Gräbner’s Mapping Study of Detroit featured on Detroitography

Assistant Professor of Practice in Architecture Lars Gräbner, Lecturer Christina Hansen and their VolumeOne studio began a mapping study of Detroit in 2010. The results of this study was presented in a book chapter, “Mapping the Urban Landscape, Revealing the Archipelago”, included in Mapping Detroit: Land, Community, and Shaping a City, a book edited by June Manning Thomas and Henco Bekkering, published by Wayne State University Press, March 2015. The website Detroitography featured one map from the project each week for twelve weeks, January – March 2016.

Gräbner discusses the mapping project: Although the reductive nature of maps suggests a spatial and compositional truth, the mapping project on Detroit is not meant to reflect objective reality, but rather bears a certain level of indeterminacy.  Indeed, the project is rather meant as a liberating tool for orchestrating the conditions into new, creative combinations. The results of the following investigation might seem to be of morphological and visual nature; however, through the process of mapping, the urban landscape will eventually reveal spatial border conditions, urban transitional situations, productive field conditions as well as coherences in the existing urban context. Turning our attention to the matter of urban perforation as it appears in Detroit, we will find an astonishing potential in the landscape, when looking through the analytical lens of the map.

To see the article: https://detroitography.com/2016/01/11/map-urban-landscape-perforation-in-detroit-2010/

For information about the book: http://www.wsupress.wayne.edu/books/detail/mapping-detroit