Rabbit Island: The Trip

Object Guerilla has been a bit slow in posting this month due to a move of HQ, resultant internet issues, and because I spent a week in the woods. 

Back at the end of March, I entered an architectural competition for an artist's retreat on Rabbit Island, a 90-acre slab of sandstone and conifer off of the Keewenaw Peninsula in Lake Superior. The Keewenaw (now technically an island itself, after being cut off by the Portage Canal beginning in 1868) is part of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, first settled by whites in search of copper in the 1840s. Long known to native peoples, rich copper deposits were commercially exploited in Houghton, Hancock, Calumet, and other towns well into the 1950s, driving the local economy. However, once the most easily-recoverable deposits played out, and copper prices declined after World War II, the mines shut down. Many people left the U.P. in search of work downstate, joining the steel and auto plants in Detroit, Flint, Milwaukee, and Chicago. The current economy is still based on natural resources -- extracting timber and importing tourists. 

Panorama at the point.

Rabbit Island

I first heard of Rabbit Island on Cabin Porn, the sort of escapist, Instagram-tinged Tumblr that sets your mind adrift on a Sunday afternoon.  The island sits in the middle of Lake Superior, a few miles off of the Michigan coast.  Bought by Rob Gorski in 2010, the land was put into a trust, and conceived as an artist's colony.  The hope is to put up artists -- visual, performance, musicians -- for temporary terms.  


Some have already spent time on the island, finding inspiration in the solitude, spacious sky, and long water views.  At 90 acres, there is a substantial amount of land to explore; yet, as an island, edges are clearly defined.  The island, as archetype, fulfills a primal, childhood dream, same as a treehouse, or blanket fort, or backyard hideaway -- it limits the big, bad outside world, circumscribing a complex universe into a simple, manageable space.  What one of us didn't fantasize about having our own island as a child, filling it with pools and waterfalls and ziplines and basketball courts and video game caves?

All photos, except renderings, by Rob Gorski, available on the Rabbit Island Flickr page.

From the air.