2G1/3G4 - ARCH 552 - FALL 2025
INSTITUTIONS
GRADUATE STUDIO
2G1/3G4 - ARCH 552 - FALL 2025COORDINATOR
Ana Morcillo PallarésPROFESSORS
Dawn Gilpin, Sharon Haar,Francesca Mavaracchio, Meredith Miller, Ana Morcillo Pallares, Gina Reichert, Neal Robinson, Christian UnverzagtPUBLIC MARKETS IN THE REGION OF THE GREAT LAKES
From lively food markets in emerging African cities, vibrant South Asian street markets, Midwest’s farmers markets to European’s historic distinctive cast iron designs, all share a common fact: markets are not just places of commerce, but dynamic urban hubs of activity, communication, economy, politics and cultural exchange. They serve as centers for traditional trade and relationships, connecting producers with consumers while boosting an important layer of local economics and negotiations. However, the inter-dependency or relationship between the traditional market space and the city is constantly being challenged, adapted and simultaneously undermined by the city's rapid growth and modernisation.
From this critical link between the architecture and the urban scale and amidst global economies’ downturns on local activities, the Institution studio will focus on the rebirth of the marketplace as one of the last destinations of urban vitality and interchange of goods and ideas. From this startpoint, during this semester we will raise the following set of questions, prioritizing the relationship between civic structures and the city, as well as capacity-building in the core.
What can we still learn from the resilience of the marketplace as an institution? How does its representational role mediate new spatial forms in sustaining the life of the city in a digital era of avidly online consumption? How can the marketplace be reimagined once again? And, what new possibilities might shape for itself in the immediate future?
Fundamentals of Speculative Markets: Architecture of Exchange
Markets have always been more than spaces of commerce; they are civic institutions of encounter, connecting people, goods, and ideas. Today, their resilience has been strained by digital consumption, globalized supply chains, and standardized construction methods. To imagine the market’s future, we must not only reconsider what it exchanges, but also how it is conceived, built, and sustained.
For millennia, Native peoples cultivated food through adaptive, cyclical systems deeply rooted in reciprocity and place. As colonization and capitalism disrupts and erases much of this knowledge, this studio proposes another architectural framework: What if design and construction could be structured around cycles of gathering, renewal, and reciprocity rather than extraction and consumption? Drawing analogies to Indigenous practices in the Great Lakes region, students reimagine the market as an institution that engages not only with flows of goods and people, but also with the cycles of materials, energy, and ecology.
Michigan’s Huron River corridor, which connects Dexter to Ypsilanti, served as the axis for this exploration. Throughout the course of the semester, students developed market proposals for up to three sites along the river, including West Broadway Park in Ann Arbor. Adjacent to the Ann Arbor Amtrak Station, the Argo Dam, Argo Cascades, and the historic Kerrytown Market, the site’s industrial legacy as a former coal-gasification plant and its FEMA-designated floodplain status position it as a unique grounds for students to question connectivity, care, and repair relative to marketplaces in a post-capitalist society.
STUDENT
Ann Nguyen
PROFESSOR
Dawn Gilpin
Reinforcing Potawatomi Indigenous values of interconnectedness, this project explores “mending” as a spatial and conceptual driver for a speculative textile market in a floodplain and former coal-gasification site. Practices rooted in reciprocity shape the market’s structural and social fabric, staging moments that:
1. Highlight communal labor, nurturing collective identity and belonging, through flexible gathering spaces
2. Strengthen relationships between craft, crafter, and recipient by revealing processes of textile production
3. Celebrate water by embracing inevitable flooding, allowing water to enter and recede through the intervention
4. Attune to seasonal, solar, and lunar cycles by capturing views through “peeling” walls and a sloped roof
STUDENT
Catherine Henebery
PROFESSOR
Dawn Gilpin
This project reimagines infrastructures of control along the Huron River as evolving architectures of care. Once built to regulate and extract, these sites are reframed as civic and ecological thresholds where the river’s slowing currents foster reflection, stewardship, and collective action. Each becomes an “eddy of architecture,” where structures appear, transform, and recede with seasonal rhythms. Modular, community-built frameworks host spaces for exchange, workshops, and gatherings that respond to cycles of use, repair, and renewal. Permanent industrial remnants anchor memory while lighter structures invite adaptation and participation. Rather than asserting mastery, the project cultivates awareness through maintenance, reciprocity, and shared responsibility between human and river systems.
Commerce
In 2025, why do we still have physical markets when services like Amazon and Instacart provide access to and delivery of anything we might call to mind, all at once, almost immediately? In Ann Arbor, for instance, Kroger, Trader Joes, Plum Market, Whole Foods, Meijer, Target, and Costco–to name a few–are all busy “marketing” venues. That said, two of the most beloved are the Ann Arbor Farmers Market in Kerrytown and the Argus Farm Stops, where “commerce” is more than the exchange of commodities. Here we exchange ideas, opinions, and sentiment. These markets draw people to them for access to fresh produce and locally sourced products, but we stay for the experience: seeing and being seen, casual discussions, studying among our friends, talking to real people about the things they produce. “Social intercourse” sustains these older, alternative models.
The Commerce studio takes on the programs of the Farm Stops and the Farmers Market, heightening them with additional opportunities for non-commodity commerce on a site at the intersection of Jackson Ave and Stadium Blvd. Once an important crossroads at the edge of the city, the current condition is dominated by cars and a shopping center. The area has recently been upzoned to allow for much needed new housing and “commercial” spaces. But what of experiential commerce, of the hybrid experiences of a city, the creation of a community, the desired reduction in automobile use? The ample parking lots of the Westgate Shopping Center, existing programs such as a branch of the Ann Arbor Library and a mix of both local and national retail will provide the backdrop for an expansive vision of commerce.
STUDENT
Bianca Caprio
PROFESSOR
Sharon Haar
Expanding interactions is here to redefine commerce. In today's society commerce is seen as a quick interaction between buyer and seller. By adding new programs and opportunities with personal vendors these human connections can be reattached. Expanding Interactions reimagines this condition by drawing inspiration from the agricultural fields that once occupied the land. The concept overlays and overlaps “fields” of program—much like farmland parcels—to create a layered architectural framework. These overlapping zones introduce new forms of commerce that extend beyond a simple buyer–seller exchange. All programs are unified beneath a single, expansive roofing structure, reinforcing the idea of shared space. Through architecture, landscape, and programmatic overlap, Expanding Interactions proposes a new definition of commerce—one that prioritizes connection, community, and meaningful exchange.
STUDENT
Jacob Hanson
PROFESSOR
Sharon Haar
This market model combines the theme of commerce with sustainable, urban farming practices, demonstrating how the program of the site can support the economics of the interior. This market’s take on “commerce” with regard to the exchange of goods expands beyond the standard market model, providing an exchange of ideas and practices each related to health and wellness. Additional spaces to support this expanded model include an auditorium for wellness education, a fitness center and sports court, a test kitchen, and a farm-to-table restaurant. The porous layout, with a central ramping system, encourages the movement of visitors between programs, keeping them engaged throughout the day. The roof is both farmable and walk-able, and the interior is heated and cooled geothermally. This project demonstrates the benefits of replacing expansive parking lots with permeable, productive land.
The frame
The shed is a building of containment and exposure. It is radically open in plan, form, and perception. At once primitive and advanced, simple and flexible, raw and civic, the shed is a direct expression of structure.
This Institutions studio focuses on the design of “Shed 7,” an addition to Detroit’s Eastern Market, developed within the shed typology.
The building is defined by a clear perimeter and an open interior. Primary structure, the frame, drives space, organization, and use. Structure sets rhythm, scale, light, and atmosphere. Long spans, modularity, repetition, and expressive structural systems are central. Beauty emerges through order.
The horizontal frame has shaped Detroit’s architecture, from Albert Kahn’s Ford plants to industrial sheds across the city. The shed is both legacy and opportunity, a framework for public life.