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Posted Sep 12, 2023, 3:10 AM
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Doc Love 3.0
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Join Date: Mar 2022
Location: Metropolitan Detroit
Posts: 389
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Nice to see Gilbert getting into the Henry Ford - MSU campus.
^^ When I first heard about the hold up my mind when to the incomplete district detroit and all the tax breaks they got at a time Detroit was being nationally lambasted for giving them out. The whole massive funding package and tax incentives for LCA were predicated on the surrounding development. My first thought was they’re making sure they’re gonna get theirs no matter what if the development is drastically downsized.
I feel bad for Stephen Ross having to struggle so hard to get the innovation center off the ground. It wouldn’t surprise me if the University of Michigan board of governors are looking for a sign of commitment before giving the green light. Developing the parking lots in the middle of their own campus is at least a sign that they will do the bare minimum to make the greater campus a success. It’s all getting a bit frustrating, the board of governors is set to meet in November ostensibly to give the final go ahead the timing of the CoPa project getting settled first fits in with this line of thinking.
On a different note a new model of development is being embraced in Core City neighborhood. One of the biggest challenges knitting back the urban fabric of the city has been how to move forward in neighborhoods just outside the periphery of the core urban areas. Embracing the green nature of these areas is a great way to turn what is seen as a liability into an asset. We’ve seen success on a smaller scale over the last decade in areas with abundant land outside of downtown and the surrounding neighborhoods which are better suited to rebuilding a dense urban environment.
If it has a familiar ring to it don’t worry you aren’t hallucinating the park city concept was a core tenant to post war urban planning. This more organic grassroots approach however is something that’s been visualized since the Future City Detroit plan was released. Implementing it at scale however is something that we had yet to see so far. There are many other areas where such an approach in coordination with the community could help the revitalization take a tremendous step forward. McDougall - Hunt on the edge of Eastern Market, the North End, parts of the Lower Eastside & perhaps even Brightmoor could be potential areas to replicate this model.
Some may remember several years ago there was an attempt by developers to rebrand Core City as west corktown the historic black neighborhood stood up to keep its identity. It seems like a good balance have been achieved giving long time residents the benefits of green sustainable development without gentrification sweeping through and pricing them out. Side note the neighborhood is home to the University of Detroit Mercy School of Dentistry, which my Grandfather my mother and much of her family attended.
I think this development can be a model of what can be achieved without having to spend hundreds of millions to create a healthy sustainable vibrant urban space. There’s room for criticism because ideally residents should have access to resources to resources for similar projects. But I think the criticism towards the end of the article goes too far as there needs to be a balance between protecting vulnerable low income residents especially renters and being welcoming to outside ideas.
A creative focal point in core city doesn’t mean neighborhoods in the Midwest like Petosky - Ostego are all of a sudden going to be over run with mini Dan Gilbert’s. It’s valid to point that the development has catered to young creative types that have disposable income but we’re talking the Grand River corridor in core city. There are other parts of core city that have are doing their own thing that rejected efforts of big developers to enter into the neighborhood. I would like to see local communities empowered through one way or another to be able to create development that suits their needs and that should be a key priority but it’s much easier to accomplish with a successful template available.
There’s a menu of ideas successfully implemented in this project that can be applied as in various forms to other areas of the city, that’s why I find this effort so interesting.
Quote:
Metamorphosis: Prince Concepts Reimagines Detroit’s Core City
Combining mixed-use architectural ambition, greenery and generous public spaces, developer Philip Kafka is building a city within a park.
As I cross the Ambassador Bridge from Canada, the Detroit skyline unfolds to my right. Past downtown’s tight cluster of 19th- and 20th-century skyscrapers, the Renaissance Center asserts a dramatic and slightly isolated presence. The knot of gleaming tubular forms designed by John Portman features a commanding 73-storey tower at its centre; it’s the tallest building in the city and in the state of Michigan. A couple of streets to the north, SHoP Architects’ ongoing redevelopment of the former Hudson’s Department Store site — owned by billionaire Dan Gilbert — will rise to nearly the same majestic height. I’m driving past it.
Just northwest of downtown, the evolving Core City is an entirely different milieu. As in much of central Detroit, the urban fabric is a patchwork. Driving up 16th Street, I see houses, apartment buildings and handsome churches interspersed with stretches of grass and broken sidewalk where homes, businesses and schools once stood. Then, an elongated Quonset hut appears; stretching out in front of the 59-metre span of shimmering steel is a wooden deck and a rich woodland landscape. Another block up, eight smaller Quonset huts are nestled among trees and grasses. I leave the car at the corner where 16th Street meets Grand River and Warren avenues, on a triangular lot; the parking spots are nearly swallowed up by a lush, permeable landscape of junipers, maples, sumacs and native flowers.
(At PARK(ing), vehicle spots are carefully integrated into a lush, permeable landscape.)
Across the street, at Cafe Prince, I meet Philip Kafka, the developer behind the Quonset huts, the parking lot and much of the surrounding neighbourhood — including the coffee shop where we drink espresso and eat raw carrots. An erstwhile professional tennis player turned New York City billboard entrepreneur, Kafka is an unconventional local real estate mogul. His company, Prince Concepts, now owns some seven contiguous hectares of land in Core City. It’s an evolving urban landscape of creative mixed-use typologies, contextually sensitive adaptive re-use projects, and ample and attractive green spaces, all with an emphasis on social interaction — and inventive design.
An aerial view of Core City Detroit, with Caterpillar and True North visible along 16th Street, and Core City Park seen to the left of Redeemer Presbyterian Church.
(Core City Park (left corner) is situated directly across the street from PARK(ing)
The elongated caterpillar (bottom right) and True North (centre left) stand our in a drone view of Core City.
Comprising eight Quanset huts and shared green space, True North was completed in 2017.
Down the block, the “Caterpillar” building, designed by local architect and Undecorated founder Ishtiaq Rafiuddin and completed in 2021, adapts the Quonset hut into a more urban scale. The mixed-use volume comprises eight suites — two live–work spaces, including Undecorated’s own office, and six apartments — and, like True North, harnesses the simple efficiency of the semicylindrical steel form to create high-ceilinged, open interior spaces. Two rows of dormer windows welcome ample natural light and introduce passive ventilation to each suite, while simple plywood finishes and streamlined white tile bathrooms round out the generous interiors. Framing the whole of the 59-metre-long building, a broad wooden deck creates a sort of communal front porch, one that invites interactions between residents, visitors and workers.
A communal front porch spans the length of Caterpillar.
Caterpillar is embraced by a woolly thicket of greenery designed by D.I.R.T. studio founder Julie Bargmann — a landscape architect renowned for drawing out the beauty and distinctive character of industrial and often toxic environments. To complement the street’s majestically gnarly old catalpa trees, Bargmann introduced a careful layering of new plantings, what she describes as a “misfit forest” made up of trees from a local nursery that was liquidating its castoffs at $25 a pop. The result is an eclectic landscape punctuated by the concrete pavers that link the deck to the sidewalk.
Throughout Core City, Bargmann’s pragmatic, humane and often playful ethos — and Kafka’s passion for greenery and public space — continues to shape an evolving terrain. Up the street, she recently worked with Prince’s in-house designer, Andrew Schwartz, to create a parking lot like no other in North America. Aptly dubbed PARK(ing), the 2,230-square-metre site combines a verdant landscape of 78 trees with a porous 28-spot lot that absorbs rainwater and mitigates the impacts of urban flooding; it mediates the reality of a car-dependent community within a welcoming, pedestrian-oriented environment.
PARK(ing) stakes a prominent place at the corner of 16th Street and Grand River Avenue.
The nerve centre of Kafka’s endeavours, however, is right across the street. The 743-square-metre Core City Park is a bona fide urban woodland under a leafy canopy of 87 trees, including flowering dogwoods and locusts. Salvaged bricks and concrete from the adjacent buildings — which were being redeveloped at the same time — have been ingeniously re-used here as the permeable paving for the plaza, its pedestrian paths and its oversized concrete benches.
Re-used bricks and outdoor furniture by Hay animate Core City Park – along with 87 new trees.
Flanking Core City Park, Kafka’s adapted commercial properties include a mix of retail, hospitality and offices. At the east end of the park, Prince and Undecorated converted a defunct radiator shop into Magnet, an upscale bar and restaurant featuring vivid blue tile surfaces, a sunken bar and bold monochromatic lighting — all with a minimalist aesthetic rigour echoing that of the nearby residential interiors.
Facing Core City Park, Barda lights up in neon in the evenings.
At the west end of the park, the conjoined structures of The Pie and The Sawtooth (previously vacant commercial properties redeveloped by Prince and Undecorated in 2018 and 2019, respectively), feature new offices, including Prince’s own headquarters, that benefit from street-level amenities like Cafe Prince (which is operated by Kafka’s firm), a bagel shop, and a commercial kitchen and event space. On the north end of the park, another former industrial building, The Power Plant, has been converted into loft-style offices anchored by a local hub for popular language learning app Duolingo.
“I like to do adaptive re-use projects on buildings with no perceived architectural significance,” says Kafka. “I find a lot of character in them.” To that end, Prince Concepts’ most radical and inventive project to date is arguably 5000 Grand River Avenue. Rafiuddin and Bargmann adapted a long-vacant former grocery store, transforming the deep — and dark — 1,254-square-metre floor plate by carving out a trio of inner courtyards from the rusted-out roof, bringing sunlight and fresh air deep inside.
The admirable work continues. On 15th Street, Prince and EC3 are building 24 new rental homes. Their footprints are carefully planned to preserve existing trees while balancing privacy and openness along a shared pedestrian laneway. Nearby, another pair of vacant industrial buildings are gradually being adapted for new uses, and Kafka, Bargmann and Schwartz are at work on a second major Core City park. So far, excavation has revealed a treasure trove of concrete below the soil. The team is using the blocks to build a public plaza at the heart of the green space. As Bargmann puts it, the aim is to “bring forth the landscape that’s already there.”
Yet Kafka has also been criticized for gentrifying the area. For starters, the homes he builds are relatively high-end properties, where rents start at $1,350. As Aaron Mondry writes in Detour Detroit, Prince apartments are “not affordable to nearby residents or many Detroiters — the median family income in the census tract is estimated at $28,029.” The restaurants have faced similar scrutiny. Reviewing Core City’s swanky Magnet in Detroit Metro Times, Jane Slaughter wrote that “if any restaurant is more emblematic of this decade’s gentrification, I have yet to visit it.”
For his part, Kafka hopes to build more affordable housing in the future. “I’m not good enough at what I do yet to make my housing affordable,” he tells me, explaining that relatively high prices offer an economic buffer that makes development viable. Speaking to Brooker in BridgeDetroit, he expresses a similar sentiment regarding a grocery store. “I don’t have the skills to do that right now, and eventually we will, but we’re not there right now.”
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