There is a point inside the new Detroit art gallery and cultural venue the Shepherd where the building has an audible impact on visitors. Stepping into its main performance space, there is a sudden echo from above, a reminder that the building was originally a church.
Not that this fact is hidden. From the outside, the Shepherd, located in the city’s East Village neighborhood, still shows the grand facades, bell towers, and intricate brickwork from its first life as a Romanesque-style building built in the 1910s. Inside, the decorative trappings of a Catholic church have been mostly—and literally—whitewashed, aside from the stained glass windows around its perimeter and the wooden confessional booths that line one wall of the transept. Two white-box art galleries have been inserted inside the void of the church, and the altar space has been preserved as a stage for music and other performances.
The Shepherd is a project of the Detroit-based art gallery Library Street Collective, which since being founded in 2012 has blurred lines between presenting art, creating community space, developing real estate, and giving new life to abandoned buildings. The conversion of the former church, more than six years in the making, is part of a block-size complex of projects in its immediate vicinity, which is itself part of an even larger, and expanding, neighborhood-scale development project with art and culture at its center. It’s a ground-up Detroit arts district that’s emerging from the bones of abandoned buildings.
Named Little Village, the project includes a collection of art galleries and studios, retailers, food and beverage options, public spaces, and facilities for art-centric nonprofits. Most are built from the bones of old, abandoned buildings, like the former church, which was designed by New York-based architecture firm Peterson Rich Office. A few blocks away, a former industrial bakery building has been converted into a mashup of artist studios, a screen printing workshop, and retail spaces by the architecture firm OMA. A forthcoming project on the shore of the nearby Detroit River will convert a former boat storage facility into a 13-acre cultural district, with commercial and creative spaces interspersed with public park and waterfront access.
The gallerist-developers behind these projects are Anthony and JJ Curis, a married couple who’ve steadily expanded their gallery presence into partnerships and collaborations with arts and culture groups across the city, creating a Detroit arts district almost unintentionally. “Detroit is a pretty massive city, and there’s a lot of great stuff that’s happening throughout. But everything, especially from a cultural standpoint, has been very spread out,” says Anthony Curis, who comes from a family in the real estate business. “Having something where a lot of like-minded uses and people can come together and support one another is really important.”
Top shelf architecture has become a tool for creating the physical environment for that to happen. The Shepherd is the biggest example, and though the design intervention of placing two galleries inside is relatively minimal, the new spaces become a counterbalance to the monumentality of the church.
“When we first started working on the project, we basically built a model of just the shell of the church and started playing around with what it means to put walls in this thing,” says Miriam Peterson, of Peterson Rich Office. Art, after all, tends to need walls and lighting, which would have been hard to do inside the gaping hole of an empty church, which held its last service in 2015. The designers scaled the galleries to complement the pieces of the church where they are situated, and curved the corners to soften the injection. The first gallery, in the back of the church’s seating area, has an accessible roof that becomes a mezzanine looking down on the rest of the space and at the curved ceilings above.
“It allows you to physically and literally occupy the church in a totally new and different way by being up inside the barrel vault as opposed to down below looking up at it from this human scale,” Peterson says. “We really changed the proportions of all of the spaces and the way that people occupy that church volume.”
An oculus is cut through the top of that first gallery, giving people on the mezzanine a view back inside and people below a reminder of the huge size of the building. “One of the things that I wasn’t necessarily expecting but is one of my favorite moments, is how the light pours out of that oculus back up into the church,” Peterson says. “There’s this amazing, kind of reciprocal relationship that has come through the two different qualities of light.”
The former confessional booths are integrated into a section of the building that’s called the Black Art Library, featuring reading spaces for hundreds of curated books on Black artists and art. The altar and stage are used for performances, and Curis says the church’s organ is in the process of being restored.
Outside the walls of the Shepherd, there are several other projects that interrelate. The former rectory next door has been converted into a bed and breakfast. Two houses on the same block are being turned into restaurants, and in between is a publicly accessible courtyard and parklike space, with a skatepark codesigned by Tony Hawk and artist McArthur Binion, and a sculpture garden featuring works by the late Detroit artist Charles McGee.
“We’re really passionate about preservation and urban planning and public space and all these other things that go into this project,” says Curis, who also owns a few restaurants and bars in the downtown area. “This is kind of like the intersection of all those interests coming together in one project, which is exciting.”
It’s an approach that has informed the other elements of this new Detroit arts district. Though the Shepherd was the first building the developers bought in the area, a few other slightly less complicated buildings were bought and redeveloped in the time it’s taken the former church to materialize. A few blocks away, Lantern is another recently opened project that combines culture, commerce, and gathering space. Originally a commercial bakery that opened in the early 1900s, the building expanded gradually and somewhat haphazardly over the following decades before suffering abandonment and decay.
Most of the roof was missing when Curis bought it. A design by OMA partner Jason Long turns a central roofless section into a unifying courtyard for the building’s varied tenants, which include two arts nonprofits, a beer bar, a cafe, a fashion boutique, a recording studio, and artists on residencies with the Library Street Collective.
The standout detail of OMA’s design is a wall of cinderblock that’s been perforated with a grid of round holes that pull light inside the building during the day and shine it out at night. Walking through the building ahead of its opening in May, OMA’s Long says nearly 1,500 holes were drilled into the concrete wall, creating an economical alternative to inserting dozens of windows. The architects found a type of round industrial glass pavers to serve as tiny windows, and then sized the holes they drilled to match. It’s a creative and cheap solution, but not necessarily easy. A lot of testing was required to make sure the holes wouldn’t compromise the wall, and that light would actually make its way in and out. “It was kind of a lift to do this,” Long says.
A few of the tenants are already using the building, including the screen printing workshop Signal Return and the nonprofit Progressive Arts Studio Collective. Curis says these groups are most of the reason he and his wife decided to buy the building and add to this growing Detroit arts district. “They wanted to be in the neighborhood for different reasons. They each had their own challenges that they were going through and needed to find a space,” Curis says. “That led us to move forward.”
The same demand-side pressure is behind the next phase of the Little Village project, according to Curis. That forthcoming 13-acre waterfront project, with architecture by SO-IL and a plan by the design firm OSD, sits just a few blocks away from the Shepherd, and will partly house arts groups that wanted to be a part of this emerging Detroit arts district.
This is how a cultural district has almost accidentally taken shape, with one project following another like a chain reaction. It’s a result of cross-disciplinary thinking by the gallerist-developers behind these projects, along with the sheer availability and affordability of buildings in Detroit. “We definitely recognize that we likely wouldn’t be able to do this anywhere else,” says Curis. “And that’s one of the biggest reasons we decided to really focus our efforts here in Detroit.”