Near the Mississippi in Minneapolis, Brandlhuber+ transforms a former limousine garage into Midway Contemporary Art Garage — a non-profit art facility conceived as a living process rather than a finished building.
The Midway Contemporary Art Garage occupies a former limousine garage near the Mississippi River in Minneapolis — a city in the midst of one of the more unusual urban visions in contemporary planning: a hundred-year initiative to reimagine its post-industrial riverfront landscape. The project sits within this larger ambition as an early node, an adaptive reuse that is as much about what it might become as what it currently is. Situated in the Midway neighbourhood, the building carries the unglamorous integrity of industrial infrastructure: honest in its proportions, frank about its construction, indifferent to the conventions of institutional architecture.
The existing building was not erased but accepted. Its structural frankness — exposed concrete block, industrial scale, the accumulated evidence of previous uses — was retained as the honest substrate of the new program. What Brandlhuber+ introduced were incisions, openings, and reorganisations that change the building's relationship to the street and the public realm around it. The work in progress quality is deliberate: this is a building that acknowledges its own incompleteness as a condition rather than a deficiency.
The design follows a phased concept in three movements: first, the adaptation and renovation of the existing building for exhibition and program use; second, the conversion of the outdoor parking area into a park and rain garden; third, the eventual expansion of library, teaching, and artist residency spaces. "The design highlights the transformative process," the studio noted, "acknowledging its importance alongside the eventual outcome." In a cultural institution of this kind — non-profit, community-embedded, long-term — the argument that the process is itself the content feels less like an architectural position than a necessity.
Brandlhuber+ have built a practice around the productive tension between existing structures and new programs — exploring the latent capacity of buildings that the market has left behind. In Minneapolis, working alongside local architects Snow Kreilich, they engage a post-industrial site not as a problem to be solved but as a collaborator: a structure already fully charged with the material evidence of urban time, and now asked to hold art as well.
