Brush Park – Carriage Homes

• location:
  Detroit, MI
• Date:
  Completed 2022
• client:
  Bedrock Development
  Hunter Pasteur Homes
• collaborators:
  Structural Engineer: SDI Structures
  MEP Engineer: Strategic Energy Solutions
  Photography: Jason Keen
• project_team:
  Principal-In-Charge: Elizabeth Whittaker
  Project Manager: Soo Jin Yoo, Robin Bankert
  Design Team: Elana Abraham, Kyle Barker, Charavee Bunyasiri, Jessie Fowler, Liz Galvez, Chris Johnson, Jamie Pelletier
• description:
  The Carriage Home is a reimagination of an historic garage precedent as a paired residential type that shares a courtyard. This new pair is then aggregated to form five blocks - of 53 units total - along alleys within the latest transformation of the Brush Park neighborhood.
  
  Their context, just outside of downtown Detroit, was developed in the late 19th century as an affluent enclave of mansions and boulevards, carriage houses and alleyways.The 20th century, however, saw the neighborhood decline as Motown’s motor vehicles sent waves of urban residents scattering to suburbs. When Merge was approached in 2016 to participate in the area’s redevelopment as City Modern, Brush Park was a shadow of its former self. The first large-scale development in Detroit since Mies van der Rohe’s 1956 Lafayette Park, City Modern is something of a misnomer, differing from the Modernist model by honoring the neighborhood’s past. Surviving Victorian homes have been rehabilitated and the existing street grid preserved. Boulevards are no longer lined by mansions but apartment buildings and townhomes to create a dense, diverse, and resilient urban district befitting the 21st century.
  
  Merge’s primary contribution to the development is sited along a revived network of alleyways. To make these formerly utilitarian spaces integral to the broader development and serve both the automobile and pedestrian, the carriage house type underwent a series of mutations. The double-wide garage was rearranged to create an elongated massing with a single garage and entry along the alley. The block-through units were then arrayed to create a street edge that is both consistent - to define the alley as a hybrid street/ sidewalk - and carved - to form pockets of social space at stoops and keyhole entry forecourts.
  
  These public outdoor spaces are balanced by private ones within the block. Notches within each unit pair align to shape shared courtyards that frame the sky and bring daylight to the interior. Rather than the traditional gable, roofs are angled and uplifted to accommodate double-height interiors and allow access to roof decks. This roofscape of seesawing slopes - manipulated to provide privacy where desired - also accommodates a between-backyards kind of neighborly communication and provides an elevated urban realm for adjacent apartments to overlook. Taken together, the result of these mutations is no longer a Carriage House, but a Carriage Home; a place not just for the auto-carriage so synonymous with Detroit, but the residents that make it a vibrant city.