MONEY

Detroit Design Festival celebrates creative resurgence

John Gallagher

Detroit Free Press

This week’s celebrations known as Detroit Design Festival highlight many of the cultural endeavors under way in the city. But they also illustrate that the design profession in Detroit, which around 1970 or so slipped into a decades-long slump with boring car design and insipid architecture, has found its voice again.

Back at mid-20th Century, good design ranked high among Detroit’s great achievements. Auto companies turned out classics like the Ford Mustang and Chevy Corvette. Detroit-based architects Eero Saarinen and Minoru Yamasaki were leading the architecture world in exciting new directions.

But at some point and for many reasons, the design professions suffered a malaise. Automotive designers turned out uninspiring models year after year. Local architecture mostly churned out forgettable suburban malls and office parks.

Images shows activity from the Detroit Design Festival in 2015 when the Eastern Market After Dark event included artists painting couches donated by Art Van stores with the finished designed auctioned for charity.

Creativity by no means disappeared during that stretch. Detroit always had great musicians like Marcus Belgrave, artists like Charles McGee, novelists like Elmore Leonard, poets like Naomi Long Madgett, fabric designers like Ruth Adler Schnee, and sculptors like David Barr keeping the flame alive. But in general, the world no longer looked to Detroit for the latest architecture, automotive designs or urban planning ideas.

Now, increasingly, the world once again turns its eyes to Detroit. Automotive design now keeps pace with the best the world has to offer. Our downtown Detroit architecture is once again showing a lively, progressive spirit.

The new creative spirit manifests itself in many ways. A wealth of books pours off presses about Detroit. The Kresge Arts Fellowships annually celebrate local creative artists. Each year academics, film makers and urban planners from around the world visit Detroit to study our urban arms, our greenways like the Dequindre Cut, our remade downtown and Midtown.

Today, Detroit design encompasses everything from automotive design and architecture to computer programming, fabrics, bicycles and watches, apparel, books and food.

And this week, the Detroit Design Festival offers multiple ways to engage and celebrate Detroit design. Seminars, walking tours and other events organized by the Detroit Creative Corridor Center run through Sunday. For a full list and schedule, visit the festival website, detroitdesignfestival.com.

“Design is really a thread that connects every part of our community, but it’s not a thread that we’ve often acknowledged or seen,” said Olga Stella, director of DC3 and organizer of this week’s festival. “And through the design festival, we really want to shine a light on that. Just as Detroit is Motown, the Motor City, we should be known as a city of design.”

Stella cites the large and growing community of independent design voices in this community for the resurgence of interest in design. A place like the Ponyride center in Corktown nurtures products as varied as apparel and offset printing. But that’s just one location among dozens hosting creative types.

And major players like Dan Gilbert and the Ilitch family openly acknowledge that creative designs serve as a competitive tool to attract employees, customers, and investors. An attractive building with a good architectural design and lively pedestrian amenities out-competes a staid non-entity.

The world is noticing. On Dec. 11, 2015, Detroit became the first and only city in the U.S. to receive the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) City of Design designation, joining dozens of cities worldwide as members of the UNESCO Creative Cities Network.

The Creative Cities Network is comprised of cities that represent a strong legacy in one of seven creative fields, from gastronomy to literature to design. Leaders in these cities commit themselves to nurture strategies to improve cultural life, to share best practices and to promote creative industries.

► 'Detours' podcast: Detroit Design Festival, Armageddon Beachparty

Perhaps the challenge now is to keep encouraging good design across a range of activities — from the automotive labs and architecture studios to entrepreneurial circles to our neighborhoods.

If Detroit does it right, we may one day think of this period like we think of the city’s Golden Age of architecture in the 1920s and the heyday of the 1950s and ’60s.

“We have an opportunity to make a new heyday,” Stella said, “because of the very unique mix of ingredients we have here.”

Contact John Gallagher: 313-222-5173 or gallagher@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @jgallagherfreep.