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News
December 2012: Empty Pavilion is featured on Archinect, A/N Blog, mocoloco, suckerPUNCH, Architizer and more.
November 2012: Radical Railbanking and Scenarios for Detroit is one of two projects included in American Cities 2.5 at the McGill University School of Architecture. The exhibition features work by McLain Clutter and Mark Linder. Thanks to Aaron Sprecher for the invitation.
November 2012: The Empty Pavilion opens in Detroit.
September 2012: McLain Clutter presents Radical Railbanking at the MCA in …
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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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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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Radical Railbanking
Fall 2009-Summer 2012
I. Geodemography
Over the past several decades, the use of geodemographic data has grown ubiquitous in the regulation of urban land use and development. City planning commissions use geodemography to aid in the implementation of policy, and private corporations reference geodemographic data when purchasing, selling or developing real-estate. Demand for geodemographics has created a surging industry of providers, such as Claritas and Axciom, that collate and retail data for commercial use. These corporations collect census data, consumer …
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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
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. These manipulations of …
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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
In-Progress
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. Throughout …