Deshler Group is making its mark in the U.S., Costa Rica, Mexico, and now Italy. Deshler, along with affiliates GS3 Global and Global Transportation Management (GTM USA), is sponsoring the United States Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, for the 15th Annual Architecture Exhibition, open from May 28-November 27, 2016. Founded in 1895, the Venice Biennale is one of the world’s foremost creative expositions, celebrating innovative art and architecture from across the globe.

For this year’s exhibition, twelve teams of skilled architects, from firms around the country, were chosen to reimagine future redevelopment of four iconic Detroit locations: the Packard Plant, Dequindre Cut, the U.S. Post Office, and Mexicantown. Named “The Architectural Imagination,” the project intends to “generate discussion about how to use spaces in a different way,” according to Robert Gruschow, Deshler president.

The teams’ “speculative designs” will not only produce potential plans for future development in Detroit, but also create spaces and ideas that will inform other international cities seeking to transition or redevelop their urban spaces for new or improved purposes. The architects are “not limited by funding or parameters, and this will allow them to explore ideas that will eventually filter back to urban planning and architectural communities, driving current trends and thinking,” remarked Gruschow.

Each Biennale pavilion boasts a preeminent curator who oversees a project reflecting talents, trends and ideas from the pavilion’s nation of origin. The 2016 U.S. Pavilion is co-curated by Cynthia Davidson, founder of Log: Observations on Architecture and the Contemporary City and Director of the Anyone Corporation, and Monica Ponce de Leon, Founding Principal of MPdL Studio, Dean of Architecture at Princeton, and former Dean of the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Michigan.

At the conclusion of the Biennale, Deshler will sponsor the exhibit’s return to Detroit, as well as its appearance in a show at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD). This exhibition will allow Detroiters, particularly high school students interested in architecture and engineering, to learn about the imagination, planning and execution of the teams’ vision for a future Detroit.