This thesis is a response to the physical by-products of complex and intangible forces within a society. Built on the foundations of an old automobile factory, the creator of our nomadic nation, the Urban Agriculture Facility frames and preserves the auto legacy while still striving to give new life to left over abandoned spaces.

Scaled to the city

Scaled to the block

Scaled to the man

The facility, a wall, creates a hierarchy of spaces within and around it. The extensions of this wall are no longer absolute, allowing for a new porosity to saturate the area.

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This is the exploration of an Urban Agriculture Facility (UAF) in the abandoned Packard Automobile Plant, an update to the concept of factory in the community. The existing plant is over half a mile long, appearing as an inconsiderate and depreciative “wall” to its adjacent residential neighborhood. The UAF perforates the exiting plant to create a “new wall” which grows, collects, and distributes produce goods to the surrounding areas. The factory is no longer a place only dedicated to production, but also for research and education, creating both a visual and metaphorical new horizon.

Kahn’s structure, an artifact from the past, is preserved as a monumental memory of the once proud city. The new skin, cuts, and insertions respect and allow the old structure to be of today. Together, the new and the old complete a unity which projects the events within the facility to be read on the exterior of the building. This delicate interweaving enables a new Detroit to grow from the decay and ruins, preserving the rich memories of the city’s past while creating new possibilities for its future development.