Brick + Beam photo by Julie Edgar.

A trio of Detroit building preservationists, along with a crew of urban designers, had the opportunity to test-drive an idea that propelled them to winning a grant in the nationwide Knight Cities Challenge.

An Urban Prototyping Lab, funded by Knight Foundation earlier this year at Parsons School of Design at The New School in New York, enabled the Michigan Historic Preservation Network to get a head start on its proposal. The idea: creating a one-stop shop for Detroit rehabbers and renovators who are looking for resources and fellowship with other DIY’ers. RELATED LINKS

” Friday Night Lights yields lessons in building community in Charlotte, N.C.” by Chisun Rees, 04/02/15 

“Knight Cities Challenge awards $5 million for ideas to make cities more successful” — press release, 3/31/2015

Winners list on KnightCities.org

On March 21, about 100 people came out for the “Brick + Beam” soft launch, held in a cavernous 1930s-era film studio. They offered feedback on what they would need for their project to succeed, shared their experiences with other rehabbers, and mingled with interested people from across the community. The proposal, led by Emilie Evans of the Michigan Historic Preservation Network and her partners, Amy Elliott Bragg and Victoria Olivier, is intended to benefit projects residential and commercial, historic or not.

Detroit is filled with architectural gems that have suffered from decades of neglect. It is also a city filled with tradespeople, artisans, engineers and do-it-yourselfers — people like Amy Swift, an architect who returned to her hometown to start a historic renovation business called Building Hugger. Swift talked about making the transition from designing by computer to working with a hacksaw.  She’s found, she told the crowd, that know-how about fixing and installing windows in old buildings is in great demand. Another storyteller recounted buying a faded old home in one of Detroit’s historically tony neighborhoods and figuring out what he needed to restore it to its former grandeur. It was, he said, less about recreating the past than creating a new life.

Evans and her partners cooked up the idea of a rehabbers’ community over lunch at a local eatery, later submitting it as an idea for the Knight Cities Challenge, which was announced in late 2014.  Knight issued a national call for ideas to help make the 26 communities where it invests more vibrant places to live and work. The foundation received more than 7,000 ideas, and this week it announced that 32 winners will share $5 million, including $87,424 to the Michigan Preservation Network for Brick + Beam Detroit.

Brick + Beam, along with another of the 126 finalists, the No Barriers Project in Charlotte, N.C., attended a four-day “boot camp” in New York in January to work with designers from the global firm IDEO and graduate students from Parsons to brand and refine their idea.

“It was a free opportunity to examine what we had in mind when we developed the initial proposal, and to think through its feasibility,” Evans said. “We were able to develop a few more pieces and rearrange other pieces to create a very robust opportunity. They all stayed relatively true to what we had initially envisioned, but it was stronger and clearer.”

One piece that came out of the prototyping process is the idea of offering rehabbers a physical “launch box” filled with informational pieces about available resources. The storytelling piece will be integrated into regular forums and classes. The grant proposal also included a Web-based map of renovation projects throughout the city.

Elliott Bragg, who serves as president of Preservation Detroit, also found the experience “incredibly useful.”

“The ideas we developed and the approach we learned for developing ideas have been useful — not just for the project but for my professional life,” she said. The workshop provided an “opportunity to hit the ground running.”

The Urban Prototyping Lab proved that Brick + Beam is clearly viable, said Njoki Gitahi, an IDEO designer who came to Detroit for the recent launch.

“There were so many people who were galvanized by this event,” she said.

Julie Edgar is a Detroit-based freelance writer.