The plethora of derelict homes in and around Detroit has prompted a variety of proposed solutions, but here's a new one: turning the run-down buildings into temporary greenhouses.
"It's like putting a little cap on a bottle," Steven Mankouche says. "We're not converting this thing forever into a greenhouse. It could become a house again. In a way, it's like a really good placeholder."
Mankouche, an architecture professor at the University of Michigan, is one of the organizers behind
AfterHouse, a project that aims to transform a burnt-out house in Detroit, near the border of Hamtramck, into an underground greenhouse called a walipini. Mankouche and his wife, artist Abigail Murray, both Ann Arbor residents, first learned about walipinis at a fundraiser in 2009. A guest spoke about how the walipini design is used frequently in mountainous regions of South America, employing the heat of the earth to keep crops at a regulated temperature through hot days and cold nights. All that's needed is a ground-level covering or roof (preferably glass, to let sunshine in) and a sizeable pit -- similar to your average basement. This inspired Murray to research the idea for local implementation.
"I was just like, ‘I want to make one,'" Murray says. "You can grow a lot of things here in Michigan, but the growing season is really short. Almost as soon as things start growing, you have to pack it up and the growing season's over. We were talking about it and we thought there's a lot of houses in Detroit that need to come down, and we could build one there."
Last spring Mankouche and Murray found a perfect site for their dream project through a combination of events that both describe as "serendipitous." Mankouche connected with Andy Malone, owner of a home at
3347 Burnside in Detroit. Malone, who used to live on the same block, bought the house after part of it burned down with the hope of eventually repurposing it.
"He didn't want the neighborhood to further deteriorate, because there were other houses on the block that had been vandalized," Mankouche says.
Some of those vandalized properties had already been taken up and transformed by Kate Daughdrill. Since Daughdrill moved to Burnside three years ago she's purchased six of the eight lots on her block and cultivated them as Burnside Farm. She and a group of 20 neighbors now work the farm and share the produce. When Malone introduced Daughdrill to Mankouche and Murray, it was a perfect fit for all involved.
"They told me it was going to be a greenhouse and it was going to be subterranean and passively heated, and my jaw just dropped," Daughdrill says.
"She was like, ‘Oh my God, do you want to build a greenhouse for my farm?'" Mankouche says.
Malone sold the property at 3347 Burnside to Daughdrill for $1, so that it could officially become part of her farm property. Mankouche and Murray did the design work last summer, plotting to demolish the house by hand in order to reuse some of the housing materials, leaving only the 25' x 25' pit of the basement behind. The structure of the greenhouse will rise only a few feet above ground level, with a polycarbonate window facing south and an insulation "blanket" sitting on the ground surrounding the house. A large portion of this blanket will be planted with flowers facing the street, mimicking the feel of a traditional front porch. Mankouche says the design neatly incorporates an agricultural building into a very urban context.
"If you start building greenhouses within the city, you lose the feeling of a city," he says. "What this does is reduce it to the size of a house. It'll look familiar but different."
With a site and a design in mind, the AfterHouse team had only to get the funding together to realize the idea. The project received $5,000 seed money from Taubman College and a $5,000 grant from the U.S. Economic Development Administration last year, but from there the team turned to crowdfunding. Through a campaign on
Hatchfund, started in November, AfterHouse achieved its minimum funding goal and raised over $14,000 in just four weeks.
"I was very surprised," Murray says. "We got donations as small as $5 and as big as $5,000, from as far away as Dubai and from people we've never met before."
With funding in place, the AfterHouse team plans to begin demolishing the old structure and building the new as soon as it's warm enough to work outside. After about six weeks of construction, the greenhouse will be ready to plant. Daughdrill says she plans to grow Midwest basics like greens, carrots and herbs, as well as warmer-weather crops like olives, mangos and pistachios.
"It'll probably be only a handful [of crops yielded], but part of it will be the wonder and the beauty and the excitement of being able to grow these fruits and nuts that we wouldn't be able to grow otherwise," Daughdrill says.
AfterHouse team members agree that their aim isn't food production so much as creating a practical community resource.
"It's important that it gets used," Murray says. "I'm not being critical, but a lot of architects have gone to Detroit and done things that are just folly. It gets done and it gets left behind. We didn't want that to happen."
Mankouche says he's already received inquiries from two other Detroit neighborhoods about creating AfterHouse-style greenhouses of their own. He says he and his collaborators aren't aiming to make money with AfterHouse, but to create an open-source design that's both simple and inexpensive -- ideally, cheaper than the cost of a full-fledged professional demolition. All involved see AfterHouse as the catalyst for a much bigger initiative that could spread far beyond the current organizing team.
"There's so many vacant properties, or just structures where the top of the structure is dilapidated or burnt up and the rest of the structure is just ready to go," she says. "We're excited to test it out and see how it works and work out the kinks. And if all goes well, it can be something we could share."
Patrick Dunn is an Ann Arbor-based freelance writer and contributor to Metromode and Concentrate.
All photos by David Lewinski Photography