1st Edition
Teaching and Designing in Detroit Ten Women on Pedagogy and Practice
This book provides a compelling and insightful portrait of ten female architects, artists, and designers who explored unique approaches to teaching, practice, and research in the postindustrial city of Detroit. These women explored the phenomenon of a new “ecological urbanism” through their own work in art, architecture, design, planning, landscape architecture, and installation as well as the work of their students.
Teaching and Designing in Detroit provides an eighteen-year snapshot of this work, how it affected the women’s practice, how they influenced student relationships to design and community development, and how their visions are now being carried out in Detroit. This book is organized into sections that group stories according to their focus on practice, pedagogy, and community engagement.
Included in the book is a foreword by Leslie Kanes Weisman, the only female architecture professor at the University of Detroit Mercy in the 1970s, and an afterword by Sharon Egretta Sutton reflecting on how working and practicing in Detroit foreshadowed the future vision now being carried out in the rebounding city of Detroit. An intriguing read for students and professionals, this book will illustrate how these lessons learned can be applied by universities and communities in other postindustrial cities.
Foreword
LESLIE KANES WEISMAN
Introduction: Ten Women Designers in Detroit
STEPHEN VOGEL AND LIBBY BALTER BLUME
1 The Search for a New Hybrid Landscape
STEPHEN VOGEL
2 Feminist Theory in the Practice and Pedagogy of Architecture and Design
LIBBY BALTER BLUME
PART 1
Creating: Intersectional Practices
3 Making in Detroit: Finding a Way to Act
RONIT EISENBACH
4 What Can We Co-Create That We Can’t Create on Our Own?
CHRISTINA BECHSTEIN
5 When Life Gives You Lemons
KAREN SWANSON
PART 2
Teaching: Performative Pedagogies
6 Re-Centering: From Student to Person and From Self-Centered Learning to Civic Engagement
CLAUDIA BERNASCONI
7 Experimental Pedagogy: The Connection Between Teaching and Social Impact
AMY GREEN DEINES
8 Save-As Detroit: Design Process, Storytelling, and Engagement With Place
ALLEGRA PITERA
9 Detroit, My Teacher
JANINE DEBANNÉ
PART 3
Reframing: Transdisciplinary Communities
10 Shifting to an Equitable Development Framework
CHRISTINA HEXIMER
11 Interdisciplinary Collaborations: Detroit’s Shifting Paradigm
VIRGINIA STANARD
12 Reframing and Revealing Detroit
JULIE JU-YOUN KIM
Conclusion
JULIE JU-YOUN KIM AND STEPHEN VOGEL
Afterword
SHARON EGRETTA SUTTON
Biography
Stephen Vogel is Distinguished Professor of Architecture and Dean Emeritus of the University of Detroit Mercy School of Architecture. He is past president of the Detroit and Michigan Chapters of the American Institute of Architects and has received the AIA Detroit and Michigan Gold Medals. Vogel was inducted into the College of Fellows of the AIA in 1994, and is a national AIA Richard Upjohn Fellow and Louise Blanchard Bethune Fellow.
Libby Balter Blume is Professor Emerita of Psychology and Architecture at the University of Detroit Mercy. She has a Ph.D. in Human Development, M.A. in Creative Arts Education, and B.A. in Studio Art. Blume is a Fellow of the National Council on Family Relations and received the University’s Faculty Excellence Award in 2015 and the Women and Gender Studies Lifetime Achievement Award in 2016.
"In this provocative collection of essays by influential women architects and educators, the post-industrial challenges of Detroit, and innovative programs at the School of Architecture at the University of Detroit Mercy to engage them, are compellingly told. Throughout, critiques of, and much-needed changes to, the academy and profession, are illustrated, and a more hopeful, diverse, and inclusive future envisioned."
- Thomas Barrie AIA, DPACSA, Professor of Architecture, NC State University
