When the Detroit Pistons came back to the city from the suburbs, they wanted their new training home to do more than house basketball. It had to work for the neighborhood, too.
The Henry Ford Health Detroit Pistons Performance Center pulls that off by putting a grocery store, retail and a public gym at street level in the same complex as the team’s practice courts, front office and a sports medicine clinic.
Design Solutions
At street level, over 25,000 square feet of leasable space opens onto the sidewalk and keeps the block active. A Plum Market grocery and café anchors the program, alongside additional retail and a Planet Fitness gym open to the public. Secure access keeps the athlete and staff areas private. The clear ground floor and reworked streetscape make the building easy to approach on foot. A QLine streetcar stop is about a five-minute walk away, connecting Detroit’s New Center neighborhood to the rest of downtown.
Multiple practice courts anchor the building, with training, recovery and player spaces arranged around them so a player’s day has a predictable path. The player areas include training rooms, a locker room and lounge, hydrotherapy and cryotherapy, film-study and meeting rooms. A production studio and media interview rooms support team content and press. An enclosed second-story walkway ties the center to the William Clay Ford Center for Athletic Medicine next door, so players can move from practice to treatment without stepping outside, strengthening the day-to-day connection between athletic performance and medical care.
Basketball and business operations share the building but have separate, secure paths, so the front office and players each have their own routes. At the same time, glass-walled courts keep sightlines open between departments and open views out to the city.
The material palette draws on Detroit’s industrial and automotive history. At the ground floor, precast concrete and metal echo the historic buildings nearby and the rail viaduct running alongside the site. Above that is a cantilevered sawtooth curtain wall of floor-to-ceiling glass. To get daylight deep into the offices without overheating them, the design team worked with the glass manufacturer on daylighting and glazing studies, then developed a custom parametric dot-matrix ceramic frit. It’s about 60% opaque on the south side, where the sun is harshest, then opens to clear glass on the east, where downtown views are strongest. Throughout the building, framed views look out across the city, anchoring the project in its Detroit setting.
The layout follows the same logic. The courts and training areas line the north side for steady, controlled daylight, while the offices shield them from direct southern sun. Full-height glass pulls daylight into the offices and shared rooms like the employee lounge. The players’ lounge is wrapped in a 360-degree clerestory ribbon that keeps the dining and gathering space bright through the Michigan winter, supporting team wellness during long indoor months. The orientation and envelope make the building more comfortable, reduce its energy use and help earn LEED certification.
Impact
The center opened in 2019 as an early piece of New Center’s comeback. It helped catalyze master planning that set a longer-term vision for the area, and that vision has since grown into Future of Health: Detroit, the $3 billion redevelopment now led by Henry Ford Health with the Detroit Pistons and Michigan State University, taking shape as a district for healthcare, research, housing and placemaking.
That same emphasis on downtown investment and community access carried into Detroit’s bid to bring back women’s pro basketball. In 2025, an ownership group led by Pistons owner Tom Gores won a WNBA expansion franchise, set to start play in 2029.