firm, used translucent vinyl in a range of colors and geometric patterns to create a 10,000 square foot inflatable ‘luminarium’. The designers utilized only natural light through a series of occuli to illuminate the interior spaces. Music streamed throughout the installation, enhancing the sensory experience while mixing with the muted sounds of the world outside. This distinct contrast between the interior and exterior created a dramatic immersive environment which changed throughout the day.

The installation was on view at U of M’s Palmer Field from June 23 through June 26 as part of Ann Arbor’s Summer Festival. However, the installation is part of an international tour so check the designer’s website for their upcoming installations.

Objecthood: Local Artists Respond to the Compuware Art Collection
Featuring artists Corrie Baldauf, Janet Hamrick, Stacey Malasky, Senghor Reid, and Alison Wong. Objecthood opens to the public starting June 9th inside Boutique: A Compuware Gallery, located at 99 Monroe Street, between Farmer and Randolph. The exhibition will be open every Friday until July 8 from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

click here for more information

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.