Hasta La Ideas

We’ve been championing the new design enterprise bubbling in Detroit—from Dave Seliger’s Route 77 Motor City wrap-up to coverage of Maker Faire Detroit and of course showcasing work from CCS students. But it’s the work of the people on the ground that get us most excited about design opportunities coming out of Detroit.

Longtime Coroflot member Brook Banham and his partner Judith Grubinger Banham recently announced the opening of their design studio, Middlecott, in the historic Penobscot Building in downtown Detroit. The husband and wife team are kicking off their new venture with an Open Studio and Sketchbattle this Friday where designers compete to the sounds of DJ Reverend Robert David Jones and DJ Guttertrash Evan. Guests get to vote for their favorite sketches at the end of each heat. Prizes include signed material from Scott Robertson and Syd Mead as well as some art materials from Utrecht.

Sketchbattle, click for full-size flyer!

As part of the 2nd annual Detroit Design Festival and DC3, the event promises to be a great opportunity for the larger design community in Detroit to get together and celebrate. On this occasion, we took the opportunity to talk a bit more with Brook about Detroit, design and music!

Middlecott Design Studio Opening + Sketchbattle
Penobscot Building, Studio 2100
645 Griswold
Downtown Detroit

Core77: People have a lot of preconceived notions about Detroit. What are some exciting things going on in the design landscape of the Motor City?

Brook Banham: The Motor City is where its at, seriously. Its fresher here then in any other city in America and maybe in the world. Just about no other city can offer what Detroit offers, affordability and an extrememe entreprenureal spirit, these two probably go hand in hand. The entrepreneurial spirit is fostered by all sorts of creatives moving into the city which makes a very diverse and available skill set. If you need something fabricated in metal, wood or rapid prototyping and CNCed, it’s all here. The low overheads and the community spirit make such services very approachable. The economy often works with a barter system because nobody has any cash in the city. All of this is would not be possible in other cities like Boston or San Francisco.

Designers here can take greater risks in their creative approach. In Detroit, designers have a low overhead so they can afford to break out of the mold more easily. You may pay 1/10th of the rent you might pay in a place like San Francisco, which allows you the flexibility and freedom to do what you really want. We just leased a 21st floor 1500sq/ft studio space in the beautiful Penobscot building for the fraction of the price that it would cost in Boston or even Mumbai.

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Volkswagen “Transparent Factory,” Dresden, Germany, Henn Architects, 2001. Photograph courtesy Henn Architects. A car in the harness at the final stages of production.

On September 13th, Canada’s Design Museum—the Design Exchange (DX)—announces the opening of Vertical Urban Factory, an intriguing exhibit curated by New York-based architectural historian and critic Nina Rappaport. The exhibit studies, chronologically, factories around the world in search of inspired design and inventive architecture. While the exhibition celebrates design, it hopes to inspire visitors to re-consider the function of factories in future self-sustainable cities. With the economy in its current state, Rappaport believes this idea has the potential to create and keep manufacturing jobs domestic, something that seems novel in our globalized economy.

The progression of factory design will be on display along a time line from the very beginning up through the 20th century, with more than 30 projects and 200 photographs, models, diagrams and films on display. Specifically, Vertical Urban Factory will look at boundary-pushing city factories—from Volkswagen’s Transparent Factory in Dresden where passersby can actually watch the cars being manufactured, to the definition of functional structure at Henry Ford’s Highland Park in Detroit.

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All photos credited to Ruairi Glynn, a participant of the Unknown Fields Division.

For one week only, deep in the heart of Nevada, approximately 60,000 people make a pilgrimage to the temporary metropolis of the Black Rock City deep in the heart of the barren deserts of Nevada known as the Burning Man Festival.

One such group of intrepid explorers is the Unknown Fields Division (UFD), a nomadic studio run by independent designer, futurist, critic and curator Liam Young and designer, writer and educator, Kate Davies who run annual expeditions with various universities throughout Europe and Asia and travel to extraordinary landscapes to explore the implications and consequences of emerging trends, technologies and ecological conditions. Previous expeditions have included trips to the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone through the Ukraine and the oil fields of Azerbaijan to rocket launch pad of Kazakhstan’s Baikonur Cosmodrone.

This year UFD has coordinated with the Architectural Association (AA) based in London inviting students and other collaborators from the worlds of technology, science and fiction to navigate their way across New Mexico, Arizona and Nevada chronicling a “series of extraterrestrial encounters from the borderlands, black sites, military outposts and folkloric landscapes of the United States from Roswell UFO crash site, through Area 51, the Titan Missile Silo and Biosphere II.

In the last week of August I met the troupe at the apex of their trip at the Eldorado Casino hotel in downtown Reno, a day before the epic journey, to set up their UFD theme camp at the Burning Man Festival. With the help of a school bus specifically adapted to survive off-grid using solar panels and deep cell batteries, we are preparing to spend the next 6 days in the desolate barren alkaline lakebed creating a temporary structure to provide solace from the sun, assemble the first UFD experimental UFO whilst exploring the extreme maker culture and experimental environmental art out ‘on the playa.’

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Win two tickets to the Campfire Session in NYC

In “a quest for the taste of our times,” French output Le Fooding returns to New York for another culinary bash. This year’s festivities, which span five days of well designed events, pay homage to city peripherals around the world. From East London to l’Est Parisien, the Le Fooding…

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What Comes Next? This year’s Interior Motives Design Awards asked students from around the world to answer the brief by entering automotive designs in the categories of interiors, exteriors, visualisation, technology and ergonomics.

This year’s winners will be announced at an awards ceremony at Paris’ Espace Clacquesin on September 26th, the night prior to the first Paris Motor Show press day. Join Chris Bangle, the shortlisted student designers and professional automotive designers from around the world as they celebrate this year’s winners along with the 10th anniversary of Interior Motives, Car Design News‘ quarterly design magazine.

Interior Motives 10th Anniversary Party + Awards Ceremony
September 26, 2012
Espace Clacquesin, Paris
4PM – Midnight

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