Concept Cars and Homemade Chairs Share a Floor at Detroit's Design Month

Detroit Month of Design marked its fifteenth year by putting General Motors concept cars in the same conversation as furniture built by hand in home workshops. For a collector, that pairing is the whole point. The concept car is design at its most corporate and its most speculative, a maker's idea of the road ahead rendered in full scale. The DIY piece sits at the other end, one person solving one problem with whatever was at hand, which is where many of the objects we now chase at auction began. The festival framed both as products of the same city, the one that taught the country how to build things in volume, and asked what that city makes next. Readers who track design from Los Angeles to the Hamptons should note when a manufacturing town stages its own future this plainly, because that is usually the moment the objects start to travel.

With reporting from Galerie.