JOURNAL — AKOAKI

Bologne, Italy
2024.08

Delighted to have Detroit's Cultural Center Planning Initiative shortlisted for THE PLAN Award 2024 in the Public Space Design category. This competitive international prize, celebrating excellence in architecture, interior design, and urban planning, attracts over a thousand submissions across twenty categories annually, creating a global forum around key international issues.

Bilbao, Spain
2024.07

The Detroit Cultural District Plan has been named a finalist for the 2024 Bay Urban Visioning Awards in the Partners in Progress category. This category honors global projects that exemplify public-private collaboration and significantly enhance community vitality and well-being. On October 9-10, 2024, in Bilbao, Anya Sirota, representing the Detroit Cultural Center Association and the design team, will participate in a open debate on the future of public space and the essential partnerships for an inclusive vision. Winners will be announced that evening at The Bay Awards Gala at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. The program is part of the Bilbao Metropoli 30 initiative.

Brooklyn, New York
2024.07

e-flux Index is a new print journal that explores the wide scope of contemporary culture through e-flux’s publications on art, theory, architecture, film, criticism, and art education. It's second volume is out and features Anya Sirota's recent article, "Contradictions of a Benevolent City," a complex piece that took years of reflection on how philanthropic giving influences the structure and stewardship of community-focused initiatives. The full article is available online.

Chicago, Illinois
2024.05

With support from the Graham Foundation, Anya Sirota and Suzanne Lettieri are compiling *JR Architects*, a book examining the shifting landscape of architectural and design education. Driven by student-led movements for an emancipatory educational model amid sociopolitical divisions around race and class, the book addresses current and emerging paths to lasting diversity in design education. It critically evaluates early-learning initiatives at U.S. architecture schools, assessing their ability to foster a more diverse generation of designers and to prompt a paradigm shift in teaching methods, knowledge creation, and professional standards. A significant transformation for educational institutions and the profession is on the horizon. Image: Jacob Comerci Workshop Michigan ArcPrep program.

Detroit, Michigan
2023.12

Rotterdam, Netherlands
2022.10

MONU 35: Unfinished Urbanism explores the notion of "unfinishedness" within architecture and urbanism, scrutinizing its economic, political, ecological, and social dimensions across various scales, from cities to interiors. This issue presents a global view on the potential and challenges of unfinished urban projects. Anya Sirota and Jean Louis Farges, in their dialogue "The Perks and Quandaries of Coming Undone," tackle the persistent difficulties faced by Detroit's projects in reaching completion, highlighting the complex interplay of ambition and reality in urban development.

New York, New York
2020.11

The New York Architecture League's book Young Architects 20: Objective is out. This volume showcases the work of the winners of the 2018 Architectural League Prize for Young Architects + Designers, highlighting their diverse approaches and the various "objectives" they pursue. Congratulations to the featured architects: Bryony Roberts, Gabriel Cuéllar and Athar Mufreh, Coryn Kempster and Julia Jamrozik, Dan Spiegel, and Lap Chi Kwong and Alison Von Glinow. Special thanks to Claire Weisz, Anne Rieselbach, and Catarina Flaksman for their contributions, support and vision.

Detroit, Michigan
2019.06

Detroit Square has been chosen as the winning entry in the DIA Plaza/Midtown Cultural Connections Design Competition. This project, created in collaboration with Agence Ter, rootoftwo, and Dr. Harley Etienne, initiates an intensive planning and engagement effort to activate an 83-acre district and its public spaces. The aim is to unite twelve distinct institutions under a shared vision for the future of Detroit's cultural district. Appropriately, the selection process was rigorous, comprehensive, and public. We are humbled and delighted to begin this next chapter of developing a guiding plan to invigorate Midtown Detroit.

New York, New York
2018.06

"Objective," an exhibition featuring work from the League Prize 2018 winners, opens on June 21st. It includes a series of five freestanding models by Anya Sirota, displayed diagonally across the gallery. Each model represents recent architectural interventions and scenographies completed by her studio, Akoaki. The series showcases the "playful lexicon" of her activist interventions in "unlikely contexts." The exhibition is free and open to the public at the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center, Parsons School of Design / The New School, Arnold and Sheila Aronson Galleries, from June 21 to August 4, 2018.

Weil am Rhein, Germany
2018.06

Nightclubs and discothèques have played a pivotal role in contemporary culture, challenging social norms and blending design, art, and fashion into a unified experience. *Night Fever: A Design History of Club Culture*, the book accompanying the Vitra Museum's exhibit, documents this evolution from the Radical Design group's 1960s Italian clubs to New York's Studio 54, Philippe Starck’s Les Bains Douches in Paris, Carsten Höller's Double Club in London, and Akoaki's Mothership. Featuring films, vintage photographs, posters, and fashion, *Night Fever* offers a sober examination of these cultural epicenters and their impact on the social landscape. Edited by Mateo Kries, Jochen Eisenbrand, Catharine Rossi, Katarina Serulus, and Jörg Heiser, the book underscores the profound influence of club culture on modern society.

St Etienne, France
2017.03

Hot off the press: the Out of Site catalogue. For the 10th Saint Etienne International Design Biennale, Akoaki curated a 10,000 square foot exhibit titled Out of Site, addressing Detroit's transforming urbanity. This carte blanche exhibit brought together over thirty Detroit artists, residents, and activists to showcase their evolving ideas, activities, and resourcefulness. Set against three full-scale installations originally deployed in Detroit and then transplanted to France, the exhibit featured ten days of public programming: performances, conversations, workshops, pop actions, and other experimental encounters. The catalogue details the backstory of the installations, why they were transported to France along with the embodied actors who give the work meaning.

Paris, France
2016.12

Anya Sirota will be at the City/Cité conference, "Neighborhoods: A Transatlantic Exchange," in Paris, France, from December 1-3, 2016, held at le Centquatre. She will join the final day's session, "Planning Neighborhoods: Space, Design, and Urban Democracy," alongside a distinguished group of urban planners, designers, architects, and scholars from both sides of the Atlantic, including Marie-Hélène Bacqué (Paris X – Nanterre), José-Manuel Gonçalvès (Centquatre), Richard Sennett (NYU), Saskia Sassen (Columbia University), Christophe Hutin (Arc en rêve centre d'architecture), Maurice Cox (City of Detroit), Monica Chadha (IIT, CivicProjects), and Olga Stella (Detroit Creative Corridor Center). Part of the City/Cité: A Transatlantic Exchange program, which began in Chicago in 2015, the conference aims to spark dynamic debates on urban democracy by uniting a diverse array of voices from the US and France.

Ann Arbor, Michigan
2015.04

Taubman College's Research Through Making Exhibition opens tonight. Our contribution, titled Electrofrost, is an ongoing collaborative experiment based on a simple idea: the atmosphere is an abundant, ambient resource. Its particulates, gases, vapors, and invisible fields form the ubiquitous ether that shapes our experience. By calibrating these elements, the project cultivates and trains the ethereal production of frost, making the material environment visible. Our current research explores how architecture can literally design with frost. We are testing how electrostatics affect the appearance and longevity of frost, both as an ornament and a thermal amenity. We are designing new substrates, experimenting with electric fields, and considering how this ephemeral process can be applied to architectural scenarios.

Rotterdam, Netherlands
2015.10

MONU 23: Participatory Urbanism addresses the challenge of making participation in architecture and urban design more than a token gesture. This issue reassesses the extent to which individual citizens can and should actively shape cities and neighborhoods and questions whether architects and urban designers should relinquish some control. In their conversation "What's Wrong With?" Anya Sirota and Jaffer Kolb examine the complexities of participatory urbanism, particularly in Detroit, and explore why some projects fail. They critique the superficial nature of participation when it becomes a political formality rather than fostering genuine engagement.

Lausanne, Switzerland
2014.06

Adore Me Wild is a deployable urban wilderness—mobile, stackable, mutable, and ephemeral. It examines the intersection of urban spaces and wilderness, proposing that the wild no longer opposes development but is instead optimistic and restorative. Drawing inspiration from Rust Belt cities like Detroit, Cleveland, and Buffalo, it mirrors the resurgence of lush, bio-diverse environments in urban areas, serving as a remedy for the industrial damage of modernity.

For Landing Lausanne Jardin 2014, Adore Me Wild aimed to harness emergent urban wilderness through stackable recycled containers functioning as oversized planters. These containers form an inhabitable urban topography connected by vertical scaffolding. Curated plants, attracting native wildlife, provide changing visual intrigue throughout the growing season. Delivered pre-planted on flatbed trucks, the containers are assembled on-site, transforming the installation into a public performance that imagines the coexistence of city and wilderness. The proposal received an honorable mention but was not realized.

Lausanne, Switzerland
2014.06

On the occasion of Jardin Lausanne, Anya Sirota's lecture at La Placette Gallery, titled "Come Again," explores innovative fabrication processes that are small-scale, adaptive, and nomadic. By repurposing materials and infrastructures from Detroit’s industrial landscape, the lecture highlights how the city is integrated into global material and market flows. The outcome is a playful ornamentation that forms an infinitely variable and multiplying image field.

Detroit, Michigan
2014

The ONE Mile Magazine, a publication featuring the best in art, urbanism, music, and new enterprise from Detroit's North End, was designed to share stories about Detroit's urban advocates and locally rooted actors -- stories which might otherwise have gone unheard. The magazine, envisioned as a tool of broadcast, offered participants a platform to communicate narratives and aspirations to a broad audience: institutions, foundations, neighbors, and others.

Civic Friche
2011

A paradoxical coupling of terms – the institutional with the abandoned – Civic Friche refers to the tactical appropriation of marginal sites for public function. Distinct from traditional strategies of reuse, Civic Friche describes a new approach to urbanism through civic initiative, temporary and interim uses, and public participation.

Civic Friche is an ideology. A term that resists direct translation (wasteland being its most direct and reductive English counterpart), friche has been embraced by a cadre of architects, landscapes architects, artists and thinkers as an opportunistic strategy with liberating potential. Like a Gilles Clement landscape, an architecture of friche speculates that the built environment can be set into motion, cultivating emergent behaviors over an indeterminate span of time.

A friche site, whether appropriated or new, begins with an intimate understanding of the physical and cultural context, yet it assumes that things will change. New programs will emerge. Cultural and economic shifts will invariably take place. The architect, released from the post of dogmatic creator, envisions solutions that may be fragmented, temporary, cheeky, and even subversives.

Chaumont-sur-Loire, France
2009.06

For Jardin Chaumont, Akoaki presents "Urban Prairie," a garden inspired by Detroit's rapid de-urbanization. This scenographic installation captures the city's transformation as nature reclaims post-industrial landscapes. Drawing from Detroit's reparative wilding, the installation blends built and natural elements into a poly-sensory garden. Paths, seating, and shelters made from salvaged wood are gradually overtaken by native plants and vines. Visitors encounter lightboxes showcasing nature’s exuberant reclamation in Rust Belt environments, advocating for a novel hybridization between the static and the living. Shortlisted, but not constructed.