Oblique Chunks

     In the mid-1960s, two Frenchmen, the architect Claude Parent and the cultural theorist Paul Virilio, came up with the theory of the function of the oblique.  It was an attempt to do away with both the vertical and, ideally, the horizontal in architecture.  Writing in the Canadian journal Topia, Steve Redhead put it this way:  "The work the two did together envisaged a new post-architectural and urban future that would force the body to adapt to disequilibrium and promote fluid, continuous movement.  It was bred in the context of utopian impulses in the 1950s and 1960s as a reaction to the stultifying orthodoxy and results of the earlier modern movement in art and architecture."  With his provocative designs, Parent has admitted to seeking a form of architecture which is "not rooted in the ground," but rather "erupting from it."  He has also sought to design structures that "appeared to be toppling over."  As Redhead puts it: "The drawings and models of Parent always had the potential for media notoriety, constituting almost a "punk architecture."  Like his one-time employer Le Corbusier, Parent's preferred building material is concrete.

    Virilio is probably best known for his 1975 book "Bunker Archeology" where he attempts to come to terms with the discarded German bunkers littering the French Atlantic coastline after World War II; describing them "as though a subterranean civilization had sprung up from the ground."  Parent has described the bunkers as "having a sense of movement, if you look at them for long enough, they seem to be advancing towards you—like tanks."

   It may be a stretch to say William Kessler was thinking about any of this when he designed Detroit Receiving Hospital, which was completed in 1979.   The hospital itself, with its gurney-like cladding and bold but judicious use of color, reflects Kessler's departure from traditional modernism—despite his training under the Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius. This was, after-all, the seventies. It stands today as one of the city's most striking buildings. 

    But it is around back, hidden from the street and approachable only by foot or on bicycle, where the monolithic oblique chunks can be found.  They may not quite be what Parent and Virilio were talking about, but their existence is definitely an oddity which constitutes one of Detroit's most unique landscapes.

    Their purposes are not always evident, some hum like air conditioners or ventilators, others appear to be skylights, the windows of which glow at night.  Others obviously contain stairwells, but some appear as though they are just strange portals to another world.

     In daylight they cast sharpened shadows, while at night, particularly in the rain, they stand like ghostly relics from a curious time.  Why they aren't icons of the city I have no idea.