MOCAD City of Salt

City of Salt

Detroit is a gritty metropolis that has seen boom and bust. Like the automobiles that made it the “Motor City”It has gleamed and roared only to be abandoned to rust and decay yet holding doggedly to the dream of restoration. Hidden below Detroit, out of site and often forgotten is one of the largest salt mines in the US. Every year hundreds of thousands of pounds of this salt is spread on the streets for the safe operation of the cars and trucks it has birthed. As it melts the snow and ice beneath the rivers of transportation and commerce, it corrodes the its creations, hastening their return to the earth. Blood red rust stains weathered concrete bones and washes off into the Detroit river.

City of Salt consists of two steel printing plates etched utilizing disolved salt collected from the streets of detroit. One depicts the location of the subterranean salt mining complex while the other positions the streets of the city above

DesignInquiry: MOCAD

Detroit represents a city in constant flux like no other on the American landscape. The tectonic shift of the city’s economy has created deep chasms in which artists and designers have found success in rare creative ventures.

The DesignInquiry/DesignCity Detroit Winter Inquiry is a brief expedition by a small group of designers (in the broadest sense) into the design landscape. We will explore Detroit as a naturally emergent system of creative and cultural activities. Here design is both the system and cultural activity of study, and the method of exploration.

We see Detroit as a case study for learning more about sub-structures that emerge within larger structures that have failed and for observing and analyzing the ways that communities facilitate these new realities in response to change. All systems have balances of success and failure, ebbs and flows, positive and negative feedback loops that create equilibrium within their respective ecologies. Assuming we are all navigating the curve of a success/fail cycle, then what might we observe to be true for Detroit? How can we represent these findings and of what use are they to the ecology of the city itself?

The expedition will bring together participants whose perspectives and biases represent views from inside and outside the community. The expedition outcomes are exploratory and intentionally open-ended but will form a collection of work and findings to be be published. This publication will frame a theme and pose prompts for a second larger inquiry later in 2014 (or 2015.)