“Once we knew that we had the parking garage as the location of our intervention, we started thinking about the car and car culture and specifically idling,” said Germane Barnes of Studio Barnes about his team’s Joy Riding exhibit. “If a car is just sitting there parked, what do you do—sing or do homework or just hang out?” 

His team, which includes Gabriel Soomar and Francesca Picard, also wanted to draw upon the automotive history in Indiana—from the Indy 500 and local vintage car shows to the vehicles and engines produced throughout the state. 

They narrowed their focus to the customized speaker system found in the trunks of many cars because of its importance in car culture, evoking the deep bass lines central to Black car culture and underscoring how sound, ritual, and assembly have long served as catalysts for celebration. 

“There used to be a show on TV called Pimp My Ride where they put all kinds of crazy stuff in the car,” Barnes said. “Thinking through pop culture events is really where a lot of this came from.” 

He credits Picard for coming up with the design. “We didn’t want something just for people to look at,” she said. “We wanted something that was dynamic and maybe had an opportunity for different types of engagement so that if you came one day it would be something and if you came another day it would be something else.”

Along with their design they also dreamed up a series of events—a car show, movie night and performances—to correlate with the dynamics of their installation. 

On the top floor is the main event—“the transformer,” which operates in three modes. A “solo listening” position lends itself to engagement with just one person. The fully deployed 15-feet-high by 12-feet-wide transformer provides music for the special events. A third position is more compact and functional for traveling from one place to another. 

“In the travel position you’re not quite sure what it is,” Picard said. “In solo mode you have an idea of how it functions, and then in its final position it really transforms into something that’s exciting to engage with. We think of it as being a huge activator for the whole garage from the rooftop of the garage.”

Barnes said he has long had the goal of being an Exhibit Columbus participant and was considering applying as a University Design Research Fellow before he learned he had won the J. Irwin and Xenia S. Miller Prize.

“Columbus has given us architectural inspiration,” he said. “It is a historic location that has a lot of monumental architectural figures that have already gone down in history. To be a part of that legacy is something we all strive to do when we’re students. Columbus gives us an opportunity to have a very large platform.”

He said he believes that his team’s contribution to the exhibition is to bring a bit of pop culture, excitement, and pizazz that isn’t typically seen in architecture. 

“We try to find ways to maneuver around convention and do things people haven’t seen before,” he said. “Exhibit Columbus gives us an opportunity to push that even further with Joy Riding, which is a wholly unconventional architecture proposal.”

He said some people might ask if what they have created is even architecture, but he believes architecture is all about people. “This project is 100 percent about people,” he said. “So we think it is 100 percent about architecture.”