Cadillac Tower in Downtown Detroit
This project introduces a control panel as a speculative architectural interface that reimagines urban planning tools through the lens of sonic modulation rather than visual abstraction. Based on Shannon Mattern’s critique in The City is Not a Computer, which interrogates the reductive tendencies of technocratic urbanism, the panel operates not as a computational optimization device but as an acoustic instrument. Historically, the control panel has symbolized centralized authority and legibility within the discipline of planning, where a graphical interface is designed to render urban complexity tractable. This project deliberately displaces that narrative, proposing a control system that engages the city as a sonic, embodied, and affective space.
This control panel is a pre-amp of sorts. It can connect audio inputs and send a single channel to a single output. This is not common in sound equipment where typically mixing of the tracks occurs in the machine, hence why it was created.
Formally and conceptually, the control panel draws inspiration from sound engineering equipment such as modular synth interfaces or mixers. This was done intentionally to echo the cultural lineage of Detroit techno which relies heavily on the use of electronic instruments. Emerging in the late twentieth century amidst the collapse of industrial labor and state disinvestment, techno became a site-specific form of sonic resistance within the city of Detroit. This genre emerged as a way to find new meaning in the shock of failed promises and progress while offering an escape through repetitive rhythms, sampled textures, and technological innovations. Detroit Techno was born as a methodology for urban understanding. The panel adopts a logic of sonic reconfiguration, where through controlling the volume on each track, one can manipulate layers of field recordings, interviews, and archival fragments in a method similar to mixing or sampling. In this way, the device enacts what might be called a “technofication” of the planning imaginary by transforming the city from an object to be managed into a medium to be sampled and unsettled.
The form of the panel references Detroit’s Cadillac Tower, a 40-story neo-Gothic skyscraper constructed in 1927 and now home to the city’s Planning and Development Department. Beyond its architectural significance, the building is symbolically charged: recently acquired by Bedrock, the real estate firm of developer Dan Gilbert (whose voice appears in the Planner tape). By referencing Cadillac Tower, the form of the control panel acts as a mode of urban intervention by invoking the building not simply as a static form, but as a contested site. In this framework, the city is no longer a computable entity but sonic composition.
