Situated at the triple point of Detroit’s urban form—corporate objects (Comerica, Ford), an organic urban fabric, and the endless concrete wasteland—the Foxtown High + Low Museum marks a current and historic globally recognized facet of the city. In a world of totalizing and reductive media bombardment, the mixed-use residential museum displays life itself and the production of art. These two cores, living and working, define culture. As a museum of production and consumption, it must be a neutral setting for cultural differences and a home for tomorrow’s makers. Life and art stand side by side in collaboration, tension and discourse. Staggered floors allow introversion and extroversion; apartments may overlook the city, or the galleries; they may be tucked away or displayed like art. These programmatic ideals are symbolized by the meta-project at the building’s heart: a super-public commune and artist collective nested within the museum’s clockwork. Inside-out and outside-in relationships drive the work: the artists push out, the world pushes in, the museum is left in between. Foregrounded by a scuplted alley, vertical circulation considers prescription and redundancy. Minimized service stairs leave room for variable and alternative public routes. The project meets the street with a commercial landing zone, contrasted by a contemplative roof garden, incentive for reaching the vertical dead end. Visitors may follow a single path to the top, only to discover many possible journeys. Movement through a museum should be as dynamic as the art it holds and the spaces that hold it. The museum represents an openness to new types of local and global experiences. “Outdoor” materials such as brick leak inside, undermining the status quo of museum display. Precious art collections in galleries of recycled brick stand apart from non-precious art production in spaces of grandeur and material richness. An “indoor” material, finished wood, pushes outside to become the facade, a moment of softness in an otherwise hard, cold environment. The raw energy and material held in the trees on the roof trickles down, through zones of production and consumption, to become a finished product for the world to receive.