As this project developed, I became increasingly aware that the way we represent Detroit is just as important as what is being represented. In Detroit, visual representation has long played a role in shaping narratives of decay, decline, and intervention. From state-led blight clearance to the aestheticization of abandonment in “ruin porn,” the image has often served as a tool for both policy and spectacle. That prompted a shift in my method: instead of relying on architectural drawings or photographs, I turned to sound.
This was not an arbitrary choice. In conversations I had with people throughout Detroit, many referenced the city’s musical history as a defining part of its identity—what they called “Detroit sound.” That phrase stuck with me. It pointed not just to cultural pride or a genre category, but to the environments, infrastructures, and informal networks that make music production possible. It became clear that sound offered a way to understand the city that didn’t separate content from context.
As Jacques Attali writes in Noise: The Political Economy of Music, “with noise is born disorder and its opposite: the world” (Attali 1985, 3). He suggests that sound, particularly when it resists codification, has the potential to disrupt dominant systems of representation and control. Rather than affirming a stable spatial order, noise introduces instability, potential, rupture. This line of thinking opened up a new framework for me: What if architectural representation didn’t seek to restore order, but to trace the frictions already present in space? What if we treated sound as both a symptom and an agent of urban change?
In Detroit, where the built environment is often read through lenses of failure or futurism, sound offers another entry point. One that is embedded, affective, and harder to pin down. It doesn’t seek to replace architectural representation, but to challenge its exclusivity. It raises the question of how we document and imagine space in ways that are more accountable to its realities.