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In 1942, Eliel Saarinen, the renowned Finnish-American Modern Architect, designed the Library and Museum of the Cranbrook Academy of Art to be the centerpiece of the campus, which is now a National Historic Landmark. Considered to be one of the most technologically advanced and aesthetically daring Modernist building complexes at the time of its completion, its expanding collections and growing numbers of visitors now require a major transformation of the original. This competition, the first to address the emerging field of preservation design, invites architecture students to imagine this transformation. The challenge was not to adapt the buildings to fit current trends in library and museum design. Rather more ambitiously, it is to discover how the preservation of these extraordinary buildings can provoke a profound rethinking of our current conventions about design. The aim was to envision a new type of library and museum that would be unimaginable without the existing structures.