Seediness as Art Museum. HOT !

I am back from the Holiday trip.  Blogging will resume momentarily.  I found this article interesting and I now have a small interest (the museum mostly) in visiting Detroit.  Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit - Architecture - Review - New York Times.

DETROIT — Ever since the great suburban exodus of the postwar years, American cities have experienced varying degrees of panic about their identities. One result is that more and more cities have taken on many of the qualities of suburbs to survive. Meanwhile, the once-smooth surface of suburbia has cracked open, revealing a dark underbelly that once seemed to be the exclusive realm of the city.  he new Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit is a radical rejoinder to this seismic shift. Housed in an abandoned car dealership on a barren strip of Woodward Avenue, it fits loosely into a decades-long effort to restore energy to an area that was abandoned during the white flight of the 1970s.

But the design springs from a profound rethinking of what constitutes urban revitalization. Designed by Andrew Zago, its intentionally raw aesthetic is conceived as an act of guerrilla architecture, one that accepts decay as fact rather than attempt to create a false vision of urban density. By embracing reality, it could succeed where large-scale development has so far failed.

Mr. Zago is uniquely positioned to grasp this context. Born in Detroit in 1958, he has vivid memories of the 1967 race riots that led the exodus of the white middle class. He remembers hearing white neighbors talk of fleeing to the suburbs as black families moved in. After departing with his family to a northern suburb, he saw the city decline to the point where it became a poster child of decay.

Only later, as a practicing architect in the 1990s, did he begin to see these decrepit neighborhoods as a legitimate landscape for architectural experimentation. “I didn’t want to romanticize it,” he said during a recent tour of Detroit, “but the city had a depth of character, a real substance and integrity. And while you want to do away with the problems, you don’t want to lose that quality.”

The museum, known as Mocad, presented his first opportunity to explore the tensions and ambiguities — between urban and suburban, resilience and decay — on a meaningful scale. The museum stands midway between the gargantuan Beaux-Arts structure that houses the venerated Detroit Institute of Art — a haunting symbol of the city’s faded civic aspirations — and a recently completed sports and entertainment district on the edge of the downtown business district.

Anchored by Comerica Park, the home of the Detroit Tigers, the entertainment district’s gaudy signs, generic bars and trickle of pedestrians will be recognizable to anyone who has witnessed the transformation of America’s once-vibrant inner cities into generic shopping malls. It is an ersatz vision of the bustling metropolis, sanitized for visiting suburbanites.

By comparison, Mr. Zago draws inspiration from the squatters’ houses, performance spaces, local bars and grass-roots art projects that have sprouted amid the disturbing stillness of the neighborhoods: a kind of forgotten underworld tucked into ruined houses and storefronts surrounded by lots that have been abandoned for so long that they have become overgrown fields.

The architect had no interest in smoothing over the scars, which are worn as badges of pride. The gallery floor in what was once the car showroom retains its red octagonal tile; the other floors are raw concrete. Interior walls — collages of peeling paint, exposed brick and concrete block — have been left untouched so that you can see the traces of where they have been cut open and patched over during years of crude alterations. (Mr. Zago jokingly calls it his Frankenstein building.)

To save money, he placed the museum’s mechanical systems, typically hidden atop the roof, in a corner of a gallery, wrapped in a chain link fence. Warmth is provided by a series of heat lamps suspended from the ceiling, as they might be in a public parking garage. Art works — a video by Kara Walker, a towering sculpture cobbled from the broken fragments of an old acoustical tile ceiling by Nari Ward — are scattered throughout the galleries with refreshing informality.

Comments

[Mike]

You don’t have travel all the way to Detroit to find “seediness”. Newark has it all. A city ravished in riots of the 60’s that has never bounded back. I’ve personally witnessed a mugging, two homeless people have sex on a park bench and a body being dragged out of a lake while living here. The streets are filthy and the crime rate high, plus there’s a brand new performing art center and great museum.