Core City

This project was featured in the October 2021 issue of ARCHITECT.

In 2017, the Los Angeles–based firm EC3 completed True North in Detroit’s Core City neighborhood. Following the project’s success, New York– and Detroit-based developers Prince Concepts and Ferlito Group tasked EC3 with designing a market-rate multifamily rental scheme a block north. Here, 15 duplexes totaling 21,330 square feet will occupy a 1.1-acre site across multiple lots while preserving existing trees.

EC3 steered clear of the double-loaded corridor scheme favored by many developers for its efficiency. Instead, it looked to China’s residential streets (hutong) for inspiration, admiring how individuals forge relationships across narrow alleys. “If you develop them and give them a human scale, it becomes a community spine that can tie the whole thing together,” says founder and creative director Edwin Chan, NOMA.

Hoping to nurture a similar form of community within a “green urbanism” framework that complements the landscape, EC3 organized the 15 one-, two-, and three-story free-standing structures along an open-air central spine. Each of the 30 residential units has ample access to daylight and the outdoors. “The central corridor becomes an outdoor street that can create a landscape to tie the units together into a coherent community,” Chan says. Instead of formal courtyards, EC3 arranged structures around existing trees and vegetation, which will become “a green sculpture for these galleries.”

With an eye to cost, the design uses off-the-shelf materials—“no custom doors or windows,” Chan says. White stucco will clad the buildings while colorful, painted walls will highlight the outdoor galleries. “The colors are introduced to complete the picture,” he says. “You may have a blue that would counterbalance the green of a tree.”

With permitting underway and construction estimated to begin this year, Chan hopes that the project, when completed, will blend into Detroit’s urban landscape: “We want it to feel like we haven’t disturbed anything on the lots, and the units just landed there in a casual way.”