After returning from my trip to Detroit Month of Design a couple weeks ago, I was asked what I would compare it to. Nothing, was my answer. Detroit is unlike any other city I’ve been to and its “design scene” (the term is insufficient to describe what’s happening here) is both more diffuse and profound than what you might encounter in meccas with a central fair helming a week of activities. To visit Detroit in 2026 is to observe a once-glorious centre of American industrialization, long an allegory for white flight and urban “blight,” in mid-renaissance. The process began in spurts, with artists moving into neglected neighbourhoods, turning them into creative hubs, and is now full throttle.
On my jam-packed itinerary, brilliantly organized by Camron and Design Core, the energetic steward of Detroit’s UNESCO City of Design designation, I took in a good helping of inspiration. Major institutions have been reclaimed and refurbished by entities synonymous with Motor City. Most notable is Michigan Central, which was reopened by its new owners, the Ford Motor Company, in 2024. The once-darkened shell, with its broken windows and collapsed roof sections, is now restored to its former glory. Its main hall is especially captivating: some 29,000 Guastovino tiles line the ceiling, only 1,700 of which are not original to the building, which was designed by Warren & Wetmore and Reed & Stem, the same firms behind New York’s Grand Central Station.
In the years that the station sat mostly empty (save for graffiti artists and clandestine partygoers), many of its light fixtures and architectural details disappeared; when it was time to restore the property, the heritage firm Quinn Evans invited anyone who had a piece of the station to relinquish it, no questions asked. Returned friezes, fixtures and ceiling coffers were scanned for reproduction; as was the replica filigree around the grand arch windows, made with 3D-printed segments. In the future, even the trains might return, though not inside the building: The city has signed a deal to create a multimodal transportation hub in the Michigan Central campus.
For now, the Ford Motor Company is working on establishing a 180-room hotel in the station’s tower run by NoMad, which is at work envisioning a restaurant helmed by chef Matt Eckfeld with a library curated by local cult favourite Periodicals. And the base building will remain open to the public. While I was there, I saw the place come alive with DJs, dancers and artists. A caravan of classic cars — from Challengers to Testarossas — lined the station as part of an annual event. Even if the bulk of the car industry has long departed, Motor City is still the heart of this place.
In downtown Detroit, another vestige of the city’s former life has been reimagined. Where the J.L. Hudson Department Store once stood, the Hudson Detroit owns the skyline. The five-fingered glass slab with an office block houses corporate HQs — including those of its developer, Dan Gilbert’s Rock Ventures, and flagship tenant General Motors — as well as event spaces and an Edition hotel. It was designed, with a pretty sweet courtyard, by SHoP. Hudson Detroit is the city’s second tallest and its first major development in 50 years.
As the city emerges from decades of disinvestment, there has been an ongoing conversation about how all of this urban renewal will benefit those who have deep roots here. Is this newfound investment a rising tide lifting all boats? And is it more than gentrification powered by outside forces?
There remain swaths of green parcels in between single-family homes, some inhabited, some boarded up. In recent decades, local groups have planted farms in these lots and Detroit now boasts more farms per capita than any other city in the United States. In one grassy patch that is now a sculpture garden, Detroit Month of Design has staged perhaps its most must-see highlight: “Between Your Love and Mine,” an open-air installation curated by Stefan Novakovic and supported by Library Street Collective.
Led by Anthony and JJ Curis, Library Street Collective is one of the most ambitious creative hubs in the city. Beginning with a glorious Romanesque church that it transformed into The Shepherd art gallery, it has been slowly acquiring derelict properties spanning three east-side neighbourhoods and restoring them into cultural, retail and dining destinations. Among its latest endeavours is the new home of Assemble Sound in an OMA-designed cinderblock structure; an under-construction building for the Louis / Buhl gallery (which has a presence downtown, in Library Street’s The Belt alley) designed by the late Lorcan O’Herlihy; and the Stanton Yards development, where SO – IL and OSD (Office of Strategy + Design) will remake the marina around a cluster of cultural amenities. In short, the Little Village is the kind of creative bohemia that urbanists can mostly only dream about.
Novakovic, who has documented the rise of Little Village in this magazine, collaborated with various designers and architects, including SOCA, Castor, Undecorated and OSD, to transform a green lawn that the collective acquired into a wondrous meadow filled with meditations on the border that divides Canada and the U.S. SOCA, for instance, has erected a grid of wood columns that is slightly warped by the earth in which it’s embedded — a reference to the artificiality of enforced boundaries across natural landscapes; Undecorated has built a stage out of shipping pallets, the kind found in the thousands of trucks that traverse the Detroit-Windsor bridge daily. With tensions rising between the two countries, fuelled mostly by the whims of Donald Trump, the border feels both absurdly arbitrary and incredibly consequential. It’s both something solid — with a new bridge and port of entry, after all! — and something invisible that can be negotiated over time. Increasingly, our freedom hangs in the balance when we try to cross it, the threat of being detained, of having our belongings confiscated becoming more palpable in recent years.
“Between Your Love and Mine” feels especially timely; its title, taken from Leonard Cohen’s “Treaty,” strikes a chord in a city of sound — as we toured the installation, a swelling chorus of birdsong and buzzing crickets added another layer to the experience. (Hopefully the lantern flies don’t make it across the border.)
Detroit is a mecca of music. One of the most enduring stops on the Detroit Month of Design agenda was a hard hat tour of the Motown Museum, led by Robin Terry, the chairwoman and CEO for Motown Museum, which was founded by her grandmother, Esther Gordy Edwards. Perkins & Will is designing a golden-sheathed building behind the homes of Hitsville, where legends like Marvin Gaye and Diana Ross made magic. Terry, seeing some of the details for the first time — like ceiling baffles mimicking the grooves of vinyl records and freshly poured ultra-glossy floors — beamed with emotion. Her grandmother, as Smokey Robinson said, “was collecting Motown’s history before we knew it was history,” and now all of the archives will be available to the music lovers who will flock to the building once it opens next June. As we stood on an elevated walkway that looks through a majestic window down on the courtyard between the new museum and the old houses, Terry said, “This is my favourite spot. You’re standing in the future looking at the past — it’s magical.”
That might just be the most apt description of Detroit today. In ways big and small, from the downtown core to the outer edges, the city has re-emerged as one of the most exciting and fascinating places in America.
The post Detroit Month of Design 2026: Witnessing a Major Renaissance in Motor City appeared first on Azure Magazine.
