Photo by Laura McDermott/City Lab
By Jessica Leigh Hester/City Lab
When Steven Mankouche first saw the house at 3347 Burnside Street in Detroit, in 2013, it was buckling and scarred with burn marks.
An artist named Andy Malone, who lived nearby, had just purchased the lot for $500 and was hoping to find some way to bring it back to life. Mankouche, an architect, and his partner, Abigail Murray, a ceramicist, floated a proposal to do just that, by commandeering the house’s foundation and repurposing it as a sort of plant nursery.
The following year, a team set to work dismantling the empty house, and in 2015, a new frame went up. By the time I visited, in June of this year, a new exterior had taken shape, with a fluted-plastic roof and wood siding. Like the old walls, the siding was charred, but deliberately so, via shou sugi ban, a Japanese technique that singes wood to render it resistant to rot.
Despite summer’s heat and humidity, the interior of the structure was temperate. Come winter, Mankouche told me, “it will be hot enough for plants, but not for people.”
That’s fitting, because the structure’s future inhabitants will include species that can’t usually weather Michigan winters, like fig trees. With the help of his design collaborative, archolab, Mankouche—a professor at the University of Michigan—is building a sunken greenhouse he calls Afterhouse, which he hopes will serve as a prototype for other projects across the city and beyond…
Read the full story at www.citylab.com
Follow the author on Twitter @jessicahester
I think that this is a wonderful idea. I would like to take it a step further and have a greenhouse in one of our commercial buildings in Historic Downtown Grafton, West Virginia. Since we are at the “end of the food chain” here in Grafton, it would be nice to have fresh vegetables year around and also help the local summertime farmer’s market. Your comments would be greatly appreciated.
I think some of the old places in Grafton would be great as greenhouses/nurseries.