Back to the Future

It’s an overcast day in early November, and the students of the Henry Ford Academy: School for Creative Studies (HFA) seem especially charged. Deshon Mum-ford, a ninth grader, leads a tour of his new school and explains that some of the excitement may be because he and his classmates just picked their official mascot. The sixth-to-twelfth-grade public charter school opened eight weeks earlier with students from neighborhoods across the city of Detroit as the inaugural class, and now they are helping to establish traditions. Nominations were taken, votes counted, and from here forward the students of HFA will be known as the Mustangs. Deshon, a bright kid who likes to write poetry, says it wasn’t his first choice, but he appreciates the process. “We all got a vote,” he says.

There are many things Deshon appreciates about his school. Tucked into the corner of the mammoth, 760,000-square-foot building that it shares with Detroit’s College for Creative Studies (CCS), HFA was designed to foster innovation and creativity in its student body with its physical layout, which is more akin to that of a design practice than a secondary school. The 120,000-square-foot space occupies portions of four levels in an eleven-story building. Administrative offices and a large gym are on the first floor, and the upper levels hold classrooms. As Deshon leads the group from one floor to the next via a central stairwell, he points out what he likes. “I’ve never been to a school that has carpet on the floor,” he says. “Or this color paint on the walls.” The classrooms—called learning studios—get the best spots, on the perimeter, so even on a gray day they are filled with natural light. (Staff offices are located on the interior of the floor plan.) Glass walls allow that light to flood the corridors, which double as galleries for student artwork. Nooks with tables and chairs pepper the halls, allowing students and teachers to pause for impromptu powwows. (On this day, several college students from CCS have popped in to interview middle school students for a special project on nutrition.) Outside the classrooms, there are public spaces dedicated to study and quiet discussion, and students can rearrange the chairs and tables as needed. Deshon is clearly taken by that level of latitude, a feeling that extends to lunchtime, when the students leave their school to join the rest of the building in a shared cafeteria. “This is the best school I’ve ever been to,” Deshon says.

Creating that level of student engagement was a goal of CCS’s president, Richard Rogers, when he undertook the restoration of this historic building in Detroit’s New Center district. Originally called the Argonaut, the Art Deco structure was designed by Albert Kahn in 1928 for General Motors, and it housed the first design department in the history of the auto industry. The structure takes up an entire city block, and when GM relocated its headquarters more than a decade ago to the Renaissance Center on the waterfront, the building joined the growing number of vacant sites in downtown Detroit.

In July, at the tag end of a $145 million historic restoration undertaken by CCS, the Argonaut was rechristened the A. Alfred Taubman Center for Design Education. The building, which was donated to the school by GM, now serves as a second campus for the college, just a few miles from its first. It is home to CCS’s five undergraduate design departments and its new M.F.A. degree programs in design and transportation design. The restored building contains classrooms and faculty offices for the college as well as loft-style residence halls for up to 300 students. It will have retail and offices, both aimed at reinvigorating the street. Eighty thousand square feet have been set aside for future development, including incubator space for start-up design companies. Rogers envisioned a building where design practice could thrive, from early education to professional development and production.

He also dreamed of a public school that could introduce the city’s predominantly African-American community to career paths in art and design. So CCS partnered with the nonprofit Henry Ford Learning Institute and the Thompson Education Foundation to bring HFA into the Taub-man Center. The academy’s curriculum—developed with CCS, the institute, and partners like IDEO and Stanford’s d.school—uses problem-based design challenges to invigorate the classroom experience and prepare students to be critical thinkers and creative professionals. This model, which is also being replicated in schools in Chicago and San Antonio, is aimed at reversing staggering dropout rates and turning urban public schools into centers of innovation. “We wanted to combine all these activities into one building and explore the opportunities for collaboration,” Rogers says.

Chris Trupiano, manager of interior design for Albert Kahn and Associates, the firm that led the restoration, says that desire for collaboration drove the project. CCS had learned over the years that the traditional classroom layout did not work for team-oriented, project-based design education. “Part of what they wanted was flexibility built into the teaching spaces, especially the lab areas where the college students would be doing their work,” Trupiano says.

The design team began by removing decades of alterations to Kahn’s original design, from drop ceilings to opaque windows, transforming what had become a series of dark and segmented offices into a bright and open interior with flexible work spaces. Walls were removed to create contiguous, open floor plans for each of the college’s design departments, which occupy multiple floors in the building. Movable partitions, tables, and chairs can be reconfigured as projects evolve, with design studios and lecture classes sharing space. As in HFA, college classrooms rim the edges of the floors, capturing lots of natural daylight, while additional classrooms and meeting spaces occupy the interior. Each floor includes galleries of student designs and ample wall space for critiques of works in progress. A high-tech lab offers the latest equipment for machining and rapid prototyping. (Many of the machines were purchased on the cheap at auctions, the result of manufacturing companies selling off goods after the downturn.)