grounded in detroit — ryan karczewski

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grounded in detroit

The Choreography of Excavation proposes a transformative urban design for the District Detroit, where digging becomes an intentional act of spatial making, cultural repair, and climate resilience. Through a community-led process of excavation, the project carves a network of sunken public spaces - embedded commons that exist below the surface of the city and serve as hubs for gathering, learning, and grassroots material innovation.

Rather than treating excavation as waste, the project reclaims site material - soil, concrete rubble, asphalt, and discarded infrastructure - and reprocesses it into new construction aggregates. Uprooted concrete and masonry are crushed and blended with clay and subsoil to form stabilized earth mixes, used in rammed earth walls, compressed earth blocks, and hybrid plasters. This process forges a new vernacular from Detroit’s own post-industrial sediment, transforming debris into durable, low-carbon architecture.

This site-specific material strategy significantly reduces embodied carbon. By reusing 1,000 tons of excavated and demolished material in lieu of high-emission materials like concrete or fired brick, the project avoids approximately 900 tons of CO₂ emissions, while eliminating the need for off-site transport and disposal. In doing so, it weaves sustainability directly into the rituals of making and place-keeping.

Encircling each excavation site, new community-built structures provide space for fabrication, teaching, and shared research. Abandoned buildings across the district are reactivated as material labs and learning centers, creating a decentralized system of knowledge rooted in care, circularity, and experimentation.

Underground, the project taps into Detroit’s forgotten infrastructure - reconnecting steam tunnels and invoking the deeper presence of the salt mines that lie below. These subterranean layers are both metaphor and method, shaping a city that regenerates not by erasure, but by digging into its own layered histories to build anew.

This project worked in partnership with Prutvhi Shah.