Following more than a year of conversations with homeowners, city officials, and community organizers, Build a Chair = Reframe a House was a workshop that connected skill-building with design imagination in support of ongoing efforts to rebuild neighborhoods in Detroit. Diverse individuals, groups, and organizations across Detroit are currently renovating thousands of vacant houses purchased from the Detroit Land Bank Authority (DLBA) into livable homes for themselves and their communities under the guidelines of the DLBA’s compliance program. Within this milieu of construction, Detroiters have created incredible formal and informal networks to support a collective ethos of reuse.

Contributing to this network, our workshop consisted of two parts: HOUSE-CHAIR and HOUSE-WORLDS. After introductions over lunch, participants practiced framing the walls, floors, and roof of a house by assembling versions of our custom HOUSE-CHAIR that physically embodied wood framing techniques common within residential construction. Then, participants inhabited HOUSE-WORLDS where they could experiment with digital tools that conveyed how certain building practices correspond to social practices. Advancing the workshop format allowed us to demonstrate how architects can serve people that the profession has historically not reached, as well as celebrate Detroit as a place for alternative stories of development.