Celebrating Your Surroundings, No Matter How Bleak

It’s not easy promoting high culture in a city like Detroit, where urban blight is a far more common sight than public art. So for the architecture of the new Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, organizers decided that they needed to embrace the city they hoped would be embracing it. “Housed in an abandoned car dealership on a barren strip of Woodward Avenue, it fits loosely into a decades-long effort to restore energy to an area that was abandoned during the white flight of the 1970s. But the design springs from a profound rethinking of what constitutes urban revitalization.”