Several years ago, in a bout of contemplating my future and where I wanted my future to occur, I stumbled upon a variety of people who were doing really interesting things in Detroit. One such group was Design 99. Seven years ago, Mitch, a painter, and Gina, an architect, moved into a neighborhood in Detroit where there were a large number of unoccupied homes. After living there for a while, they opened a storefront design studio and occasional exhibition space. Playing off their name, they offered $99 house calls to anyone with a design problem. Design is often separate from the people it’s trying to affect, so doing house calls was one way to bridge the gap between designer and client.
In 2008, Design 99 bought a nearby house with the intent of exploring what a house can do in the 21st century. This became their first major project: The Power House.
Houses have looked pretty much the same for the past 150 years (and, depending on the house, longer than that) and have served the same purpose and role in people’s lives. In a world where the role of an objects constantly being questioned and re-evaluated, one wonders if the traditional role of a house is still relevant. With the Power House, Design 99 has created a house that produces more electricity than it consumes, making the house an item that is closer to taking care of itself. To make the Power House, they cut a large portion of the roof out and modified it to have windows, with a ventilation system to heat the whole house with passive solar heat. In light of the 2008 mortgage/housing/economic meltdown, there was also an interest in giving a house a value that was irrelevant to the variances of markets, and was worth something on it’s own.
The Power House project resulted in a lot of press coverage, and because of that press coverage, Design 99 has expanded their work. In 2009 Juxtapoz magazine held an auction and donated the proceeds to Design 99. With that money, they bought several houses and asked the artists who had donated pieces to the Juxtapoz auction to come to Detroit and make something with the houses. Those houses all turned out very interestingly. One of them, they knew, was beyond saving, and was turned into an installation art piece more than anything functional. Design 99 cut a piece out of the floor and used it in one of their museum works, as a piece of a trailer connected to the neighborhood machine. The others were more inhabitable, and one artist bought the house that she worked on, to use as an occasional residence and to let other artists stay there.
One goal of the Power House Project is neighborhood stabilization, which involves securing abandoned homes. For a while, Mitch and Gina boarded up unoccupied homes, simply to protect them from intruders. However, there’s nothing aesthetically appealing about plywood screwed over windows, and it’s not very difficult for someone who wants to get into a boarded up house to get in. After a while, instead of boarding up houses, they used a more creative method – protection via confusion. They started to put sculptural plywood creations in windows and doors of empty houses, adding interest and possibly more effective protection to these buildings. It’s funny, though, after looking at different pieces of work, I noticed that the creative protection objects function the same way, aesthetically, as the heartland machine. The Heartland Machine started out as a boat, then evolved into an art object showcasing creative people who are in the heartland of America, instead of on the east and west coast. In the dashboard of the boat, they added two screens, one showing a video of artists, and the other showing a video of the landscape in the heartland. These two works have very different purposes and very different contexts, but the similarities between them are pretty interesting.
In their presentation, Design 99 talked about the different ways people are using art to revitalize Detroit. People talk a lot about how art can help a city, I’ve never heard the different methods articulated. The three main things happening in Detroit are the Heidelberg Project, Design 99, and Corktown. The Heidelberg Project is about filling an area that’s mostly empty, with a lot of houses burned down or beyond repair, using art as a means to fill the space. Design 99 is about art in the community, and what’s happening in Corktown is more about an interaction between art and business. All of them are operating in the same city at the same time, but with different objectives and very different ways of doing things. While I was talking to Design 99, I asked them where they wanted the whole project to be in ten or fifteen years. I’d imagined that they would want to be expanding their efforts with the Power House, and acquiring more houses in a wider area. However, they said that they didn’t plan to buy more houses, and instead wanted to focus more on their work with museums. They still want the Power House to be a part of the community, but they wanted to have someone else operate the community programs that they operate now. Gina said that one of her favorite parts of the Power House project has been playing with architecture on a large scale, which is an opportunity that architects don’t often have. Mitch said that one of his favorite parts of the project has been the immediate conversation and exchange that happens in the neighborhood, and is something that you don’t have when you’re a fine artist working in a studio all day.
I think the Power House, along with everything else Design 99 has been doing, are very interesting. If you’d like to read more about their work, there are a few articles in Juxtapoz (link) (link) and another article in the New York Times that I’d recommend.