Jamie Sherman:

Welcome to the Michigan Minds Podcast, where we explore the wealth of knowledge from faculty experts at the University of Michigan. I’m Jamie Sherman, an arts and culture writer and PR representative for the Michigan News Office. I want to welcome Nick Tobier, professor of Art and Design at the Penny Stamps School of Art and Design, who focuses on collaborative projects in the public realm and the potential of public spaces. Nick is the co-founder of the Detroit-based Brightmoor Makerspace in partnership with Detroit Community Schools. Some days, youth and adults build their creative making skills and incubate business ideas, and other days they’re invited to present at the Venice Architecture Biennale. Welcome, Nick.

Nick Tobier:

Thanks, Jamie. Thanks so much for having me.

Jamie Sherman:

For sure. We can jump right into it. So talk to me a little bit about the impetus behind creating the Brightmoor Makerspace.

Nick Tobier:

Sure. All right, so the Brightmoor Makerspace came about because I had read about this school, Detroit Community Schools, it’s still there, that was founded on Waldorf principles to educate the whole child, the hands, heart and mind and when I got there, maybe 2009, a lot of the hands-on programs had been sidelined because they’d done poorly on standardized testing and they were facing some kind of oversight or closure potentially from the state. It’s called a Public Charter Academy, so it’s a charter school, but the founders were all still there. So Bart Eddy, who was taught at Detroit Waldorf School, Candice Sweda, Ken Dargan is a gym teacher, Marcel Amonra, and we started reintroducing a lot of the hands-on things on the sides, like after school and on weekends, and it sort of grew from there. I think if I had this idea that we would build a bamboo bike trailer, so I’d never built one before.

I don’t know why that was a good idea, but we had a bunch of kids who showed up. We had bamboo and a hacksaw and a wrench, and the idea was we can use kid bikes and build this thing. We built it, really great looking and at the end of this, girl, Erica Cross who was an eighth grader, she said, “What are we going to do next?” I really at that point hadn’t thought of a next. I thought we were going to build the bamboo bike trailer. It’s going to be fun, it’s all over. I realized that there were people who expected something else to happen.

Now we’re 16 years later and a lot has happened. So we grew from something that program that had been marginalized to our own building to thinking how can we engage more of the hands-on skills that were really clearly captivating. A lot of the kids that we would get who’d come to us were sort of classified either as learning disabled or discipline problems, but it’s just they couldn’t sit still. So to recognize that that’s fidgetiness is part of being a kid and also being 14-year-old boy, and you have to move your body around, which grew from as I said, the hallway to getting to use a classroom to a building that was on the campus of the school, a 3200 square foot former Ford garage that is still running and still amazing spot.

Jamie Sherman:

So cool. So what are some of those skills that they get to use at the Makerspace and then what are they primarily working on?

Nick Tobier:

Oh, excellent. So we are in some ways at times what I would describe as militantly low tech. People always try and give us a 3D printer, and we usually don’t want it because it’s going to jam and the filament costs a lot and the times we’ve had it, everybody just makes a cell phone case. So we do a lot with our hands. We do a lot with power tools, honestly, like things that you could chop your fingers off if you wanted to, but in some ways, straightforward dimensional lumber. So we build a lot of furniture. We built some living edge tables. We upcycle fashion right now. So there’s a lot of tie-dying, screen printing, jewelry. We’ve gone from furniture to things that are approaching tiny houses, which is our next, I don’t want to say frontier because that sounds too colonial and western expansion, but we’ve built things that you could live in. They just don’t have septic systems attached to them.

So a big vision is that we start to partner with some HBCUs because getting teachers in our school is not a challenge, but a challenge like all schools are, and we need teachers who are going to come and who are going to love our kids in ways that may extend beyond teaching the subject, but recognizing that a lot of the students that we work with come from chaotic lives outside, and often they bring that chaos with them into the classroom, and it’s not that they’re not paying attention or not listening, but a lot of the street skills that they’ve learned come for instance, I expected everybody to sit down and listen at first, and then I recognize they’re all listening. They’re just also doing other things.

So although we build furniture and we do a lot of woodworking, I always say we’re not training woodworkers, but we’re building creative confidence so that if you use a chop saw for the first time or something you were scared of, you think it’s possible I can do something that I didn’t think was possible, and then what do I want to do with my life rather than what am I left with because that’s what’s open to me.

Jamie Sherman:

That would be really empowering I would imagine.

Nick Tobier:

If you come, you’ll be amazed. I would say it’s surprisingly quiet for having 45 teenagers and power tools, and it’s not quiet because we’re telling people to be quiet. It’s quiet because people are focused, but there’s a lot. We listen to music out loud and people talk, but it is intense.

Jamie Sherman:

As far as creative confidence. I’m just curious, which way do the ideas flow as far as what the next project is going to be or do they get to propose ideas of things to do?

Nick Tobier:

Oh, yeah, the things are really great. I’ll show you something. We had this one a couple summers ago, we had an opportunity working with the city of Detroit and we worked with the city of Detroit on a structure in a nearby park, and there are a number of buildings that are part of the Detroit Land Bank. So we did acquire through the Land Bank and we operate a separate not-for-profit that owns now 10 parcels of vacant land adjacent to us. So we did kind of visions and models for what you would like to see in vacant land, and that’s where I think I cut myself off working with HBCUs, hoping to recruit a new core of teachers who would live in this sort of grouping of tiny houses that we build with a studio, like a common workspace at its core right across the street.

So right now, we’ve stewarded those lots from overgrown places where people would dump things routinely, and you could see it happen every weekend. We’d come in and there were just piles of mattresses and construction debris, and so over the last few years as we’ve transformed those lots into dumping sites into a musical playground, a park with sort of a band shell, we started this kind of process of what would you like to see a shoe store, a bakery, these are things that young people came up with and one is this kind of home. I love this, D’angelo came up with this thing. It’s somewhere between an animal shelter and a pet store. So there are a lot of stray dogs in the neighborhood, often pit bull mixes and the sort of distance between loving and animosity between a snarly dog and a good dog.

The idea would be capture dogs that are causing problems and rehabilitate them and you would adopt them. A lot of these things are somewhat far-fetched, but you start doing things, you think, “Oh, we built this thing that has a roof and I can walk into.” So it’s not just what can I make and there are a number of things that we’re calling currently the Brightmore marketplace that we have made recently from a lot of lumber, a lot of beautiful wood that we get donated. If a tree falls down in your yard, we’ll come take it away and then we can mill it down into useful lumber. We can make really beautiful sort of bougie cutting boards that are good for, in Ann Arbor, we say they’re charcuterie boards and in Brightmore, they’re cutting boards, but they’re gorgeous and currently we are going to try and set up at the Ann Arbor Farmer’s Market at some point the artisans market, but we’ve done quite well locally with us.

Jamie Sherman:

Very cool. So talk to me a little bit, I know that the Makerspace did receive federal NEA funding twice for these neighbors pavilions. Can you tell me about that project?

Nick Tobier:

Sure. Yeah. Well, the first NEA funding came for the Makerspace itself and also got funded for the Knight Foundation and things, the community foundation for Southeast Michigan, the Fisher Foundation. So what we would call neighbors, pavilions had started during COVID where we could not get to our kids’ computers for a while, and if we got these crappy old Chromebooks, they didn’t have adequate Wi-Fi, and so think of small 700 square foot house sitting with five kids trying to go to school in the same room and we were losing kids like crazy. So as soon as possible, as soon as Governor Whitmer enabled outdoor work to happen, we came up with the idea of building this sort of what we at that point called outdoor classrooms.

How could we get people together safely with public health in mind? Because we had a lot of COVID deaths in our neighborhood in Brightmoor very early, including one of our bus drivers, one of our lunch ladies within a month, first month. So we started building these structures that are beautiful, I think they’re beautiful, they’ve got a three-part roof to them and we started doing things at them, but just building, just being able to get together with people to do something live in person by May of 2020. So we built the first one in one of the vacant lots behind the Makerspace. We also built a lot of benches to bring to our kids we worked with and our neighbors so they could sit outside their house and have conversations with people.

And the first neighbor’s pavilions, there was that one and then a giant one, a 900 square foot one at St. Suzanne’s Community Action Center in the neighborhood, which maybe that one we got done the next year that has been almost continuously programmed. Day camps, city of Detroit mayoral debates, a dinner church met there also during COVID, which is amazing. Actually, the pastor was at the pavilion and people in their cars listening to the sermon and then they would get a meal delivered to the cars. So we’ve built five of these throughout Brightmoor. They’re all recognizable. It’s the same structure with this three-part roof. Super proud of that I designed something that is built in public and is still standing, all built with young people who are paid by the way, I want to make sure that everybody knows. It’s not free labor and the number of stamped students who have participated in those buildings, and you can use them. Some you can just show up, some you have to schedule.

Jamie Sherman:

So it was created for a very specific purpose at the time.

Nick Tobier:

Right, and it’s grown.

Jamie Sherman:

And it has grown. So now these are community spaces that can just be used.

Nick Tobier:

Some of them are really open, like there’s one on Outer Drive and Burt Road at this thing that we call Prayer Park. You can just show up and some are associated with other sort of faith-based centers or public institutions like schools, and you can pretty much show up. Our first one, there’s an amazing series of janky extension cords, and there’s a guy who does what I would best describe as free jazzercise. So he brings a boombox out there and he gives it his all and people join him.

Jamie Sherman:

I love that.

Nick Tobier:

Yeah.

Jamie Sherman:

So then how did this neighbor’s pavilions project open the door for an invitation to present at the Venice Architecture Biennale? I know that that was happening this summer into the Fall.

Nick Tobier:

Yeah, I was walking into the Makerspace one day and the phone rang from one of the curators and introduced himself and he said, “You guys are in the US Pavilion in Venice.” And so there was an opportunity to present proposals, which I’ve luckily had my eye open for, and so this year’s theme, so the US Pavilion is a beautiful little structure. I think it might even be a scaled-down version of Monticello. It looks like sort of a neoclassical Greek temple. Very beautiful and very sort of humble in certain ways, but also gorgeous, and the theme for this year is called Porch, the Architecture of Generosity and I think it’s unbelievably wonderful and American that there is this kind of informal structure that is both connected to a house, but it’s where you greet your neighbors, and so we proposed this because a lot of people in the neighborhood call them porches, but they’re porches that are not attached to houses.

Because over the decades as Brightmore has gotten less populated through depopulation associated with suburban flight or the lack of jobs in the neighborhood, and quite a period of neglect and arson and lack of public structures, and when neighborhood schools are demolished, people tend to move out. So these are sociable structures that are not attached to someone’s house, but function in the same way as a porch. So the curators were looking for structures that exhibited porch-ness, and we were asked to describe the quality of porch, and then each of the exhibitors that include some of the most iconic architects and practices in the United States today and us, everyone has a window that is supposed to be a representation of the ideas of your project, but not a model of it, and I’m really proud that ours doesn’t look like a model of ours, although I have been told that many of the installations do look like architectural models. Ours is definitely our own. Should I try to describe it for the listening audience?

Jamie Sherman:

Yeah, please.

Nick Tobier:

Okay, so everyone has what’s called a porch window, and ours from the outside on one half has an old casement window that resembles the casement windows in the older houses in Brightmoor roughly built between the 1920s and 1950s, and it’s painted over as a lot of them are both for privacy and for insulation, and then there’s one of the panes that’s open and you can peek inside and if you’re smart, you’ll open it up or if you’re curious, you’ll open it up and you’ll see the full scene adjacent to that window is what looks like a cross between a little chest of drawers and an apartment building.

You peek into that and there’s a map of Brightmoor showing a street plan where there vacancies and when there are houses. In one of the one remaining drawers, a photo of the crew that built the structures, and when you open it up, there’s a beautiful text, a line from a poem that one of our recent high school graduates, Perseus Skipper wrote that said, “10 dreams for all to share.” But the full text of the poem is in a video that you can access by QR code and I’ll give you the link to it in which Perseus recites the poem and the young people walk out to our pavilion and it is very moving to me because they’re enjoying each other and they’re enjoying the space that they built.

So the full experience would be if you don’t do what I used to do and take a picture of a QR code with my phone and follow the link and listen to the poem and watch the video, even for those of you who can’t get to Venice, and I’m really excited that we’ll get to go for the closing ceremony. Perseus, who’s a softball player, poet, and freshman at Oakland Community College now, and Kaiman Griffin, who’s a freshman at EMU and I are going and they’ll speak, maybe I’ll say something, but I’m excited that they’ll get to be there at the US Pavilion at Venice.

Jamie Sherman:

How did they react when they learned they were going to get to go be a part of this major international festival?

Nick Tobier:

There was a whole series of things from getting to go on a plane to getting a passport to going to Italy. They’ve done a lot of research about Italy, Venice particularly, I loved getting the process of getting a passport. If you don’t have a photo ID is fairly complicated and there are a lot of things that we take for granted that I’ve learned not to take for granted working with some of the brightest and most creative young people I’ve ever seen who’ve made it despite the circumstances that it might be stacked against them institutionally, but it is not easy to get an ID when you don’t have one and we did it. I almost felt like we’d completed the trip after getting it, but that will get Perseus’s voice rings through the pavilion on a regular basis as people watch the video is pretty amazing and I’m looking forward to getting to experience this with them.

Jamie Sherman:

For sure. So I’m just curious, your background and where you teach is at the Art and design school and then presenting at an architecture festival. What is that like for you? Or do you work much between those two festival events?

Nick Tobier:

Oh, I was a graduate student in landscape architecture and so the design world is a big part of my practice and my understanding of myself and what I do, which I describe as sort of public construction. So the things that I build are more the scale of small architecture. Sometimes it’s sculpture, but it’s a definitely, I feel lucky or happy to be able to straddle art and design worlds. Venice alternates between the Architecture Biennial and the Art Biennial. I think I’m probably more comfortable in the architecture world because the questions that I sort of tackle with or tangle with routinely in my work are sort of social and cultural and are maybe in some ways more based on daily use than the kind of phenomenal creativity that we often associate with work that’s produced in a studio and exhibited that way.

So it makes perfect sense for me. They have built a porch on the outside of this fairly formal neoclassical structure where what they have what are called porch talks are held in Venice. So they’ve informalized a structure. I think it’s very moving to me at this time where a lot of people think of the United States as a potentially unfriendly place to introduce the design practices of the world as something that’s inherently communal and social, and I feel really lucky that there’s a resonance with the work that we’ve been doing together in Brightmoor and this exhibition this year.

Jamie Sherman:

Absolutely. Well, just to wrap up, what’s next for the Makerspace and what’s next for you?

Nick Tobier:

The big thing is if we can pull off what we believe we can do, we know we can build a structure that’s habitable. If we can figure out city codes and what it means to build maybe a collective septic system and get the permits to go from, it is zoned residential and then to get the commitment of enough people who would live in these structures and devote themselves to a few years of teaching. We have examples of it that exist in Detroit with Cass Community Services, Reverend Faith Fowler helped construct a number of tiny house community in some small part funded by David Lee Roth. I don’t quite understand that relationship or where that came from or if I’m even correct, but I think that’s what she told me, and there is a sort of cultural hurdle to get over, we probably should stop calling them tiny houses. They’re small houses, but when you walk into them, you don’t feel that you’re being punished. It’s not a clubhouse, but it could be. So next is to figure this out and see if we can do that.

Jamie Sherman:

Well, we’ll have to do a follow-up interview then. That sounds very interesting.

Nick Tobier:

I hope to invite you all out there. Yeah.

Jamie Sherman:

Great, well thank you so much.

Nick Tobier:

Thanks so much for having me.

Jamie Sherman:

Thank you for listening to this episode of Michigan Minds produced by Michigan News, a division of the University’s office of the Vice President for communications.