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Posted May 16, 2024, 4:19 PM
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Join Date: May 2024
Posts: 12
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East or Little Village has gotten some coverage lately from the Charles McGee & Tony Hawk designed park/skate park. To the renovation of the church & more. Of special note award winning local artist Charles McGee’s last work turned out to be the collaboration with Tony Hawk on the park & skatepark.
Yet its location near Pawabic Pottery and Cadillac Blvd (the grand old street that ended at the water works park gates) is coming along to be quite the incredible project. Cadillac Blvd has had a decent amount of investment in it recently & rightfully so it’s not another Indian Village in architectural terms though it’s opulent in its own way.
Unfortunately perhaps a 1/3 of the original homes are no more and 1/5 to 1/10 (depending on location) are in need of renovation not to be shiny but to prevent ingress of water and the structural integrity issues that will cause. The Library Collective offers an anchor point for this unique community in an of the lower east side that has become more green than urban in spots. While bordering the Jefferson Ave commercial district & famous neighborhoods such as the Berry Subdivision as well as high rise of the Gold Coast.
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Little Village: The Next Big Thing In Detroit
Forbes
Chadd Scott
LIBRARY STREET COLLECTIVE
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Little Village in Detroit with the Shepherd in
background opening May 18. 2024.
A staunch group of holdouts who stuck by the city through its decades as a national punchline for urban decay and crime, when it was broke and busted, have done the hardest work. Have seen the hardest times.
Today, their refusal to accept that Detroit was hopeless, makes it one of the most exciting cities in America. That’s right.
Husband and wife Anthony and JJ Curis were two of the holdouts.
They’ve poured into Detroit for decades. Easiest to recognize are their Library Street Collective art gallery and The Belt, a rehabbed alleyway the gallery calls home also housing hip restaurants and nightclubs. Then there’s the public art and murals they’ve populated the city with.
Beyond public view, thousands of hours collaborating, planning, arm twisting, petitioning, meeting, pulling, pushing, advocating, fundraising and doing the uncelebrated work of trying to turn a city around.
Their efforts–and those of Detroit’s other unbreakable champions–initially focused on downtown. Having achieved one of the most amazing urban comeback stories ever told there, emphasis has now shifted to the neighborhoods.
On May 18, 2024, the Curises debut their most ambitious project to date, Little Village, a new cultural corridor in the East Village neighborhood. Focused on art, architecture, the landscape, and access to the waterfront, Little Village is anchored by the Shepherd, the former Good Shepherd originally built in 1911.
“I fell in love with the idea that the history of this neighborhood and how it was developed, a lot of that was done around this church,” Anthony Curis told Forbes.com. “Maybe we could find a way to help generate things in this neighborhood around the church in a similar way.”
The Shepherd has been transformed into a cultural arts center, keeping the integrity of the original architecture intact.
“My wife and I are preservationists at heart, we value history and architecture and preservation in general,” Curis said. “Our own home, similarly, we went through a very lengthy restoration and preservation then put that home on the federal historic registry, which is something we also intend on doing with this space.”
Two new gallery spaces have been added to the central nave and a transept. The other transept houses the Little Village Library, curated by Asmaa Walton, founder of Detroit’s Black Art Library, making artist monographs, exhibition catalogs and research materials centered around artists of color who have made contributions to the arts in Michigan publicly accessible.
The Shepherd will also host live performances and larger installations throughout the central crossing, apse, and a mezzanine above the main gallery.
Anthony Curis is a real estate developer. JJ Curis’ background is in finance. The pair could have focused their revitalization efforts in a hundred different and necessary directions around the city. Why arts and culture?
When we met, we had shared appreciation of the arts, and it was something that became passionate for us, traveling and collecting and seeing how art has impacted communities,” Anthony Curis said. “It really snowballed. (Library [/B]
Street Collective) was never really meant to be a business. It was our way of challenging each other on how we could use the gallery as a vehicle for change which is why we've always been so focused on public projects, urban planning, and public spaces, things outside of the brick and mortar.”
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Charles McGee
Charles McGee, 'Play Patterns II,' 2011. Mixed media collage on enamel 120 x 240 in 304.8 x 609.6 cm.
Courtesy of the Charles McGee Estate and Library Street Collective.
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Adjacent to the Shepherd is the Charles McGee Legacy Park.
“In my opinion, Charles is the most important artist in the last century in the city of Detroit,” Anthony Curis said. “His impact on this community, the work he's done both in the studio and public spaces, his focus on staying in Detroit when, as an artist at that time, it was near impossible. Charles stuck it through and lived his entire life here and was passionate about that.”
The sculpture garden features three large-scale pieces by McGee (1942–2021) and debuts the artist’s first figurative work in public sculpture. McGee completed the designs for Legacy Park prior to his passing in 2021.
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To further honor McGee, in collaboration with the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, the inaugural exhibition at the Shepherd will be an expansive survey of his work. “Charles McGee: Time is Now” can be seen May 18 to July 20, 2024. MOCAD and Library Street Collective will present a sister exhibition at MOCAD, titled “Kinship: The Legacy of Gallery 7,” from June 28 to September 23, 2024.
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LANTERN building south facade artist rendering. Oma and Luxigon.
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World renowned artist McArthur Binion oversaw elements of the artistic design. Binion’s foundation, Modern Ancient Brown, occupies part of the third floor of the former church rectory now known as ALEO. Modern Ancient Brown supports the intersection between the visual and literary arts in Detroit and sponsors two artist residency programs–one of which is facilitated out of ALEO.
A boutique bed & breakfast will also open on ALEO’s second floor with the first floor of the rectory centered around communal spaces for events and social programming.
Located directly behind the church and adjacent to the skatepark is BridgeHouse.
Two vacant residential houses have been converted into four small commercial spaces intended for culinary uses. Both houses have been restored and are now encapsulated within a two-story deck providing outdoor space and viewing opportunities into the skatepark, grounds, and stage intimate performances.
BridgeHouse includes a new restaurant by James Beard Award-winning pastry chef Warda Bouguettaya, who will exclusively provide breakfast for the ALEO guests.
The former garage of the Shepherd has been transformed into a cocktail bar, Father Forgive Me.
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A few blocks away from the Shepherd, the Curises are transforming a former commercial bakery and warehouse building, now vacant, into a mixed-use arts hub which will serve as headquarters for two local arts non-profits, Signal-Return and PASC (Progressive Arts Studio Collective).
Named the LANTERN, the building will include 5,300-square-feet of affordable artist studio spaces, and nearly 4,000-square-feet of creative retail–all connected by a 2,000 square foot outdoor courtyard imagined as an accessible community space and open-air lobby.
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https://www.forbes.com/sites/chaddsc...h=64d2ec8862ea
Stanton Yards from its current renderings looks like a slice of what we were originally so excited about the Ralph C Wilson Centennial Park. A slice of nature as it was along the Straits of Detroit before urbanization.
The White Pines naturally along the waters edge (though the coastline was a mixed forest likely heavier with Oak, Elm, Beech & Chestnut) conifers take the longest to regrow after an area returns to nature. Nothing says Great Lakes coast quite like White Pines.
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SO – IL, OSD, and Library Street Collective unveil Stanton Yards, a new arts venue in Little Village, Detroit
The Architect’s Newspaper
Daniel Roche
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In Detroit’s Little Village, a historic neighborhood along the Detroit River, SO – IL is designing a new arts campus together with Office of Strategy + Design (OSD) and Library Street Collective, a Detroit-based cultural agency founded in 2012.
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OSD is responsible for the project’s master plan, formally called Stanton Yards. The buildings by SO – IL will deliver 42,000 square feet of space for arts and culture on a 13-acre site that will double as both cultural venue and active marina. The waterfront will be fitted with amenities for concerts, play areas, and public art installations, and have 85 active boat slips.
The forthcoming project by SO – IL represents the latest addition to Little Village, a multisite arts neighborhood that features new projects by Peterson Rich Office (PRO), the Shepherd, and OMA. “We wanted to celebrate the site’s industrial character, while clearly demonstrating its renewed purpose and identity,” SO – IL’s Florian Idenburg said.
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The project will adaptively reuse four industrial buildings, and maintain unique features like sawtooth roofs.
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OSD’s master plan features one new ground-up building; it will also convert four industrial buildings of mixed sizes into a cohesive multi-use arts campus. The future interior spaces will have room for art-making, workshops, educational programming, performances, galleries, and recreational uses. The overall goal is to build a “porous space in which programs exist in dialogue with the city and one another,” SO – IL offered.
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New ground-up building by OSD
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The design approach places emphasis on the adaptive reuse of existing materials on site at the four buildings. Swaths of metal siding will be replaced with translucent polycarbonate to fill spaces with natural light. Additional windows and skylights will be added to amplify a sense of openness. The overall material palette will have polished metal, hammered concrete, and layered brick to create familiar yet contrasting textures.
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The Detroit project builds on SO – IL’s track record of successfully converting industrial buildings into cultural milieus. Previously, the New York office completed Amant in Brooklyn and Site Verrier in Meisenthal, France.
In signature SO – IL fashion, the future project in Detroit uses mesh: The design proffers a distinctive sloped canopy of the netted material that stretches over an entry plaza on Jefferson Avenue. This is meant to give the site a signature and new public identity.
The street-facing structures will be strategically perforated for public access to draw in visitors to the lush courtyard at the site’s core. The courtyard itself will act as the “beating heart of the campus, supporting community events, art installations, and leisure activities,”
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https://www.archpaper.com/2024/05/so...detroit/?amp=1
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