Arch 442 - UG4-Wallenberg Studio/Winter 2009 Studio Mankouche Alfred A. Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning University of Michigan Stanley Kubrick, 2001: A Space Odyssey, 19681 1,200 Feet Below Detroit; the Other White City Salt mining in Detroit began in 1896 with the sinking of a 1,100 foot shaft, but its investors went broke. Although there have been no deaths in the mines since, flooding and natural gas killed six men during the original construction. Today the 1,500 acre mine expels 10 ton loads of salt every few seconds. Salt is an ingredient essential to our survival. Empires have risen and fallen around their access to salt. Salt a critical chemical compound in numerous manufacturing processes was critical to the development of Detroit as a major industrial city. As such the excavation of the underground salt city has a spatial relation with the development of the above ground city. This studio would like to honor the legacy of Raoul Wallenberg, by addressing issues of social justice centered around the theme of two cities, an underground crystallized city of labor and an above ground city of lost and replaced labor. With the increasing sophistication of digital mechanization mining has become an incrementally safer practice. The greater safety and efficiency has the downside of reducing the need for human labor. While we are saving lives paradoxically we are at the same time ruining livelihoods. What will or can become of this underground city? Will it be like Carlsbad, New Mexico a safe place to store refuse? Could it be like the catacombs of Rome, a place to bury the dead? Could it be a fall out shelter a la Doctor Strange Love? A place to archive information such as the Corbis Iron Mountain facility in Pennsylvania? How does any of this relate to what is going on above ground? Tectonically this studio will be concerned entirely with interior space. It will work with salt, with mining, with darkness, with large scalar shifts, with excavating, with rust, with labyrinths, with what is above and what is below. Tags: Salt, Labyrinths, Underground, Iron Mountain, 2001: A Space Odyssey, ant farms, Super Studio, Night, Salt Lake City vs. Detroit, Haruki Murakami, Ledoux, Chaux, Hitler’s Atlantic Wall, Carlsbad Underground Lzunchroom, Bettmann Archive Corbis, Them 1954. Bibliography: Mark Kurlansky, Salt a World History, Penguin Group, New York 2002 1The “whiteness” of this image first came to my mind when thinking about this studio. There is loneliness within this whiteness. In the final scene David Bowman wearing a bright red respirator (like in a mine) sees himself as an old man in this white Baroque environment. Outside is absolute darkness. .