Civilla Gardens: The “living process” in practice, with Adam Selzer and Or Ettlinger

Civilla Gardens is an ambitious recent project for a company headquarters intended for Detroit’s former industrial core, which was developed entirely according to Christopher Alexander’s principles. Its client completed the Building Beauty program and, upon graduating, invited two of Building Beauty’s faculty members to design it with him. Accordingly, the design thoroughly demonstrates Building Beauty’s “unfolding process” as applied to a full-scale project in the real world: interviewing stakeholders, developing a project pattern language, studying the local form language, analyzing the site’s centers, unfolding key patterns on the site, building a working model, iterating several design outlines, developing a detailed proposal, and collaborating with local architecture firms and city hall. 

Adam Selzer is co-founder and Senior Director of Innovation at Civilla, a Detroit-based design studio, and a graduate of the Building Beauty program. He has spent more than a decade practicing human-centered design with public-serving institutions, and is a former Design Fellow and Lecturer at the Stanford d.school.

Or Ettlinger is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Ljubljana, and a faculty member at the Building Beauty program. He is a decades-long researcher of architectural processes and creative methodologies, and is a practitioner of the “living process” of architectural design.

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