According to The Western Architect, four hundred and fifty million bricks were used in construction in Detroit in 1916. Among the brick buildings featured in this reporting is the Victor Theatre, located near the Ford factory that was, at the time, the largest manufacturing site in the world in Highland Park, an autonomous city in the center of Detroit. Today, this building is the main location of the Ruth Ellis Center, a nonprofit organization providing social and medical services to LGBTQ...
From the beginning of my time as a transfer student to the University of Michigan in the Fall of 2019, I have been interested in both engaging with the transfer community and improving the overall transfer student experience. When preparing for this big transition over the summer of 2019, I was most concerned with adjusting socially and academically to a new school. However, when I actually got here, I found there were many other, more hidden aspects of campus life that I had to figure out on...
An 1861 map of New York City, now worn with age, the delicate paper permanently creased from its life in a file-folder, shows the familiar landscape of upper Manhattan. Two hand-drawn lines, remnants of its previous handling, cross the page – a red line runs along sixth avenue, and a yellow one cuts across 86th Street, intersecting just below the reservoir. Aside from a few cosmetic changes - “Bloomingdale Road” has been straightened out into Broadway, the Great Lawn is now decorated with...
Over the past academic year, Anthony Erebor, Lyse Messmer, and I have worked as library engagement fellows. We have been working with Librarian Rebecca Price to exhibit a growing collection of 20th-century house catalogs held in the Art, Architecture and Engineering Special Collections. The catalogues, which focus on residential construction in the Midwest from the 1910s through the post-war building boom of the 1950s and 60s, tell many stories: the historical story of Michigan's...
This project, supported by the Library Engagement Fellows Program, asked itself: what are the needs and opportunities within graduate curricula in the humanities and social sciences for co-curricular digital scholarship education that could be offered by the University Michigan library? This project defines digital scholarship as “Scholarship enabled by and shared through digital media and tools, that is able to ask new questions through digital methods.” While there have been various past and...
Idealized Cuban Family Structures is a research based project that uses humor, the Cuban Family Code, the ASCE Steel Construction Manual, and my own family history to start a conversation about social engineering. It is presented as three sculptures, or “corrective devices” for the steel structure shown above, which represents my family’s dynamics. The sculptures will be accompanied by a series of 2D graphic works which assist the viewer in understanding the absurd translation of my family’s...
PILOT is a student organization founded in 2010 with the mission of empowering students from underrepresented communities. We work to develop campus leaders through various project initiatives, one of which is Dreams2Reality. Dreams2Reality is a social justice outreach program that hosts bi-weekly workshops with first- and second-year Metro Detroit high school students that center around different social justice topics, as well as on-campus Dream Day. Our program aims to build community between...
