Avis + Elsmere

Avis & Elsmere is home to neighborhood nonprofit Young Nation and bookends The Alley Project, a youth-led street art gallery. This project entails the redesign of a small commercial building and former square dance dress factory into program space for a creative youth nonprofit and includes rental space for neighborhood businesses. The design extends to a vacant lot across the street, which will feature a skatable plaza and performance space as well as seating areas. The community design process was led by the Detroit Collaborative Design Center (DCDC) and included a series of workshops with a key group of neighborhood stakeholders, which directly informed the program and schematic design of the building and plaza. The project is a unique collaboration between DCDC, Young Nation, and et al. Collaborative, a small for-profit architecture firm that now has added capacity in collaborative design processes.

Detroit Collaborative Design Center, 2016-2018

Role: Project Manager & Designer

Partners: Young Nation, Et al. Collaborative, neighborhood stakeholders

Photos by Erik Howard.