Detroit has long been a mythic city, a sort of metaphor for America. By the 1950s, it symbolized the American Dream, the power of industry, and our car-obsessed culture. It gave rise to a blue-collar middle class that helped birth a new political order: the so-called "New Deal Order" of urban liberalism. Then, in the late 1960s, it symbolized racial strife, riot and the limits of that same urbanism. By the late 1970s and early 1980s, Detroit had become the poster city for urban blight. It lived the entire life-cycle of American cities within a mere 50-year period, complete with a rise and fall. There was a certain point in the mid-1990s when many wondered if what was happening to Detroit would soon, or inevitability, happen to most American cities. 

On the surface, Detroit is indeed a contradiction. It’s lost 97 percent of its property value in just eight years. And yet, its cheap rent and frontier sensibility is attracting creative types. Mark Binelli, a Detroit native and journalist, helpfully unpacks some of this complexity in his excellent new book, Detroit City is the Place to Be: The Afterlife of an American Metropolis.

Binelli burrows into the city and tells the story of those who have stayed behind and dug in. His book is about those ordinary people who, through living their lives, are doing the hard work of saving the city. What he discovers is that there are indeed creative and remarkable things happening on Detroit’s streets and in its neighborhoods. At the same time, he stresses that all this attention on the new urban pioneers, those hipsters, artists, and entrepreneurs constantly being painted as the saviors of the city, misses the point of what is real and what is most likely to save the city – if anything can. Detroit is big and its problems equally massive. And no small band of artists can do it alone. 

As a majority-black city, how Detroit comes back, if it comes back at all, is going to be a black story, Binelli argues. And so he follows the members of a dedicated core of local black activists and community organizations that are seldom the subjects of national news stories. Take one scene where Binelli finds himself in a crowded room that was pulled together for a discussion of how Detroit is being defined from the outside. At one point, a speaker implores the crowd that "we're not gonna let New York City reporters come here and define us!" With that local activist Marsha Cusic, who is black and one of Binelli’s main characters, stands up and tells the nearly all-white crowd, "I don't want to insult anybody, but when you talk about how 'we' need to take this city back, I look at this room, and I'm not sure what 'we' you're talking about." Later, Cusic tells Binelli that "Detroit isn't some kind of abstract art project…it's for real people." 

Ultimately what Binelli uncovers is that amid all the gloom of financial ruin and cynicism about white newcomers, Detroit still has plenty of people like Cusic who are hard at work on practical, on-the-ground solutions. Cusic, the daughter of Joe Von Battle, owner of a legendary Detroit record store, is important because she hasn’t give up on the city, recognizes its past, and is there to educate its present. Binelli follows organizations like the Detroit Blight Busters and nameless groups who rescue stay dogs, plant gardens and put cupcakes in empty store windows. He spends time with Grace Lee Boggs, the legendary civil rights leader and author of the recent The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century. This 95-year old revolutionary, along with her followers at The Boggs Center, have created a resource and model for the next generation of community activists. Detroit's future will depend on the Boggses and Cusics to bridge the past and present to the vitality and creativity needed for the future. And the road Boggs and Cusic are on has suddenly gotten a lot bumpier. 

Top image: A 24-foot long cast bronze arm and fist monument to boxer Joe Louis is seen hanging from a balance suspension on Jefferson Ave at Woodward in downtown Detroit. (Rebecca Cook/Reuters)

For someone like me with a lifelong, nerdish love of what British people call the Tube, the celebration is overdue. Bar a few wonderful exceptions, the arts have rather ignored the Tube (as John Lanchester himself pointed out this weekend), while the few exceptions –the odd Sherlock Holmes story featuring murder on the line or punk hit about subterranean muggings – generally paint it in rather gothic terms

You see, I grew up on the London Tube. Back in the days before parents micromanaged their children’s every step, my siblings and I used our pocket money to explore the network’s farthest reaches every weekend, traveling out to magical-sounding stations called things like Cockfosters and Theydon Bois. Sometimes we’d discover forests or Jacobean mansions, but mostly we’d find a bus depot and the usual blah 1930s housing, though it all still seemed exciting because we were kids, briefly far from home. It was by running around on those rattling trains, pulling faces at people on the platform to deter them from getting in "our" carriage, that I first got to know London, both its vastness and its strange uniformity.

I’m not alone in this. For most Londoners, knowing the Tube comes first, the city second. People usually learn the evocative names of its stations – Angel, Elephant and Castle, Swiss Cottage – long before they attach any knowledge of actual streets and buildings to the name whizzing past the train window. The Tube also helps us make sense of where we live. Intricate it may be, but it possesses an order the city above ground lacks. Despite the London street plan’s illogical sinuousness, the network’s iconic map is lucid and intuitive, imposing a graspable, stylized mental order that users absorb and then project as a grid onto the randomness of ground-level reality.

It’s far more than just a place for orientation and transit, however. The Tube is London’s skeleton, its nervous system and its heart. Parts of it are so old that they dictated the shape of the still un-built metropolis. The network’s earliest lines pushed out into open countryside, and streets and houses only later added flesh to their bare bones. When bombs fell on the city in World War II, it was where Londoners withdrew to safety (though it wasn’t always safe). When terrible, frightening things have happened to the city, intentional or accidental, they have often occurred underground. This rocky history – the history of modern London in microcosm – has made the tube both refuge and living memorial.

Notting Hill Gate, one of the earliest Tube stations. Image courtesy of Flickr user Trowbridge Estate

Charring Cross Station. Image courtesy of Flickr user Brett Jordan

But it’s not all doom and somber remembrance. London’s antique network is also its best side. It’s a reminder that the city was once so confident and forward-looking that it was happy to pump money into crazy new schemes, even when the necessary technology wasn’t fully ready. According to the book How the Tube Shaped London, steam trains made its earliest underground lines so smoky that chemists near stations carried on a brisk trade reviving the nauseous. And when electric trains – among the world’s first – arrived in 1890, they were still so feeble they could pull just three carriages at a time. The network was thus a trial and error laboratory for every future metro system. London’s anything but defeated as a city today, but it still has managed nothing so forward-looking or so brilliantly crackpot since.This could be why its newest line, shiny and spectacular, explicitly references the Tube’s dingy Steam Age past, its boldest stations resembling glitzy, updated versions of a Victorian dark, satanic mill.

Such affection might seem odd, of course, to the thousands who descend daily into the network under duress, taking journeys they don’t like pressed against people they’d rather avoid. Crowded and expensive, the Tube is beset with (improving) delays, and weekend closures for (as announcers love to recite) "planned engineering works." It’s a place of suppressed exuberance, where people give as little of themselves away as possible. In Berlin, U-Bahn users gawp at each other openly, while Madrid’s metro riders often tend to chat. In London, however, people make eye contact only slyly and briefly, otherwise adopting a blank tube mask, or reading.

Canary Wharf Station. Image courtesy of Flickr user IdleFormat

Still, nowhere else in London shows you so effectively that you live in a huge, heterogeneous city, a small, fairly trivial member of a millions-strong mass. In a city where even the rich use public transport (cars take longer), the Tube is one of the few places where you see people from every race and social stratum. And while trains can be cramped, the inactivity of a view-less journey is often perversely pacifying, giving you enforced time for daydreaming – or reading. This makes the arrival of a dedicated set of books on the Tube especially appropriate.  Personally, I’ve read more underground, speeding under the city’s streets, than I have in any library.

Cities across the world are seeing a dramatic increase in cycling. Is this a short lived fad – or are we witnessing the start of a revolution in urban transport?

Students of the Kalindi Colege at Delhi University have received approval to pilot a project that will use the high-speed winds generated by metro trains to produce energy. The team of 10 students and two teachers developed a proposal that consists of small turbines placed strategically throughout Delhi’s 196-kilometer metro network.

Read the rest of Delhi University Students to Harness Wind Energy Produced by Metro Trains

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Bocchignano, Italy.

Street artists worldwide are beautifying crumbling streets, walls, and buildings by filling in the holes with LEGO bricks — which not only makes old structures whole again, but gives the illusion that they’re LEGO buildings that have been camouflaged with plaster or stone.

Tel Aviv, Israel.

We always knew countries outside the U.S. were probably just fake models. Now we know what the models are made of!

Toulouse, France.

Since early January, 30-second, subtitled episodes of "Murder in Passing" have played every 10 minutes (on weekdays) on platform screens throughout Toronto's subway system. The story tracks the investigation into the death of bike courier named Mars Brito in fictional Passing, British Columbia. The suspects include a "green bike boss," a train conductor, an anti-bike mayor, and others.

Among the universal urban issues addressed by the series is the ongoing problem of cyclists and drivers having trouble sharing the road.

"Being a lifelong bike rider and public transit user in Toronto, who doesn't own a car, I spend a lot of time thinking about transit issues — in particular, why Toronto is such a bike-unfriendly city, with too many bike deaths and 'door prizes,'" says writer and director John Greyson.

Recognizing the difficulties of capturing an audience on the go, Greyson embedded one clue per episode to keep interest piqued. He also relied on the general entertainment value of his film-noir style, a number of plot twists, and a good bit of humor. Travelers who miss a spot can catch up online and also get additional clues. Above all, he hopes to spark a discourse on the topics addressed in the series.

"Underneath the pleasures of the genre and the humor, 'Murder in Passing' joins a serious conversation among Toronto commuters about issues of bikes, public transport and gender — issues which affect us all," says Greyson.

"Murder in Passing" is the brainchild of Sharon Switzer, arts programmer and curator for Pattison Onestop, the advertising company that manages the transit screens. Switzer had the idea of engaging commuters in a daily murder mystery as far back as 2007, but it took this long for all the pieces (not to mention the funding) to come together. The Pattison screens reach more than a million riders a day.

"The entire goal of this project is to bring culture to commuters," she says. "It made sense to create a project that commuters could interact with on a daily basis — follow the story over a prolonged period of time on their way to work."

The advertising screens on Toronto's subway platforms run an endless loop of ads, news clips, the occasional public service announcement, and an art project conceived by Switzer. Last year's program included a popular series called "Confessions Underground," which aired short public confessions from residents in cities across North America that ranged from the shocking to the poignant.

"Murder in Passing" is the biggest project on tap for 2013, but there are some others on the schedule that elevate the typical transit art medium as well. In April, the transit system run an annual "book club," with the city's public library promoting a book through Twitter and commuters tweeting responses to prompts on the book that are shown on the screens. In summer, transit art is planning another interactive project that asks people to share their observations of the city.

Switzer hopes to do more mystery narratives but recognizes they ask a lot of commuters, Some want a distraction without a commitment, others might enjoy the series but simply miss the spot each day. Still, she says, she's glad to see "Murder in Passing" finally come to fruition, and hopes the series augers a more progressive wave of transit art.

"It's the most ambitious project I've ever done," she says, "so I'm incredibly excited to have it on the screens."

Images courtesy of "Murder in Passing."

In the center of Chengdu, China, at the intersection of the first Ring Road and Ren Ming Nam Road, the Sliced Porosity Block forms large public plazas with a hybrid of different functions. Creating a metropolitan public space instead of object-icon skyscrapers, this three million square foot project takes its shape from its distribution of natural light.

These two short videos explore the Sliced Porosity Block project in more detail. The first video is a walk-through with lead architect Steven Holl, who provides background to the project’s beginnings, its formal cues, and its performance, as well as enlightening the more cryptic elements embedded within the complex.

This second video offers a different point of view on the project. This first person point of view shows the daily activity the main plaza, where three staggered terraces feature seating areas, trees and large pools of water.

The post Sliced Porosity Block: A Conversation with Steven Holl appeared first on I Like Architecture.

Architects: Cuningham Group
Location: Culver City, California, USA
Client: REthink Development
Area: 8500.0 ft2
Year: 2013
Photographs: Courtesy of Cuningham Group

The new Cuningham Group office is being designed to reinforce the firm’s emphasis on sustainability, collaboration, and creativity.

The new office, which is targeted for LEED Gold certification, will feature a host of sustainable elements. The office building itself is being converted from an existing warehouse, and is located near a bike path and an Expo Light Rail stop. Large expanses of glass and four skylights will introduce an abundance of natural light, while trickle vents will allow fresh air to circulate through the space and exit through exhaust vents on the opposite end of the building.

An indoor garden with native and adaptive plants will filter the office air and create a connection with nature. The garden will be watered and maintained by employees. In addition to the interior garden, a vegetable garden will be grown in the office’s “backyard,” which faces a residential development.

Cuningham Group’s culture fosters fun, creativity, collaboration, and a work/life balance. A full kitchen will be installed to encourage family-style meal time and gathering. There will also be a gallery space to promote sharing of creative ideas. The gallery can also serve as a gathering space when the office hosts functions.