Archive for August, 2010
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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. …