Today, the city of Detroit began demolition of the former Federal Department Store, a.k.a. the Mammoth Department Store, at the corner of Grand River Avenue and Greenfield Road. Mike Duggan shows up to all of these things to tout the great work they’re doing in the neighborhoods, which evidently includes converting entire blocks into vacant lots. Just take a look at the Google Maps view of the nearby intersection– you have multiple strip mall buildings and acres of parking. Mostly empty parking.
It’s not a remotely crazy idea that we could actually redevelop these buildings to imagine new uses for them. The city faces a shortage of affordable, decent housing. The city spends millions of dollars each year to demolish buildings that, while perhaps severely deteriorated, could be stabilized and adaptively reused into future purposes.
The naysaying– “That can’t be done!”- usually comes from folks who have a vested interest in seeing the building come down, like some of the corrupt contractors in Duggan’s demolition regime. They’ll argue that the floor plates are too hard to repurpose, or that the HVAC would be too expensive. There are a lot of community members who are happy to see the building come down because they’re sick of having to stare at a shitty old building.
Very simply put: these are silly arguments.
Architects train for years to solve problems like these. Builders train for years to figure out how to implement these designs. It may require a lot of head-scratching. But it’s completely possible. And I will always maintain that creating value is better than destroying it. Let’s recall that the Dan Gilbert report about how “demolition creates value” that formed the rationale of Duggan’s demolition crusade was riddled with methodological problems.
Also, it’s always possible to build things like lightwells on the interior of a large space. On a top floor, you can even open the entire space up to the floors below. This is all even easier when you have steel and slab construction, as opposed to something like wood framing, where slicing and dicing through joistses [sic] requires hardcore frame carpentry that adds up to be extremely expensive on a per-square-foot basis.
The claims about HVAC are ones I’ve also seen in arguing that “the Renaissance Center must be demolished! There is no other way!” HVAC is, at its most basic level, a question of moving heat from one place to another, whether you’re talking about moving warm air into a space (heating), moving cool air by moving heat out (air conditioning), or distributing refrigerant or another thermal medium to supply heating or cooling equipment.
HVAC isn’t rocket science; it’s the design portion of a project this large that would be hard to pull off. Hard? Yes. Impossible? Absolutely not. Certainly cheaper than the alternative of leaving the site vacant for years before it can be redeveloped with something like a strip mall, which is the thing most readily allowable under Detroit’s hideously antiquated zoning code?
Trying not to think too hard about it.