ABSTRACT
Ronit Eisenbach describes her initial encounter with Detroit as a graduate student and how she learned to “read” the built environment. Memory, absence, the overlay of event and place, the sense that the city was both shaped by large-scale top-down urban moves and an infinite number of small gestures and events over time, and a fascination with the notion that our experience of place always combines interior and exterior realities. This became the focus of her work in the decade she spent at the University of Detroit Mercy. The chapter describes her master plan and renovation of the School of Architecture building and her installation work focusing on sites in transition like Detroit. By expanding her definition of what an architect could and should do, she uses any means possible to activate places and create shared experience to stimulate conversation about the built environment—while not worrying about whether it is architecture or not.
