Meredith Miller

Olaia Chivite Amigo, Stratton Coffman, Meredith Miller, Vyta Pivo

As the third studio in the first-year graduate sequence, Situation considers architecture as assemblies of people and materials that embody various economies, ecologies, and cultures. Students work through a series of exercises starting from the scale of a stock building component to temporary constructions to life cycle research to programmatic scenarios.

Through field trips, lectures and research, this year's studio learned about concrete, investigating the complicated histories of extraction, production and use. The final project brings the programmatic experimentation of the earlier work to bear on the design of a Visitor's Center for the distributed territories of concrete production in southeast Michigan. While visitor’s centers have typically created a space for people to learn and appreciate sites associated with traditional ideas of nature or human history, these projects reimagine the visitor’s center as a place that produces and maintains knowledge of material processes that underpin contemporary life, as well as the people and landscapes involved in those processes.

Students could locate their visitor's centers on one of two sites: (1) on the River Rouge, adjacent to an aggregate distribution yard, in Southwest Detroit; or (2) on the edge of an inactive limestone quarry to the south near the Detroit river.