The Book Depository building in Detroit was designed by late industrial architect Albert Kahn in 1936 as a post office and mail-sorting facility. Some years later, it began being used as a public schools’ book depository. Ever since, the building has become noted as an Art Deco landmark—but now, it has more than one reason to shine.

The building’s most recent metamorphosis as a state-of-the-art innovation hub for entrepreneurs and inventors—focused on developing sustainable and equitable solutions for challenges at the intersection of mobility and society—is the product of a joint initiative by Newlab and Michigan Central. Launched this spring, the new ecosystem serves as the first piece of a larger civic and urban redevelopment puzzle centred around transforming Detroit’s Michigan Central Train Station into a mobility innovation hub. The interior design was helmed by Nicko Elliott and Ksenia Kagner of New York-based studio Civilian.

Nicko was no stranger to Newlab’s design ethos. He had, after all, designed their first space in New York’s Brooklyn Navy Yard. This time, in a bid to maintain Kahn’s architectural signature and echo the area’s corporate modern design ethos, he developed a design scheme rooted in adaptive reuse, in consultation with architecture practice Gensler, who served as the architect of record for the project and undertook its core-and-shell renovation.