Harvesting Floorboards

This is where I walked in to work on Wednesday. Up on the third floor of this old apartment building on Garfield St, just off Woodward, right across from MOCAD. The only flooring left on the top floor was along the original corridor linking the old apartments. Everything around it had been cut away. You could see down over the old rooms on the second floor below like you were looking at a floor plan: the demising walls, framed-out doorways, closets, bathrooms. It was like you had just walked into a cut-away model of a hundred-year-old building. This is how architects work and imagine constantly, thinking of buildings in the abstract- views from above, drawings and models with sectional cut-aways to reveal relationships that won't exist in the final building. But here it was. Seeing down on a floor of residences like abstractions of themselves. And abandoned buildings already give an abstracted view of reality: every object you find when you visit one seems to be frozen in time- more significant, more of an object than it ever was when people occupied the place. A note on a scrap of paper is no longer just about the brief message it originally intended - its now been layered with all kinds of other significance- the years that have passed since that kind of paper was used, the careful technique of old handwriting, the old font types, the places/objects/commodities it mentions that have faded from existence. All these things and more surround the elements you find in an abandoned building and make the whole experience of walking through one like going to a museum. In this case, a crew of workers had carved out volumes of space so that you could see the work of the architect frozen in time as well. Some job site.




The building was being built and un-built at the same time- the crew I was with was pulling out the old floorboards to plane down, re-mill, and re-install in another space, while carpenters were setting and sheathing new floor joists for the new apartments. These will be some of the residences available in the $35 million 'Sugar Hill' project. Read about that here: http://www.modeldmedia.com/developmentnews/sugarhill18209