A lot has been written about Detroit in recent months: unemployment, bankruptcy, and a failing auto industry. When arriving there, one would surely compare reality to what has been said in the media. But Detroit is a city in transition rather than a dying city. It looks like a semi-empty canvas or an experimental ground that could be embraced by artists and designers. Empty factories lined up in the distance as we drove through the city. Incredible relics of American industrial architecture and modern housing structures are waiting to be found in Detroit. This city has a potential to become a true 21st century American city through regeneration and new design thinking.

Local regeneration projects are mushrooming in Detroit. Last month, the Taubman Center (former GM Technical Center, pictured above), in downtown Detroit, reopened its doors as the new design campus for the College for Creative Studies. The Argonaut building, designed by Albert Kahn, is 80 years old and offers 760,000 square-foot of space. This adaptive re-use project not only intends to educate students from middle, high school, undergraduate and graduate levels, it also hopes to transform the economy of Southeast Michigan and renew Detroit. The Taubman site created 200 new jobs and will bring more than 2000 people to the area on a daily basis, giving an opportunity to provide new customers for local businesses. If you would like to learn more, Chad Reichert, our ‘guide’ while in Detroit, shares his thoughts about the city and how its local community is taking creative steps towards recovery, in this written piece: If you rebuilt it, they will come

Detroit is following the green movement like other American cities with NGO’s such as the Greening of Detroit. It is also looking at design as a tool for social change. Project M recently initiated Plot 63, a project involving a group of designers and local communities. In one week, they transformed a vacant city lot into a community gathering place in Detroit’s North End. Another example is Design99, a retail space that works with experimental design and architecture and attempts to make contemporary art more accessible to the public. The founders of Design99 are also behind Power House Project, a social art project that started with the purchase of foreclosed home in a neighborhood in crisis. “Can super efficient and self-sustained homes be achieved for under $99,000?” is one question. Another is: “what would happen if people moved to Detroit?”

Taubman Center image credits: © College for Creative Studies

General Motors Technical Center, inaugurated in 1956 and designed by Eero Saarinen is America’s largest corporate building ever. Its cost at the time was $125 million, the equivalent of over $800 million today. Otherwise known as the “Versailles of Industry”, this post-war complex is “a reflection of car industry’s consumerist pitch” according to architect Robert A.M. Stern.  Some of its distinctive features are the water tower (pictured above) designed to re-circulate water for the center’s air conditioning system, and the Design Dome (last picture, below) an auditorium and exhibition space of 188 ft diameter width and which is covered by an aluminum skin thinner than an egg shell. With the GM Technical Center, Eero Saarinen pushed technological and architectural boundaries. He used automotive material and assembly line construction methods and also experimented with ceramic glazed brick that were fired in a kiln specifically built on-site by GM. 26 glaze colors were developed in collaboration with the nearby Cranbrook Art Academy.

When the Technical Center opened its doors in the 1950’s, GM published a souvenir guide entitled “Where Today Meets Tomorrow”.  The opening foreword by the company’s president mentions the post-war challenges lying ahead and the rapid technological progress made in the first half of the 20th century. The Technical Center is also referred to as a physical incarnation of GM’s vision “in creating the new and useful (and) in filling the needs and desires of millions of people (…) by applying the best talent, the best equipment and the best facilities available to molding Tomorrow”. Perhaps, by looking at its past, GM can finds a few answers for a more sustainable future.

In 1986, the GM Technical Center was named the most outstanding architectural project of its era by the American Institute of Architects (AIA). In 2000, it was listed in the National Register of Historic Places and the State Register of Historic Sites in 2002. Talks of opening a visitors center have been mentioned in the press but have not yet materialized.

The Design Center (pictured above) boasts an impressive lobby staircase designed by Kevin Roche. The staircase is made of suspended terrazzo slabs that are overlapping each other over a water fountain. Various paintings (including portraits of past presidents and vice presidents) as well as sculptures are displayed inside and outside of the center’s reception area.

Christine Park, Creative Designer at Cadillac, talks to Cities x Design about how she became a designer, the importance of user centered design and why more women should be designing more cars.

Christine Park talks with Cities x Design about her work with Cadillac’s Design Center and the intricacies of designing luxury interiors.