Fifteen Years In, Detroit's Design Festival Puts Concept Cars Beside Homemade Chairs

Detroit Month of Design marked its fifteenth edition this year with a program that ran from General Motors concept vehicles to furniture built by hand in home workshops. The pairing is the point. A city that spent a century engineering the automobile is now putting that lineage in the same room as makers working at the scale of a single chair. For a collector, that is the kind of juxtaposition worth standing in front of: the factory-born object next to the one-off, each explaining something about the other. The organizers framed the edition as both a tribute to the city's manufacturing past and a look ahead at the designers now coming up there. That forward glance is what should interest anyone who follows American design from the coasts, since the objects shown in Detroit this year are the ones that tend to surface later in galleries and at auction.

With reporting from Galerie.