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56<br />
CENTER<br />
ARCHITECT THE AIA MAGAZINE JULY <strong>2014</strong> WWW.ARCHITECTMAGAZINE.COM<br />
NEXT PROGRESSIVES<br />
WATERSHED DESIGN<br />
MADE STUDIO IS APPLYING ITS DATA-DRIVEN APPROACH TO DETROIT, REVEALING WAYS THAT THE<br />
REGION’S WATER SYSTEMS CAN INFLUENCE URBAN PLANNING.<br />
María Arquero de Alarcón<br />
(left) and Jen Maigret near<br />
the site of their speculative<br />
project that proposes to<br />
connect Detroit’s Eastern<br />
Market to the Dequindre<br />
Cut, an abandoned railway<br />
that’s being turned into a<br />
public greenway.<br />
Text by Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson<br />
Portrait by Brian Kelly<br />
DETROIT, AMERICA’S POSTER CHILD for the<br />
post-industrial shrinking city, may suffer<br />
from a paucity of residents and resources,<br />
but it’s a boomtown of urban theory. There<br />
is no shortage of clever schemes aimed at<br />
repopulating vacant houses and vacant land.<br />
Jen Maigret, AIA, and María Arquero de Alarcón,<br />
co-founders of Ann Arbor, Mich.–based MAde<br />
Studio, have a slightly different perspective:<br />
What if you look at Detroit not in isolation, but<br />
as a regional system defined by its watershed?<br />
How would that change planning? “We are<br />
interested in different scales,” Arquero says.<br />
“And we are not interested in only focusing on<br />
the metropolitan area.”<br />
Maigret, 41, a trained biologist, and<br />
Arquero, 41, who’s licensed in Spain, began a<br />
detailed analysis of the region’s water systems<br />
in 2011 through a grant from the Graham<br />
Sustainability Institute at the University of<br />
Michigan. Their award-winning project, Liquid<br />
Planning Detroit, considered how watershed<br />
data might inform the future planning of the<br />
city, looking at ground cover, stormwater, and<br />
imperviousness, among other things. Forget<br />
existing grids and boundaries; the watershed<br />
should serve as a lens through which future<br />
planning decisions can be made. “This was an<br />
amazing opportunity to work on our analytic<br />
techniques,” Maigret says. “But the thing we’re<br />
always the most motivated by is how that data<br />
plays out in the built environment, in material,<br />
and in habitable, experiential space.”<br />
The Next Progressives series of emerging-firm profiles is proudly supported by VT Industries.
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