Christian Unverzagt, Assoc. AIA: Adapting Detroit for the CreativeClass Economy
In the broken and disused spaces of a faltering industrial giant, one designer and architecture professor is sowing
the seeds of an entrepreneurial rebirth.
By Angie Schmitt
Christian Unverzagt, Assoc. AIA, likes to design tangible
things: books (more than 40), furniture, buildings, and
interiors. He calls his firm M1/DTW a design studio rather
than an architecture firm. In that sense, he’s right at home in
Detroit, with its storied history of manufacturing—tinkering,
innovating, inventing. What M1/DTW has been doing,
project by project, has been adding sort of a 21st-century
spin to industrial spaces and processes, rebranding and
revitalizing them for a new audience of creative
professionals.
So it shouldn't be surprising that Unverzagt, who grew up in
the Detroit suburbs, has been held up recently as one of the
young creative entrepreneurs helping redefine Detroit.
It was a big moment for the Motor City last summer when
Richard Florida swooped in for an Atlantic Cities video series
titled “Detroit Rising.” Unverzagt was one of the series’
featured innovators, a beacon of promise helping reshape
the public image of this humbled city by drawing on its iconic
history of industrial design. It was just two years ago that
Florida was taking heat for allegedly implying in his book The
Great Reset that trying to save cities like Detroit was a lost
cause. Apparently Unverzagt is one of the things turning
Florida’s head. The relationship between these two men—
one of the world’s leading urban theorists and an exciting
new designer in a troubled city—goes beyond interviewer
Christian Unverzagt, Assoc. AIA. Image courtesy
of M1/DTW.
Signal-Return print shop in Detroit, designed by
M1/DTW. Image courtesy of Nathan Leach-
and interviewee, however. Unverzagt’s M1/DTW performed
the most recent renovation on the Martin Prosperity
Institute at the University of Toronto Rotman School of
Business, where Florida and his collaborators ponder the
preferences of the “creative class” and the shifting
geographic and demographic sands of the American
economy.
Proffer.
Florida isn’t even Unverzagt’s biggest star client. That
distinction belongs to the most iconic Detroit musician since
the Motown era: Eminem. One of M1/DTW’s first projects
was redesigning a recording studio on the banks of the
Detroit River for this renowned Detroiter.
Perhaps already you’ve noticed a theme winding through the
work of M1/DTW. Unverzagt, who also teaches at the
University of Michigan Taubman College of Architecture and
Urban Planning, has developed a specialty in “creative class”
infrastructure. M1/DTW recently turned an old warehouse
into a print and letterpress studio. The space– called SignalReturn -- allows artists and designers to use traditional
printing practices to produce products for retail clients. It’s
an adaptive-reuse concept that would be right at home in
the hipster elite enclaves of Vancouver, Brooklyn, or Los
Angeles. “Moving here and doing the work here, anything I
wanted to get made I could get made,” says Unverzagt. “L.A.
didn’t need me in the way that Detroit needed me."
Designing mostly for entrepreneurs—especially creative
ones—as well as arts and educational institutions, M1/DTW
and its young founder are redefining Detroit’s spaces for a
new type of economy, one where contemporary style
sensibilities are met with a respect and reverence for the
city’s venerated culture of design and craft.
LESSON ONE: Let Your Work Define You
Signal-Return print shop in Detroit, designed by
M1/DTW. Image courtesy of Nathan LeachProffer.
Martin Prosperity Institute at the University of
Toronto Rotman School of Business, designed by
M1/DTW. Image courtesy of M1/DTW.
Founding M1/DTW
“I’ve had a bit of a nontraditional career path. I’ve never
really worked for anyone. I started doing lots of sort of small
collaborations with friends, colleagues, or professors. It set
me up for sort of a project-based practice.
Before grad school [at SCI-Arc] and during grad school, I
started designing books on architects. Those became
projects that allowed me to study other people’s work.
Anywhere I had a computer, I could design a book. I could be
in San Francisco while I was on summer break. I was a bit of
a vagabond freelance designer, doing all kinds of different
projects with different people.
When I was living in L.A., I figured I’d left Michigan for good.
It was an interesting time in that things were really, really
good [economically]. I finished in ’99; the [architecture] firms
were really, really busy. They wouldn’t even look at your
portfolio [before hiring you]; they just needed bodies.
I started my firm a year after finishing grad school as a little
design-build practice, and it’s really kind of grown
organically. For me, the distinction between school and
working independently and working on projects has always
been a little blurry. Because of how things were going, I
thought maybe I could continue working independently. I
still had a studio space. I kept showing up and I had
independent work. Then I was offered a teaching position at
Michigan and I thought, ‘Let’s take this for a year.’
We didn’t start a practice to start a practice; we started
working together because we had work. [Former M1/DTW
partner Chris Benfield] was actually a printmaker that did
welding. He was an artist. We thought we were kind of in
different camps. He approached me because he said he was
tired of designing objects for other people’s space. We had a
series of projects that were all word of mouth. We went
from [designing] a table, to a recording studio, to a hair
salon, to a house in, like, five moves.
For us, our work was our calling card. We put a lot of effort
into that first project and it set a tone.”
54 Sound Studio in Ferndale, Mich., designed by
Chris Benfield and Christian Unverzagt. Image
courtesy of Justin Maconochie.
LESSON 2: Adding Another Layer to History
Detroit Adaptive Reuse
“Given [Detroit’s] building stock, almost all of our work is
adaptive reuse. It’s kind of rejuvenating working within a
former space.
We’re never working within a kind of blank slate or empty
canvas. There [are] all these analogies about the Wild West
and blank canvases. To me, there are just tremendous
opportunities [with adaptive reuse]: the industriousness of
manufacturers, the knowledge base of fabricators, the
general spirit of the place, mixed with low overhead and a
lower cost of living. [Detroit’s] ripe with 100 years of building
stock. And I think the quality of buildings in the urban core
speak to the potential of adaptive reuse.
We’re always just adding another layer. There’s something
that came before us and something that came after.
Sometimes we’re playing with the legibility of those layers,
trying to tell a story. Sometimes we’re trying to be more
forceful. Sometimes we’re trying to be almost invisible. It’s
never a blank slate. In some other cities that are more
densely populated, where capitalism is more or less working
as one would hope, there’s more of a market to respond in
that way.
[M1/DTW is] a ‘recession practice,’ essentially doing all of
our work during a period of general economic decline and
yet working for clients who are looking to double down on
their own ideas and business. Jane Jacobs put it quite simply
that "new ideas must use old buildings.” Fortunately Detroit
has plenty of both, and we've worked hard to find a way to
do something new without always erasing what's there.
Sometimes we get lucky, like with the patina on the brick
walls at the Signal-Return studio, where we didn't touch the
walls at all. Ten years prior to this, we worked on another
project in a similar space (which coincidentally has a similar
nickname—Signal/To/Noise), which was a large reception
area in a former loading dock where we had to scrub the
walls to reveal the patina. But for the most part, that project
was about adding another layer to the history of the place.
Even with more comprehensive renovations, like the Mills
Pharmacy + Apothecary, we're always constricted by unique
existing conditions, even if they are seemingly buried beyond
view. It may be an opaque layer in this case, but we really
work to make it work. Or, perhaps to put it another way, it
really makes us work so that it can do the work.
The thing I like most is designing something I’ve never
designed. And then the thing I like next [most] is designing
something I’ve designed before, because you get to try
again. To me, that’s just design. How can you be curious?
How can you study something and act on it?
LESSON 3: Never Stop Learning
Teaching at the University of Michigan Taubman College
“Participating in that discourse at the university level keeps
me engaged and spirited, thinking about things that maybe I
can’t take up in my own practice. It’s also a way to work at
another scale and think out things, and then roll them into
our own work.
I’m not quite an academic, I’m not quite a practitioner—I’m
caught somewhere in between those two. They definitely
complement each other and keep me honest.
Recent Related:
Jennifer Coleman, AIA: Designing the Memory of Place
RecoveryPark Offers Fresh Start for Detroit with Urban Farming
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