Peterson Rich Office (PRO) has transformed a historic former Catholic church in the East Village neighborhood of Detroit into a new cultural arts center for exhibitions, public projects, and
performance. Located in a residential area which has been subject to decades of population decline, the Shepherd expands the operations of Library Street Collective, one of Detroit’s leading
art galleries. Part of a 3-acre master plan PRO has developed with the landscape design firm OSD, the Shepherd is the first phase in Library Street Collective’s creation of a new arts campus, and will be an anchoring institution for the neighborhood, echoing the role the church once played as a space for community gathering.
Built in 1912, The Good Shepherd Church closed in 2016. An architectural beacon within the neighborhood, the existing conditions of the historic Romanesque-style church were twofold: the building itself was in good condition, while the surrounding area–residential plots where abandoned buildings had been torn down in the 1990s and 2000s–had degraded into inactive
greenspace. The church presented an opportunity to transform the former religious institution into a new anchor for the community founded in the arts. With this in mind, PRO’s adaptive reuse of
the church focused on keeping the integrity of the original architecture intact, while strategically inserting elements into the space to both introduce new programming including gallery space, a library and performance space, and to allow for new ways to experience the historic building.
PRO stripped back the interior, removing the ritual elements of the congregation, while leaving the essential forms of the building intact. From here, they set about rescripting the visitors' experience through the primary architectural gesture of inserting two art gallery volumes–the first in the central nave and the second in the adjacent transept–in the space. Above the central gallery a mezzanine level has been introduced, allowing visitors to walk within the barrel vaulted ceiling and provide opportunities for additional programing. The central crossing and apse have been left open to create space for live performances and larger installations. The other transept houses the East Village Arts Library, a branch of the Black Art Library which includes artist monographs, exhibition catalogs, children’s books, and rare research materials centered around artists of color who have made significant contributions to the arts in Michigan. For this space, PRO introduced new stone bookshelves and repurposed the existing church confessionals into multimedia listening booths for the public to enjoy audio and video materials related to the archive.
PRO’s design strategy focused on subtly highlighting the relationship between the old and the new. New elements are designed to selectively reflect and reframe existing ones, without
imitating them. PRO studied the materials and forms of the existing interior, introducing a related palette into their interventions through a contemporary design language. A new arched-shaped rounded steel staircase rises in front of one of the original stained glass windows. For example, the stair is clearly contemporary in its materials, construction, and detailing, but has a formal resonance with the existing arches throughout the building.
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