WHY I PRACTICE ARCHITECTURE

Detroit, Public Life, Civic Ambitions, Buildings as Offerings to City, Goodale Architecture Planning

Motown, Detroit culture, Influence, Goodale Architecture Planning

Detroit Main Library, Public Institutions, Influence, David Goodale Architecture Planning

While my architectural practice has centered in Los Angeles, Pasadena, and Southern California, greatly formative life influences came from the City of Detroit in her most robust years.

In the days of my youth, I had the great privilege to be nurtured in democratic, free institutions - institutions that grew out of the Enlightenment, public schools, libraries, parks, museums – and in the Motor City's polyglot factories and downtown streets.

Through the eyes of youth, every building and designed environment felt like an offering – an experiential, aesthetic, and social proposition to the citizens about how the city could become an ever-richer place. These built propositions accumulated, in tacit agreement, to make the city what Lou Kahn called “a place of availabilities,” and, one might add, a place of unbounded dreams.

It's the challenge of architecture to dream the city, provide its citizens with diverse and liberating propositions, new and old. In the networks of these propositions lay the prospect of a genuinely rooted culture. It's for the pleasure of this dreaming and making these propositions that I practice architecture.

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Detroit and polyglot factories of working people

Detroit Art Institute, Rivera murals and the rich culture of the city and its citizens

Detroit, MC-5, and Iggy Pop, culural influences

Detroit, United Artists Theater, park and flaneur reading newspaper

WHY I PRACTICE ARCHITECTURE

While my architectural practice has centered in Los Angeles, Pasadena, and Southern California, greatly formative life influences came from the City of Detroit in her most robust years.

In the days of my youth, I had the great privilege to be nurtured in democratic, free institutions - institutions that grew out of the Enlightenment, public schools, libraries, parks, museums – and in the Motor City's polyglot factories and downtown streets.​​​

In the days of my youth, I had the great privilege to be nurtured in democratic, free institutions - institutions that grew out of the Enlightenment, public schools, libraries, parks, museums – and in the Motor City's polyglot factories and downtown streets.