PROJECT PROGRAM

motives | program | themes | acknowledgements

index | proofsheet | agenda | individuals | gallery

 

Overview

Your challenge is to propose a design for the Dearborn Intermodal Station. This project must stir the public imagination about cultural and technological change. Obviously the very presence of rail transit in Dearborn indicates a switch away from automobile monoculture, but there is more to this challenge. This is also a time of upheaval between public and private enterprises, an age of personalized and social electronic media, and an era where the idea of design arises in many more disciplines. Technologies of mobility, information, and environment play a distinct role on this project. Several distinct groups will make use of this facility, including commuters, students, visitors to The Henry Ford, people meeting the trains, and railroad and supporting personnel. Yet many more people in the area may become aware of the station as a symbol. How would you create an identity for this regional cultural gateway? Your challenge is to take a position about the role of architecture among these many concerns. The conditions for this architectural opportunity have been years in the making, and involve considerable planning for project collaborations and contingencies, particularly in finance. To intervene at this scale is obviously beyond the scope of this studio. To have witnessed candid exposition of these factors is some education in itself. This project proposes the several guidelines for taming the complexity of these circumstances.

Building

The station will occur at the scale of the existing proposal. Your challenge is to go deeper on a chosen topic, such as materials and assembly, environmental performance, interfaces and information, visitor experience design, or another such theme. Your project should probe one of those, not and not try to solve all of them. It should offer both research and provocation. Your pursuit of expression should not be just in sculptural form (i.e. “trophy buildings.”) Craft is especially vital. This remains the suggested scale for most work in the studio. The existing proposal provides a credible model of program, but you are invited to probe it. By necessity it includes ticketing, waiting areas, restrooms, casual concessions such as a coffee bar or newsstand. It should provide covered exterior walkways. It might also include elements at mezzanine or bridge level, and may add some (any) programmatic element to represent an “intermodality” that is cultural. There are 2 tracks, a 500 ft platform on each side and between, and a bridge at a height to allow double-decked trains. Accompanying retail space is minimal and flexible. Approximate size: 15000 sq. ft.

Site

The existing proposal provides the basic scheme for the surrounding parcel. Immediate connections to bridges and pedestrian/recreational corridors are open to interpretation, however. More attention to the ground plane may be helpful—anything but asphalt and grass. Paths toward adjoining sites may drive some reconsiderations.

Performance

Relative to some buildings of this size, mechanical/environmental demands are high here. This invites an innovative solution, which may invite consideration at the level of the architectural program.

The Henry Ford

The station also houses exhibits from The Henry Ford. Any combination of freestanding objects, kiosks, media installation, and secured gallery space must become integral to the station design. The bridge over the tracks begins an approach sequence to a new visitor gate to The Henry Ford, at a location to be determined. This approach is expected to both dramatize and maintain the time shift in historical frame of reference that is so important to visits here. Introduction of the 21st century must be done with this time-zoom in mind. We believe that historical awareness need not dictate a specific style.

Suspended disbelief

To make this a rich educational exercise, let us imagine that the current proposal is a temporary consensus until the public can identify with something more phenomenal, or at least something more particular.

Heightened reality

Everybody, student and professional alike, needs to explore the increasing impact of information and environmental technologies on the cultural identity, and not merely the performance, of buildings.

 

 

Phases

(Although almost everyone chose to concentrate on the fundamentals of doing a building, we did imagine three distinct phases in the long range planning of this site. Each of these would make an excellent studio.)

1. In the Installation phase, the station is a much smaller demonstration project. This project is not the core of a larger, later station. After its use here it is to be demounted and moved for reuse in a similar role elsewhere or in the collection of The Henry Ford. This phase emphasizes design for assembly, the theatrical aspects of public education, and possibly radical interactivity.This installation is itself an artifact that expresses new chapters in the history of technology. There is no space for exhibits of other things. Approach to The Henry Ford beyond the site of the grade crossing is beyond the scope of this project. Motorized shuttle service to the existing gates is assumed.To make this a rich educational exercise (and not a just a prefabricated box), let us imagine that a patron who shares our broad cultural objectives will sponsor an installation, for purposes of public education.The introduction of a very distinct set of materials, assembly methods, experience of engagement, and minimum of site work all this piece to become a rigorous and expressive piece of construction.

2. The Building phase is the one we have explored.

3. Later, in the Installation phase, station soon triggers urban densification, which becomes both feasible and fashionable as the price of gas drifts ever upward. Best practices in transit oriented development are brought to metro Detroit. Your challenge is to design the a station in relationship to the public spaces around it, as if those will be framed by additional buildout, and as if what happens between the buildings becomes especially important to the urban character. Because the studio as whole will explore a pedestrian recreational corridor connecting the station with The Henry Ford, the Rouge, and the UM Dearborn campus, you may wish to develop that further as an urban amenity.The surrounding parcel should be built out to best density, with buildings for which your concern is their architectural rather than functional type. Facades and street sections are of particular interest. Public open space must become figurative.By now the new approach path to The Henry Ford might be fully developed. The challenge remains as expressed above, but here you might address it more ambitiously, and in relation to the public spaces on the other side of the tracks. To design for buildout assumes prosperity, which here assumes a new economic chapter soon for Detroit and its mobility industry.It is here that urban design can add the most value. Walkable urbanism is where the design professions are increasingly making a difference.