Arcadia Amittenda
It’s amazing that what was once the prison of wide-eyed aesthetes looking to the East for cultural refuge in fact holds so much unprized grandeur. After half a year’s absence spent swanning up and down the East Coast amongst America’s glossy architectural flagships, I can now see Detroit as Gaugin’s Tahiti or Alberti’s Rome.
America’s automotive ghost town, what was once the Arsenal of Democracy, now brims with the ruins of an age of opulence gone to ashes. The flakes of paint blooming on the walls of Fisher Body Plant 21 are as still as the fossilized pomp of the Siegel House; they are almost untouched by any breeze of progress.
Detroit and its fragile, crystalline gravitas—the cultural memory of a forgotten industrial America—feels like it will be soon reduced to nothing by the erosion of renewal. Detroit still lives the America many would like to forget.
