PROJECTS
Anna Peterson - On Broadway
Riley Montgomery - ARGO CINEMA
UNPLUGGED STUDIO
The rising awareness of the effects of climate change calls for a response to a condition in which designers are increasingly compelled to transform built contexts and to address problems that had been confined to the domains of engineering, ecology, or city planning. Building on the urgent need to contest today’s energy politics of containment by reconfiguring outdated aesthetic assumptions, the ‘Unplug from DTE Studio’ invites students to reflect on an environmental awareness of a new clean-energy institution.
Drawing on a hypothetical future when DTE will leave Ann Arbor, the studio will take advantage of the privileged location of the DTE’s historic property of Argo Substation next to the Argo Cascades - today a major recreational green area but a relic of an industrial past for the production of hydroelectric power on the Huron River. The studio will stimulate the persistence of the site’s past, through its electricity legacy to envision a typology intimately related to lighting performance such as a movie theater. An opportunity that will stress the physical, symbolic and environmental importance of using the existing. A framework, in which the students will design a movie theater that doesnt follow a trend of superfluous new construction but considers the uniqueness of reused materials and energy in a more economic way, extending the life of the structures, at the same time advocating for a climate justice future. In a capitalist-driven society, is there still room for the environment? Can we revert the legacy of the opulent movie palaces towards a more ambivalent and playful institution? Can we change our myopic vision of inclusion and sustainability?