Grand Haven, Michigan Redevelopment
Set in Grand Haven, Michigan, this studio project with Professor Douglas Duany allowed students to explore the future of the small Midwestern city over the next three generations. Amid rising sea levels, dwindling fossil fuel supplies, and a probable return to preindustrial patterns of life, the Great Lakes Region is expected to become a refuge for people relocating from increasingly uninhabitable parts of the globe. Our task as a class was thus to create a master plan that would allow a Lake Michigan town of 12,000 residents to accommodate growth to a population of 75,000. Each student in the class developed a plan for one of seven key areas within the town.
My assigned site was the geographic center of our project area, known as "Harbor Island" (left and below) -- an irregular piece of land surrounded by water and linked to neighboring sites by bridges, causeways, and ferries. Containing few existing buildings, the area of nearly 150 acres was largely a tabula rasa for urban development but required sensitive consideration of mature trees and brownfield concerns associated with previous uses. Under Professor Duany's guidance, I developed a plan to transform Harbor Island into the cultural center of Grand Haven, taking inspiration from the traditional European cities of Bamberg, Bruges, and Venice as I envisioned how a new canal could become the central spine of a thriving urban core. The ultimate goal of the studio's urban design component was to test the model of permanent, high-density, low-rise, walkable new development and infill as a component of the solution to climate change and concomitant population shifts.
ARCHITECTURAL COMPONENT: AN ART MUSEUM FOR GRAND HAVEN
Upon completing a master plan for part of Grand Haven, each student then designed a public building generated by the urban context established in Part 1 of the project. For the Harbor Island cultural district, I chose to design an art museum. While Grand Haven currently has no such institution, the idea of establishing one is consistent with the premises of the studio. If climate change prompts people to move inland from the coasts, the great collections of art in America’s coastal cities will also have to be rehoused, creating a need for new museums in cities such as Grand Haven, which are of the ideal size to thrive under the projected political, economic, and environmental conditions of the mid-to-late 21st century. Set along the canal in my master plan, the proposed museum is designed to house a combination of old and new art collections in a two-story central core with a regular hexagonal footprint measuring 80 feet in diameter and comprising six main exhibition spaces (three on each floor) around an atrium capped by a skylight. Subsidiary wings extending from the faces of the central core are to include a large sculpture court, administrative offices, and an art and architecture library with reading rooms on two levels.
