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T+E+A+M Featured on Cover of Metropolis Magazine

T+E+A+M Featured on Cover of Metropolis Magazine

The design practice T+E+A+M, founded by Taubman College Assistant Professors Thom Moran, Ellie Abrons, and Adam Fure, and Meredith Miller is featured in the September issue of Metropolis Magazine in an article entitled “The Architectural ‘Blob’ is Dead, Long Live the ‘Pile.’” The article is part of a short series aimed at identifying current trends in the work of emerging architects, one of which is the “pile.” A photograph of T+E+A+M’s first collaborative work “Detroit Reassembly Plant” from 2016 Venice Biennale U.S. Pavilion Exhibition is the cover image for the September issue.

The portion of the article devoted to T+E+A+M’s work, reads:

The speculative project, one of several to reimagine key sites of decay in Detroit, aimed to transform the ruined Packard Automotive Plant through a two-pronged strategy of demolition and rebuilding. Segments of the complex would be purposely razed, the spent material immediately recycled and fused with plastic and other consumer waste on-site. (Moran and a few other T+E+A+M members have done further research into this kind of alchemy, yielding a new building material they call “postrock.”) The resultant mounds of brick, rubber, and car parts took on different hues—some were the color of volcanic ash, others terra-cotta red, still others an amalgam of synthetic hues. But these heterogeneous hillocks were actually buildings in craggy prehistoric drag; the concrete structure of the original plant was preserved within and reinforced with steel ties. “There’s a willful formal vocabulary, but it’s basically a starting point for materials to melt, and fall, and tumble, and fill in, and creep,” Moran explains. “We’re interested in making a kind of armature that allows material processes to take over and kind of finish the job.”

The article features work by T+E+A+M and other architects and intentionally coincides with the opening of the 2017 Chicago Architecture Biennial. The exhibition is open to the public on September 16, 2017 to January 7, 2018 and features T+E+A+M’s new project, “Ghostbox,” on display at Chicago Cultural Center, the main venue for the event. “Ghostbox” imagines a strategy of “redistribution,” in which the physical elements of a big box superstore are “taken apart, moved around, piled up, and mixed with new construction to create alternative uses.”