AIA Detroit is pleased to introduce some new faces to our Board of Directors!

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Steve Friess | Hour Detroit

Vishaan Chakrabarti, the architect overseeing the master plan for the redevelopment of Michigan Central Station, answers some questions about the project and why he loves Detroit.

Ford executives, casting about for a firm to oversee a master plan for redeveloping Michigan Central Station and the 30-acre area around it, landed on a New York firm called Practice for Architecture and Urbanism, or PAU.

Its founder, Vishaan Chakrabarti, 56, has focused his career on large-scale urban revival efforts. Notably, he helped concoct the groundbreaking idea of repurposing an elevated freight rail line in Manhattan as a public park known as the High Line; PAU is currently designing the expansion of Cleveland’s Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.

Chakrabarti, who was born in Kolkata, India, and arrived in the U.S. at age 2 with his family, first came to Detroit on a mid-1990s cross-country road trip with his girlfriend in a 1983 Honda Civic. They went to a downtown jazz club, he says, and became charmed by the city. Decades later, he’s at the center of the process of revitalizing it, as he explains to Hour Detroit.

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