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Lecturers Ellen Donnelly and David Karle awarded first place honor in SUPERFRONT LA competition about Detroit for "LIGHT UP!"

Architecture Lecturers Ellen Donnelly and David Karle were awarded first place for their proposal LIGHT UP! as part of SUPERFRONT’s competition that invited artists and architects to propose a buildable project for 25 square inches of Detroit, located at 13949 Evergreen Rd., in Detroit, purchased in partnership with LOVELAND micro real estate. An interdisciplinary jury, which included Lecturer Craig Wilkins, selected their entry to be constructed by July 2011. LIGHT UP! Is presented as part of SUPERFRONT LA’s exhibit “Detroit: A Brooklyn Case Study.” LIGHT UP! is a 5″x5″x 102″ metal and acrylic armature illuminated by a single thread of LED lights mounted in and emerging from the lantern. The LEDS light a series of helium-filled balloons which hover in the Detroit skyline.

About LIGHT UP!: Detroit sits in darkness. One of every three street lights now shines on main thoroughfares, side streets suffer from decades-long black out. A transparent case, a glass, a horn, a talc*…a lantern illuminates loveland…a soft glow…a ghost-like glow…a whitish-blue glow illuminates the ground, illuminates the sky…a luminious appendage of the lantern flies high above the darkened windows, the empty houses, towards the city lights that once were, reaching towards the sky, towards the stars, fading into the surrounding darkness…Detroit sits in darkness…lit up by a transparent case.

“Detroit: A Brooklyn Case Study” invites not so much a comparison of Detroit and Brooklyn but a calculated misreading. How and where might the logics or circumstances of Detroit operate in Brooklyn? At what scale of intervention or performance could Detroit and Brooklyn become indistinguishable? The exhibit investigates Detroit as a shrinking city, abandoned city, and reclaimed city.

The exhibit is open Jan. 20- May 27, 2011, at the Pacific Design Center in West Hollywood, Calif. SUPERFRONT is a not-for-profit space for architectural experimentation and creative interdisciplinary exchange. Open in Brooklyn since January 2008, SUPERFRONT opened an additional satellite gallery at the Pacific Design Center in Los Angeles in the summer of 2009. SUPERFRONT LA is sponsored by the Design Loves Art program of the Pacific Design Center.

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