The Detroit Great Game. Explorations around architectural design and its agency.

Architectural design is often described by practitioners of all creeds as some sort of game of chess. This enticing description most often remains within the realm of metaphors, though: the world or city as chessboard, the clever architect as chess master, the construction of the project as checkmate. In real practice, or so the narrative goes, each design process is so different from the others, so dependent on specific contingencies that no common structure can be found outside of a metaphor such as this. This book is an attempt to define some mechanisms of architectural design practice, make them communicable and replicable in the form of a handbook-of-sorts. Within a game of strategy, twelve groups of architects work on adjacent and sometimes overlapping areas in an eastern district of the city of Detroit. Detroit is the site where designers test different strategies within a setting of political, economical and urban controversies, where systematic scarcity gives way to bursts of lively reactions and new developments. As a city, Detroit makes it possible to trace complex processes in which different interests overlap and precipitate onto specific parcels of land. In the game, real actors, real contingencies and real trajectories of change intersect with fictional ones, and the agency of design is defined as the possibility to trace these vectors as they unfold, and have effects on them.