Class Co-Op

The Longo Competition was introduced by the architecture school at Michigan the summer directly after COVID shut down most of the world. The brief stated, “This competition challenges participants to consider how the corona-virus pandemic will impact the design and occupation of urbanism.” And “How can we reconsider the space of the campus and city in the context of the pandemic in order to awaken modes of public life that will be valuable in a post-pandemic context?” Class COOP’s response took advantage new student lives at home.

Class COOP looks to the history of the University of Michigan and the town of Ann Arbor, specifically through the organization Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) founded in 1960 to fight the inequity created by global capitalism. It ultimately failed by lacking to garner a working class coalition. Class COOP physically dissolves the academic institution of the U of M in favor of moving resources to where their students now reside, in the community.

Ann Arbor has a long and important history of civil demonstration.

The burgeoning industrial democracies of the early 20th century brought about a new paradigm in collective activism. Organizations like the League for an Industrial Democracy (LID) and the American Federation of Labor (AFL) sought to empower working people through labor organizing and political solidarity.

Founded in 1960 the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) was formed at the University of Michigan as an offshoot of LID. SDS was a student activist organization driven by the principles of it’s founding document the Port Huron Statement:

SDS led a wave of political activism in the 1960’s that redefined the role of universities as places of political change…

…However as the decade progressed The American manufactured war in Vietnam became a more salient issue amongst many SDS members. Disagreements about the direction of the organization led to it’s fracturing, resulting in the formation of a violent radical sect known as The Weather Underground. As the perception turned against these “Weathermen” the SDS was marked in the public eye.

David Barbers book, “A Hard Rain Fell: SDS and Why It Failed” describes the collapse of SDS as a failure of it’s members. It’s “young, white American radicals – failed to grasp how white supremacy shaped their own thinking and action, failed to develop an analysis of imperialism that linked it to domestic conditions, and failed to challenge male supremacy within their own ranks. In short the SDS suffered from an insulated culture, in which the white male dominated world of Academia failed to reach out and build an intersectional working class coalition… [2]

[1] The Progressive Fox (Original ed.). Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) And Jeffrey Lebowski, known commonly as “The Dude”. Retrieved 6 September 2019.
[2] Friedman, Tami J. Labour / Le Travail 63 (2009): 319-21. Accessed July 17, 2020. www.jstor.org/stable/40650269.

While the University of Michigan owns and occupies 9.4 percent [1] of the 27.8 square miles that is the City of Ann Arbor [2], the vast majority of its resources, the academic schools and students, only amount to for 0.3 square miles at the heart of the city. The sharing of resources takes precedent in the Israeli kibbutz, a commune style living that undergoes transient style visitors like university students on account on birthright trips.2,3 The field matrix [4],[5] on the left, where P represents physical resources and S represents services, suggests the redistribution of those resources for a few departments based on community needs rather than spacial proximity to each other.

[1] The Regents of the University of Michigan. “Facts + Figures: U-M + Ann Arbor,” 2020. http://communityrelations.umich.edu/facts-figures/.
[2] “U.S. Census Bureau QuickFacts: Ann Arbor City, Michigan.” Census Bureau QuickFacts. Accessed July 17, 2020. https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/annarborcity-michigan.
[3] Feldman, Nadan. “In a Hyper-Capitalist World, the Kibbutz Is Making a Global Comeback,” August 20, 2019. https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premi-um-for-this-stanford-professor-the-idea-of-the-kibbutz-is-alive-and-well-1.7684785.
[4] Deyong, Sarah. “Rethinking the Legacy of the Sixties.” Scholarship of Design. Journal of Architectural Education 68, no. 1 (2/1/2014): 28–41.
[5] Fisk, Pliny. “The Future of Indigenous Building Materials.” Center for Maximum Building Potential. SunPaper, September 1982. https://ww-w.cmpbs.org/sites/default/files/ad4.1-indig_building.pdf.

Assuming the University take responsibility for its students, the buildings that now sit empty would be deconstructed and used elsewhere to construct the ADUs in and around Ann Arbor. Each department would be reviewed for its adaptation potential, some of the best being Business, Policy and Environment. High occupancy rooms and heavily trafficked corridors are stripped of salvageable material to be re-purposed opening large gathering spaces that could be linked together along a disruption route. Resource distribution back into the community would be guided by the individual community needs.

Borders would be removed, residences and other necessary programming would be erected. Shared workshops, root cellars, spare produce/necessities fridge, whatever the community could imagine. Again, assuming the University takes responsibility for their students, they would fund the initial construction costs with rent going to a coop fund. The block would then begin functioning more as a whole and could isolate as necessary if COVID infections became an issue.