Like too many Detroit houses irreparably damaged by disuse, vandalism and fire, the house at 3347 Burnside must come down. With support from the neighborhood, rather than razing it and leaving fallow land, we propose deconstructing the house and reusing the foundation to build a semi subterranean passive geothermal greenhouse. Precedents in contemporary Bolivia and […]

Project Reach Can space, terrain and design facilitate the reduction of intergroup tensions and foster cross-community building? The Farm: Gaming Strategies for Empowering Marginalized Youth investigates this question. Launched as a design and research project, The Farm took off as a series of design workshops organized collaboratively with Project Reach, a New York City-based anti-dscrimination […]

Applied Research Collaborative (ARC): High Wire was funded through the Applied Research Collaborative (ARC), a University sponsored design build seminar that attempts to extend initial robotic research and implementation at Taubman College through the design and fabrication of an inhabitable, architecturally scaled project.  Programmatically, ARC serves a dual purpose as lounge and meeting space to […]

Recovering Plaster as Architectural Substrate     Morphfaux is an applied research project that revisits the virtually lost craft of plaster to explore its potential for producing innovative architectural elements through the use of contemporary digital technology. The research challenges the flatness of modern, standardized dry wall construction and explores plaster’s malleability as a material […]

  Youth Hostel Design Build In the fall of 2010 the Archolab began a series of conversations with the director of Hostel Detroit, a non-profit youth hostel located in the re-emerging Corktown neighborhood in southwest Detroit. Those conversations led to a seminar course during the spring of 2011. The hostel needed an outdoor building to […]