The Detroit Institute of Arts’ decommissioned Farnsworth Street underground parking structure is reimagined as a civic hybrid: an auto-storage facility coupled with a public art vitrine. A glass pavilion positioned on the south lawn, aligned with the existing access ramp, mediates between street-level public life and subterranean infrastructure, rendering visible systems typically kept out of sight.
The vitrine hosts a rotating program of contemporary installations organized around a fully operational car wash, reframing an everyday Motor City service as a site of cultural production. Brushes, pulleys, dryers, radios, and water become scenographic devices, enabling artists to transform a familiar ritual into a spatial and performative experience. Visitors are not spectators alone, but participants within a choreographed technological sequence.
Through the use of projection, extended reality, and holography, the project collapses distinctions between the mundane and the elevated, the infrastructural and the artistic. The result is a deliberate recalibration of how and where art is encountered—legible, playful, precise.
Unlike ticketed immersive exhibitions, the Farnsworth vitrine is fully accessible from the street. Museum-quality work operates here as public art: unmediated, unpaywalled, and embedded within the civic fabric.
2022
Midtown Detroit
Scale:
3,000 SF
Client:
The Detroit Cultural Center Association (DCCA)
Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA)
Principals:
Jean Louis Farges, Anya Sirota
Design Team:
Sarah Carter
Visualization:
Atelier Replica