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About
Master of None is a design practice dedicated to rethinking architecture’s disciplinary capacities within the complexities of contemporary urbanism.
The practice is directed by McLain Clutter, an architect, writer, and Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan Taubman College of Architecture. Clutter received a Bachelor of Architecture from Syracuse University and an MED from the Yale School of Architecture, where he was the recipient of the Everett Victor Meeks Fellowship. He has worked in design offices in New York, Chicago …
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News
Winter 2015: Empty Pavilion has been awarded as ACSA Faculty Design Award.
Fall 2014: McLain Clutter participated in the conference All Out in the Streets, hosted by the University of Chicago Urban Network.
Fall 2014: City School is published in Plat 4.0, en masse.
Spring 2014: Radical Railbanking and Scenarios for Detroit is published in the Journal of Architectural Education 68-1, Design +, edited by Amy Kulper.
April 2014: Incentive Network is featured on Bustler.…
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Contact
Studio:
McLain Clutter
Taubman College Research Annex
305 West Liberty Street
Ann Arbor, MI 48103
mclainc@umich.edu…
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Empty Pavilion
November 2012
The Empty Pavilion is a meditation on Detroit’s evacuated urban context and an experiment in architecture’s ability to activate a latent public in the city. The project aspires to distribute just enough material across empty space – an element Detroit has in excess – to make that space legible and promote interaction. From a distance, the project engages the onlooker in a visual game of fleeting figuration. The pavilion is conceived as a collection of architectural figures drawn-in-space. …
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City / School
Summer 2011
Entry for the 2011 Cleveland Competition
Assisted by Bryan Alcorn and Katie Baldwin
City/School is miniature city within the city of Cleveland, and a new home for Campus International School. The scheme imagines a future student body for CIS of 1500 students, and locates the school within a bustling enclave of urban activity. The intent is to integrate the diversity and culture of urban life into the educational experience, while stimulating the surrounding city through the school’s presence. …
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The Essential Seagram
July 2013
What is it about the Seagram Building? How has a building so mute, reduced, and presumably self-effacing become the object of so much disciplinary fantasy? Perhaps provoked by its reticence, architects, historians, and theorists alike have repeatedly divined through the Seagram evidence for teleological realignments of our discipline’s history from which to project future trajectories. Changing with the ideological disposition of interlocutor and epoch, the insights the Seagram has granted have varied richly. Through Manfredo Tafuri, for example, …
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Incentive Network
October 2013
Incentive Network aspires to channel private investment to sites that are critical in providing access for pedestrians and bikes across the wide bands of infrastructure currently severing downtown Dallas from the waterfront. The scheme begins by identifying areas where the divisive highways and railways rest on the ground. These zones comprise the best opportunities to bridge across the infrastructure. Areas within these zones are then parceled for development, at allowable floor area ratios (FAR’s) radically in excess of …
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Domestic/Data Occupations
November 2013
With Matt Kenyon.
This project is about the relationship between “big data” and contemporary urbanization. Using Detroit as a testing site, the project forwards design proposals that hack the conventional characterization of urban space in commercial data models.
GEODEMOGRAPHY: The use of geodemographic data has become ubiquitous in the regulation of urban land use and development. Defined as the study of the geographic distribution of demographic data for use in marketing research, geodemography is increasingly influential in …
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Radical Railbanking
Fall 2009-Summer 2012
The use of geodemographic data is common in the regulation of urbanized land and development. Demand for geodemographics has created an industry of commercial providers retailing complex data assemblages, called market segmentation sets, describing synthetic consumer identity groups and linking these groups to their locations in urbanized space through GIS. Among other uses, this data directs real estate development. Radical Railbanking articulates a position from which architects may find agency within the hegemony of geodemographics.
http://www.vimeo.com/101805986
I. …
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Metro-Detroit Faith Territories
August, 2013
Featured in MONU
The received narrative of Detroit’s past forty years is one of epic decline. The gradual loss of the city’s industrial economic base and flight of the white middle class to the suburbs contributed to an immense population exodus. What remains is an evacuated city of ruins with a citizenry composed largely of those without the means to move. Most recently, the city has found itself literally bankrupt, and without the financial resources to continue to …
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Territory Twister
Summer 2011
Territory Twister is a theoretical project sited within the zoned conditions described in Radical Railbanking. The project is located in the southwest side of Detroit, next to Mexican Town and directly adjacent to the popular Mexican Town Flea Market. Territory Twister attempts to gerrymander a material environment for social interaction within an otherwise lifeless neighborhood. The form of the project is determined through an iterative “relaxed” redrawing of the site boundary. The result is a layered boundary …
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Scenarios for Detroit
Summer 2012
Assisted by Se Hee Kim
The following scenarios for Detroit are based on an incomplete process of interpreting the Radical Railbanking zoning map.
Dequindre Cut
The Dequindre Cut is a portion of inactive railway that has been partially converted to a pedestrian path. Recessed thirty feet below the surrounding city, the Cut surfaces north of Gratiot Avenue, where rail once serviced the wholesale and meatpacking industry at Eastern Market. Despite the surrounding blight, Eastern Market thrives as a …
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Onondaga Creek
Spring, 2010
With Mark Linder
This transdisciplinary project proposes that Geographic Information Systems can be converted into a productive tool for architecture and urban design by developing innovative urban modeling techniques using commonly available census and municipal data. Now ubiquitous in urban planning and real-estate development, GIS most commonly uses spatio-demographic data to validate or reify conventional planning practices. This project exploits the ubiquity of GIS by converting data-sets with discrete categories and boundaries into pliable and fluid relational topologies. …
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Imaginary Apparatus: New York 1966-1973
Spring, 2009
In 1966, under threat of bankruptcy and crumbling urban infrastructure, New York City mayor John Lindsay signed Executive Order 10 – a measure intended to attract the film industry to New York. Major productions such as The Night They Raided Minsky’s and Midnight Cowboy were soon drawn to the city. Simultaneously, the city was drafting a significant amount of innovative urban planning policy. One remarkable aspect common to many of these policies is a tendency to understand the …
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Detroit Shape Scape
Summer 2011
The Detroit Shape-Scape is a theoretical project sited within the zoned conditions described in Radical Railbanking, and aspires to concretize the latent publics implicates in that project. The project is conceived as mini city within the city, housing a programmatic diversity characteristic of a vital metropolis. The program includes interior and exterior public spaces, an expansion of the adjacent Wayne State University, student residences, rentable space for craftsmen and artists, stops for existing and proposed mass transit …
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Cleveland: MEDIPLEX CITY
Spring 2011
Once the fourth largest city in the United States and a major industrial center, Cleveland has lapsed into decades of sustained decline. The loss of its middle class population and economic base in manufacturing has left the city financially and physically in shambles. Amidst this perfect storm of bad news, one sector of Cleveland’s economy has been growing prodigiously: healthcare. The Cleveland Clinic, the city’s medical namesake, is now its largest employer and a cornerstone of Cleveland’s economy. …
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Hedgehog House
Spring 2009
Hedgehog House is a summer cottage to be built on sloping farm land in south-western Pennsylvania. The region is spotted with aging timber barns that are remnants of dozens of deserted farms. In lieu of their intended function, the barns have become picturesque follies hidden amidst the winding country roads and mountainous terrain of the area. This project exploits the picturesque nature of the region’s barn structures by borrowing the typical building type and distorting it through a …
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The Desire for the Real in Urban Real Estate
Winter, 2010
New York’s High Line, the highly anticipated park built on an abandoned elevated train line on Manhattan’s West Side, opened to the public on June 9, 2010. The date culminated an eleven-year process of gaining city and public support initiated by a citizen advocacy group, Friends of the High Line. The story of the group’s efforts have been often told: they saved the decaying piece of infrastructure from imminent demolition under the Giuliani Administration, successfully lobbied for …
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Seaport
Fall, 2008
With Thom Moran.
This project was an entry to the 2008 ENYA Competition: South Street Seaport Re-Envisioning the Urban Edge. The competition brief called for the design of a new pier on the East River containing a mixture of community facilities. The authors of the competition hoped that such a structure would help to reconnect the community to their waterfront.
This entry contends that the best way to reconnect the South Street Seaport neighborhood to its waterfront …
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SimCity ShapeScape
2008
This speculative project locates a new high-speed railroad station on the current site of Chicago’s Union Station. The goal of the project is to make the use of high-speed rail a casual part of urban culture. Union Station was precisely the wrong type of building for these goals: it is out of scale to the street-level development in its context, its elevations are blank at the pedestrian level, and its beaux-arts monumentality is prohibitive instead of casual and inviting. …
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Bucktown House
2003
To the northwest of downtown Chicago, sandwiched between the post-industrial landscape of the Chicago River to the east, and largely Hispanic communities to the west, is a neighborhood called “Bucktown”. Originally settled as early as 1833, the most formative onslaught of settlement in community history was the mass immigration of Polish Catholics beginning in the 1870’s, and continuing through the turn of the century. It was during this era that the community experienced its most significant period of development- …
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Core Club
2004-2005
With SPaN.
The Core Club is an exclusive 30,000 sq. ft. lifestyle club in Midtown Manhattan. The project presented the challenge of weaving a cohesive design methodology into a program including a bar, restaurant, movie theatre, complete health club, and library. Since the envelope of a New York City high-rise constricted most formal and spatial notions of architectural cohesion between floors, the design was unified by thematizing and manipulating materials. A series of trademark material were designed (such …
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Convention Center
Spring, 2001
In most American cities, the paradigm of the urban environment as the material index of social collectives has lost its validity. Today, it has become cliché to note that communities are more convincingly defined around one’s prime-time television habits than any architecturally conceived sense of place or belonging. Even the notion that the city is the center for economic exchange and trade has quickly lost ground to technologically enabled exchanges. Beyond the glaring urban exceptions within the United …
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Dayton Street Residence
2002-2004
With G. Goldberg + Associates.
The Dayton Street Residence is a renovation of a typical Chicago six-flat apartment building, located in Lincoln Park. The entire interior and the back wall of the structure was initially demolished in order to convert the apartment building into a single, 9,000 square foot, residence. The back wall of the stucture was rebuilt to include a series of double-height steel windows that flood the entire residence with natural light throughout the day.
The design …
