M. Arch. I Thesis
Site: Detroit, United States
Advisors: Andrea Simitch, Aleksandr Mergold
Semester: Spring 2011

Museum of Ruins. Return to Nature. Landscape Urbanism. Urban Agriculture. Riverfront Development. Creek Daylighting. New Suburbia. Mass Transit.

No single master plan is capable of revitalizing Detroit due to the immense scale and dispersion of vacancy. Rather than implementing one proposal, intended development is declared through signage. The future city evolves through the inhabitation, hybridization, appropriation and weathering of signs.

Each of the eight proposal types was characterized by considering its relationship to the urban scale, built environment scale, sign subject scale, and signage scale. To project the blurring of sign proposal boundaries, core samples at successively smaller scales were generated. The smallest iterations, with a diameter of 100 m, were developed through a combination of plan, section, collage, and model.