A fiction as a solution for Detroit crisis

Detroit is the major American shrinking city, leaving behind vast abandoned suburban neighbourhoods plagued by crime and destruction. The aim of the project is to find what is left of architecture after an economic crisis, sublimate it and transform it through fiction into a proposal for sustainable housing that suggest a hyper contextuality.

As Jean Baudrillard said, America is the “realised utopia” or the original version of modernity where symbolism makes history. This can be contrasted with the European realism of Martin Steinman where the accumulation of primitive history makes reality. The project is at the crossroads of these two contradictory ideas, of this dilemma. This is where fiction begins.\nThe Park family buys the adjoining plot from their restaurant: Bar B-Q to build a family house. It is a big family that lives with its elders, an old couple that sees in the success of their restaurant passed on from generation to generation the fulfillment of the American dream.\nThese small objects such as sheds, diners and motels, seem to be really what remains after the destruction of the city. These buildings resists compared to the usual houses and as Detroit needs reconstruction, it is necessary to compose from its history and therefore of what endures.\nThis curious restaurant has characteristics of kitsch imagery and North American banality. These are extracted, as kitsch as they seems, then assembled into an architectural catalogue that we will then use to generate a project that is in line with reality.\nThe project draws on the volumetry of the spatial incongruities of the dinner by aligning itself directly with it. The house is composed of two volumes linked by a circulation of perpendicular corridors whose intersection generates a patio, a noble element of architecture brought back to the chaotic context of Detroit. The central technical block, evoking modernity, offers a fluidity of circulation. This continuity with European-style reality is associated with the work of symbolism by taking up the characteristics of the diner, such as the fireplace, the tiles, the extensions, the advertising paint, the mirror glass, the plastic canopy and placing them in strategic places.\nBy the collage of these elements and the resumption of the volumes of the diner, the project presents itself as a hyper contextual architecture evoking the paintings of Hopper and Frederick Linden. A hangar-like house crisis-resistant.