![Michigan Theater, Detroit, in 1927 (left) and 2005 (right).
“The old Michigan Theater is one of the most suggestive sights in the whole city of Detroit: neither an abandoned ruin nor a precious, restored fetish, but a working statement about making do with the past. The tenants of the offices adjacent to the theater threatened to move out unless they were provided with secure parking, so that’s what the landlord improvised out of the otherwise useless auditorium. And that is the genius of the place. One can only marvel at the dramatic parable being enacted by the current occupants — the returnees — who drive in and out of the vast space, past the former ticket booth, brought daily into conversation with the past, and what our desires have made of it: the desire to ride Henry Ford’s cars out of town, onward to a better life that lay, we imagined, beyond the city. But still the city is here, outmoded and abandoned but necessarily returned to, that contradictory fact of life rendered in an architectural colloquy so extraordinary it cannot help but be felt.”
Jerry Herron, The Forgetting Machine: Notes Toward a History of Detroit [via @urbanverse]](http://places.designobserver.com/media/images/herron-forgetting-8_525.jpg)
Michigan Theater, Detroit, in 1927 (left) and 2005 (right).
“The old Michigan Theater is one of the most suggestive sights in the whole city of Detroit: neither an abandoned ruin nor a precious, restored fetish, but a working statement about making do with the past. The tenants of the offices adjacent to the theater threatened to move out unless they were provided with secure parking, so that’s what the landlord improvised out of the otherwise useless auditorium. And that is the genius of the place. One can only marvel at the dramatic parable being enacted by the current occupants — the returnees — who drive in and out of the vast space, past the former ticket booth, brought daily into conversation with the past, and what our desires have made of it: the desire to ride Henry Ford’s cars out of town, onward to a better life that lay, we imagined, beyond the city. But still the city is here, outmoded and abandoned but necessarily returned to, that contradictory fact of life rendered in an architectural colloquy so extraordinary it cannot help but be felt.”
Jerry Herron, The Forgetting Machine: Notes Toward a History of Detroit [via @urbanverse]
“A lot is said about the fact that this is the car capital of the United States. Everybody has seen we can get out of our cars every once in a while and survive.”
Carmageddon - LAT
New technology monitors parking spaces
Streetline creates and installs wireless sensor networks to monitor parking spaces. Each sensor uses a magnetometer to detect the presence of large metal objects nearby. “If the sensor is within two or three feet of the car, it will register a huge increase in metal,” explains Zia Yusuf, 45, the company’s chief executive. “When the metal content suddenly drops, we know a car left.”
Paul Rudolph: Lower Manhattan Expressway.
“Back in 1967, Rudolph was commissioned by the Ford Foundation to study the implications of the Lower Manhattan Expressway, Robert Moses’s project for a Y-shaped highway that would have tied the Holland Tunnel to the Williamsburg Bridge and the Manhattan Bridge. The expressway would have destroyed much of what we now know as SoHo and Tribeca, which could not have evolved as they did had the highway been built. I am not sure it is possible to find anyone who regrets that this project never happened…” - Paul Goldberger, The New Yorker
To New Horizons (1940) depicts the “Futurama” exhibit in General Motor’s pavilion at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. It predicts that the “great metropolis of 1960” will be a utopia of “fresh air, fine green parkways, recreational and civic centers, modern and efficient city planning, and breath-taking architecture”.
