Located in the heart of Detroit, District Detroit is the Motor City’s literal epicenter of sports and entertainment. Visitors to the area come to watch their favorite professional sports teams play—including the Tigers, Red Wings, Pistons or Lions—or to see live entertainment at any of the District’s seven live performance venues. There’s now something in District Detroit for students too: Wayne State University’s new Mike Ilitch School of Business. The building's exterior design is an expression of a modern corporate space, which carries through to the interior with the help of Perforating Imaging Panels from Dri-Design.

The school and its location provide a launch point for students’ careers with a vital business community, said Brad Zeeff, president of Dri-Design. “The building reflects this forward-thinking focus with modern and technological flairs, like the use of the Perforated Imaging Series to announce the school’s pride and purpose.”

Christman Constructors of Lansing, MI, installed about 2,000 square feet of Perforated Imaging Panels for the project. The panels were installed over light-diffusing fabric and a mounting structure engineered by Christman Constructors. Perforated Imaging Panels are ideal for exterior and interior projects. Exterior applications marry functionality and aesthetics because the Perforated Panel Series provides necessary airflow and/or shade to a structure without sacrificing style or design. Virtually any shape and pattern can be perforated into the panels and used for a myriad of purposes. Interior applications bring logos for schools and corporate themes to life with different colors and lighting. For the business school, the lighting color can be changed depending on the activity taking place in the auditorium, which hosts community and school functions.

According to Fred Alt, project manager/estimator with Christmas Constructors, installing the panels was the easy part of the project. Designing and engineering the mounting structure and finding the right light-diffusing fabric took more planning. "The most difficult part of the process of installing the metal panels did not have anything to do with Dri Design. The light diffusing fabric size and the method to attach it to our structure had to be modified. The installation was completed by our carpenters under budget and on time."​

The 4-story building is 125,000 square feet and can accommodate 4,000 undergraduate and graduate students. The project won a 2019 National Lighting Award of Excellence from the Illuminating Engineering Society.