1/20/2024 0 Comments Ruins of rust belt![]() Abandoned for more than 30 years, the downtown property was purchased last year by Ford Motor Company, which will invest $750 million to create a headquarters for its autonomous vehicle division. Spanning 1.2 million square feet, it has been part of the city’s skyline for more than a century. Photograph by Stephen McGee, The New York Times/Reduxĭetroit: Michigan Central Station This majestic 18-story building was formerly one of the grandest railway stations in the U.S. The interior of Michigan Central Station in February 2010 displays both graffitied walls and towering columns and archways dating to 1913. Other industrial sites across the Midwest that are undergoing similar makeovers include: ![]() “They’re what we call really good bones.” The fact that these have brick facades with high bays and large columns and spacings between columns-while that’s not suitable for today’s manufacturing-is ideal for creative office and loft residential,” Shoag says. “There’s a character to these buildings that cannot be replicated. The 1883 GE plant, for example, spans 1.2 million square feet and formerly accommodated a 20,000-person workforce. He said millennials want to live, work, and play in dense urban spaces, which means sites such as the GE plant have suddenly become desirable because their sheer size can encompass everything new residents need in what will be an 18-hour district. In Fort Wayne, Indiana, developer Jeff Kingsbury is in the process of transforming a 39-acre former General Electric plant into Electric Works, a multi-use building that will encompass entertainment, office space, a public school, and a tech hub. That’s pretty attractive when you need support both financially and politically.” “But in these cases they’re stepping into situations where the local city council is cooperative. “Typically it can be really hard for a developer to repurpose a site,” he says. Find out what the teams proposed after the break.Pick a Rust Belt city and you’ll likely find a relic from its glory days-an abandoned car factory, steel plant, or manufacturing facility-that serves as a reminder of its industrial past more than a half century ago.Īfter decades of disuse, many of these sites-some sprawling up to 5 million square feet-are transforming cities including South Bend, Indiana, and Milwaukee, Wisconsin, thanks to redevelopment efforts that are offering tourists and residents alike new spaces for galleries, restaurants, breweries, and offices, all imbued with a sense of regional history.ĭaniel Shoag, an economist at Case Western Reserve University, in Ohio, says developers are actively scouting these Midwest sites because they tend to be located in desirable locations, such as downtown business districts, and are championed by local officials “who are open to trying new things.” After receiving 43 entries from 17 countries, a jury of local architects selected three exceptional proposals and five honorable mentions. The winning proposals range widely from a stylized village of housing, to the creation of enormous urban farms, to the construction of an innovation park featuring a series of vast artificial lakes. ![]() Proposals had to take the adjacent neighborhoods into consideration, with the ultimate goal of bridging gaps between disparate communities at opposite ends of the property. In response to Kenosha's Chrysler problem, a team of urbanists, architects and researchers known as Urban Design for Everyone (UD4U) launched a global competition to reinvigorate the former industrial property. Located adjacent to a densely populated suburban development, the 107-acre property begs the question: what can be done with such a massive piece of land? The factory has since been demolished and is now at the beginning of a five-year cleanup. In 2010, shortly after the beginning of the global economic crisis, Chrysler closed a sprawling engine factory in Kenosha, Wisconsin. The prolific ruins of the largest abandoned factory in North America, Detroit's Packard Motor Plant, have served as an emblem for dozens of similar plants dotting the landscapes of cities across the continent. Across industrial North America, many small working class cities are faced with a plethora of abandoned property due to the downfall of the automotive industry. ![]()
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