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Event Info
Event type: Exhibition
Design Disciplines:
Entertainment x Design Industrial and Product Design Art x Design
When:
May 16 | 1–6pm
Where:
35-15 19th Avenue
Queens NY 11105
Neighborhood:
Queens - Astoria
Organizer:
000 Magazine
Accessibility:
Wheelchair Accessible Family Friendly
Purchase Tickets

Rare Shades NYC

Rare Shades NYC is a one-day-only exhibition of Porsche’s most rare and unusual colors, where design, culture, and engineering converge. Presented by 000 Magazine during NYCxDESIGN Festival, it takes place at Wildflower Studios, a film production facility imagined by Robert De Niro, Adam Gordon, and Danish architect Bjarke Ingels.

Rare Shades NYC is a one-day-only exhibition dedicated to Porsche’s most rare and unusual colors, where automotive design is treated as a cultural language rather than a product display. Presented by 000 Magazine during NYCxDESIGN Festival, the event sits at the intersection of design, engineering, and contemporary culture, reframing the automobile as a medium of expression, identity, and material storytelling.

Set within Wildflower Studios in New York City, the experience unfolds inside a purpose-built film production facility conceived as a new kind of creative infrastructure—part studio, part architectural experiment, and part cultural stage. The building was imagined by Robert De Niro and Adam Gordon, alongside Danish architect Bjarke Ingels, bringing together film, architecture, and urban development in a single environment designed for large-scale production and immersive storytelling.

Within this context, Rare Shades NYC becomes more than an exhibition—it operates as a designed experience. Each Porsche is selected not only for rarity, but for how its color defines identity. These rare and unusual factory and bespoke finishes shift perception of form, proportion, and presence. Rather than static objects, the cars become studies in color, industrial design, and emotional response.

The environment of Wildflower Studios amplifies this approach. As a working production facility, it introduces cinematic scale, controlled spatial sequencing, and narrative structure. Visitors move through the space as if entering a film set—each moment composed and staged to emphasize material, surface, and detail. This transforms the encounter from observation into experience, aligning automotive design with cinema and installation art.

Rare Shades NYC has evolved into one of the most anticipated gatherings within the 000 ecosystem, driven by rarity, curation, and cultural relevance. What distinguishes it is not scale, but concentration: a single day in which a highly selective set of vehicles, people, and ideas come together. The result is a moment outside traditional automotive or design programming.

Positioned within NYCxDESIGN Festival, the event connects automotive culture to the broader design world—alongside architecture, fashion, product design, and contemporary art. It asserts that automotive color is central to how objects are experienced, remembered, and valued.

Rare Shades NYC ultimately exists as a statement on design as experience. It reframes the automobile as a cultural artifact and elevates color as a primary expressive tool. For one day, it brings together a focused audience inside a cinematic architectural environment to explore what happens when engineering, design, and culture are treated as one continuous language.

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