Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit

Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit

Founded in 2006, at the peak of Detroit’s decline, MOCAD was established as a vibrant site for the exploration of new ideas in contemporary art. Housed within a former Albert Kahn designed Cadillac dealership, the original renovations were only what was necessary to open the doors. This project improves the existing facilities and capacity for programming to extend MOCAD’s role as a cultural hub in the center of the Detroit arts district.

The building is a display of its collective histories, constantly reinventing itself through its users and a wide variety of public programs. The grounds of the museum advance environmental storm-water management practices by using LID techniques to establish an aesthetically bold public event space for summer film series, musical events and arts programming that accommodates cars at other times. The east and west facades receive interventions to visually open MOCAD to the Woodward Ave corridor and establish a new entry from the parking and events space while maintaining the grittiness that defines the character of MOCAD. Overall, our approach is to touch lightly, in what is as much a process of selective subtraction and careful addition, producing new connections between various programs and public space while opening the overall site producing a porous campus that acts as a central community hub.