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Source: Taubman College
Anya Sirota, Associate Professor of Architecture at the University of Michigan’s Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, has worked to make Oakland Avenue Urban Farm self-sufficient and sustainable. Photo credit: Austin Thomason, Michigan Photography.
Anya Sirota, Associate Professor of Architecture at the University of Michigan’s Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, has worked to make Oakland Avenue Urban Farm self-sufficient and sustainable.
Photo credit: Austin Thomason, Michigan Photography.
While the methods and results in Anya Sirota’s work vary widely, the underlying values remain tirelessly consistent: the creation of a pluralistic, liberating and integrative cultural infrastructure.
Sometimes Sirota works within the university to shape the pedagogy around contemporary practice and the role of architecture in civic life. At other times, the experimental designer works with residents of Detroit’s North End neighborhood to incorporate urban agriculture, old small businesses, and pop-up performance spaces – and with urban landscapers, city planners, and a few dozen of Detroit’s most influential and traditional cultural institutions to create imagine an all encompassing Midtown Cultural District. In between, she has established a virtual meeting point as a thought connection for art, architecture and urban intervention that transcends physical space and national borders.
“My career has mainly focused on expanding the understanding of cultural infrastructure and its emancipatory, collective possibilities,” she says.
Sirota’s efforts are diffuse and unique attempts to create spaces that are agonistic forums “in which people with different, sometimes even contradicting views can come together, exchange ideas and contribute to building civil society,” she says. In an age of algorithmic pop-social bubbles, Sirota seeks to do the anti-bubble by building intense relationships and using them to bridge the gap between social enclaves that don’t normally find themselves in the same conversations.
This commitment to public culture extends to Sirota’s role as deputy dean because “I have created a position that fundamentally supports the culture of our diverse and diverse community,” she says. When Sirota took on the role in 2019, no one could have imagined that a global pandemic was on the horizon. At the time, she was interested in building stronger, interdisciplinary bridges between science and practice so that students could understand their role as architects and planners with greater agency.
“The pandemic has accelerated our response to these questions because it has allowed us to rethink the boundaries of the classroom and invite more diverse and emerging voices to speak to our students. At the same time, there were important concerns about how we can preserve our collective culture of the place, ”she says.
Through four design competitions and other initiatives launched by the Academic Innovation team in summer 2020, a common thread was the commitment and participation of Taubman College students. “We saw an opportunity to stimulate new approaches to real and virtual spaces for learning and social experience and to further develop our culture of the place by sharing tools, methods and strategies for a more humane, playful and intuitive way of being together in this emerging space”, says Sirota.
But Sirota’s practice – she co-founded Studio Akoaki with Jean Louis Farges – also manifests itself deeply in physical environments and has long focused on the use of architecture and design as tools for urban renewal and cultural preservation. In 2019, she assembled a team to win an international design competition that will change the way visitors and Detroiters experience the Midtown cultural district.
01/23/19 Anya Sirota, associate professor of architecture and director of the Akoaki design duo in Detroit, talks about the proposed canopy, which would rise high and flexibly as a DIA addition. It would be used to display new works, major exhibitions, and events. Scott Soderberg, Michigan Photography.
Their winning project “Detroit Square” offers a “locally rooted, contextual and environmentally sound framework” to unite 12 public institutions and create an inclusive cultural district on an area of 83 hectares in Detroit. Taubman College faculty, Harley Etienne, Assistant Professor of Urban and Regional Planning, and John Marshall, Associate Professor of Architecture and Art and Design, are also part of the Detroit Square competition team.
The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the way Sirota and her team are driving the project – while building on new strengths in the digital engagement she led at Taubman College last year. When the pandemic made it impossible to share “Detroit Square” models on public forums, Sirota’s studio teamed up with Oliver Popadich, M.Arch ’18 to bring ccpi.online, a navigable digital model, to market .
“Some of the best conversations around a model take place in our practice,” says Sirota. In her view, people often empathize with the legibility of physical objects, while other forms of architectural representation require a degree of professional education that can obscure the basic premise of a work. The virtual iteration works like a live pin-up board and event platform, “where people can enter into collective conversations. It allows us to continue our practice and engagement activities that are an integral part of the design process despite the challenges and disruptions we are experiencing today, ”she explains.
Much of Akoaki’s other recent work has centered on Detroit’s historic North End, a once thriving entertainment district that now has few physical traces of that heritage. For Sirota, who remembers how Jewish cemeteries were paved in her native Ukraine, it was heartbreaking to see this important part of African American history disappear when she moved to the area 10 years ago. Akoaki was able to network with existing community leaders and active projects in the neighborhood to envision a utopian vision of “ONE Mile” – a whole network of projects, programs and installations that helped bring the neighborhood narratives and thriving culture to life .
“How do you tell a story when you have removed most or all of the physical markers associated with that story?” Asks Sirota.
Akoaki’s work – for which Sirota was awarded the Architectural League Prize in 2018 – explores the rubble left by systemic racism, poor planning, and aggressive pest removal in an area with scarce resources. Informed by the background of Sirota and Farges (he is French), the couple set out to apply the European idea of culture as a catalyst for change and economic development in a post-industrial world, but with one big difference – in the United States, public funding for this type of work is not easy to come by.
“We were looking for ways to design without the typical inflow of capital that supports architecture,” says Sirota. “In doing so, we unintentionally addressed the constant criticism of architecture, namely its dependence on power and capital.”
To that end, many of Akoaki’s structures have focused on low-cost, temporary, portable installations that combine design with cultural programming, and often tap into Detroit’s rich musical and art history with a flair for spectacle and celebration – including a traveling “mothership”, the houses a DJ, sound system and light show and can “land” anywhere in the neighborhood and transform unused buildings or open lots into a pop-up nightclub.
In February 2021, Sirota received a significant boost for another project in the neighborhood: a $ 405,000 grant from the John F. and James L. Knight Foundation to design and adaptively reuse an existing building that is part of the Oakland Avenue Urban Farm will be. Working with the farm, Sirota’s Studio will transform a vacant residence into a community-centric design library and meeting room – one that is run entirely with community support and input.
As Sirota-founded Akoaki design firm got more stakes in Detroit’s North End and Oakland Avenue Urban Farm, it realized the high risk that a buyer could buy out the land below. Like many of the urban farms in Detroit, it was founded on land that did not belong to the farmers – land that was cleared of rotting and that had no real value or target for local residents during the Great Recession of speculation.
Date: 09/19/2018
Photo credit: Austin Thomason, Michigan Photography.
The project builds on a five year effort to realize a civic commons and transform the farm into an experimental urban prototype for equitable regeneration. The aim is to help the farm redesign and realize six acres of the North End as a living landscape with cultural infrastructure that benefits residents and mission-oriented organizations alike.
“We hope this project will provide the North End with a valuable resource and continue to build on all of the positive things that are happening in the community,” says Sirota. “As a permanent infrastructure, this facility offers residents and the university the opportunity to learn from one another over the years, and encourages us to rethink the role of the architect as negotiator – as facilitator and galvanizer of networks of people.”
Sirota’s simultaneous reinterpretation of architecture education by her leadership as deputy dean for academic initiatives speaks for her acceptance of the “radical flexibility” that has emerged from her own experience as a non-traditional architecture student. It continues to pursue collective efforts and experiences – in digital space during the pandemic and through institutional networks and physical spaces after the pandemic.
“Designers in every scale and medium have the unique ability to create spaces for pluralistic, inclusive, collective encounters, create spaces that enable participation in public discourse, and create situations that shape the future of bourgeois life,” says she, “and this potential makes me stubbornly optimistic about our profession.”
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