2G1/3G4 - ARCH 552 - FALL 2025
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.