OMA drilled roughly 1,500 holes into an old Detroit bakery to make LANTERN glow

The most striking thing about LANTERN is its south wall. The architects drilled roughly 1,500 holes through the old concrete masonry and filled each one with an off-the-shelf cylindrical glass block, per OMA's project description. By day the wall reads as a field of small dots. After dark, light from inside pushes through the glass and the whole building glows, which is where the name comes from.

LANTERN is a 22,300-square-foot arts hub at 9301 Kercheval in East Village, a few blocks from The Shepherd. It opened this spring as a Library Street Collective project, the gallery and development venture run by Anthony and JJ Curis, who have been assembling a cluster of arts properties in the neighborhood they call Little Village.

The building has deep neighborhood history. It housed the Blue Bird Baking Company, a family operation that made bread on the site for over fifty years, from 1946 until the business was sold in 1999, according to a Runner Magazine account of the property's past. After decades of decline the building sat empty until the Curises acquired it in late 2021. New York firm OMA took on the redesign, its first completed project in Detroit, with partner Jason Long leading the work.

Rather than rebuild everything, OMA kept the damage. One section of the structure had lost both its roof and an end wall. The architects turned that gap into an open central courtyard, about 2,000 square feet, which now serves as the building's main entrance and ties the tenants together.

Two arts nonprofits anchor the ground floor. Signal-Return, the Eastern Market letterpress and printmaking shop, has its new home here. Sharing the main level is the Progressive Art Studio Collective, or PASC, a studio and exhibition program for adults with developmental disabilities and mental health differences that launched in 2021. The building also holds roughly 5,300 square feet of artist studios offered at below-market rents, along with the recording studio and label Assemble Sound.

Around the courtyard sit the retail and food tenants: the boutique Coup D'etat, the beer bar Cøllect, and Cafe Franco. The mix is the point, and it lines up with how Library Street has framed the larger effort. "The core of our mission in East Village is focused on creating an inclusive community centered around the arts," Anthony Curis said in the project's announcement.

LANTERN sits near The Shepherd, the former church Library Street converted into a gallery two blocks south, part of the same push to turn vacant East Village buildings into arts space. The hub is at 9301 Kercheval Avenue in Detroit's East Village.