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Motor City
Thanks to Eero Saarinen's flexible plan and General Motors's commitment to design, the original GM Technical Center is still a model corporate campus.
By Paul Makovsky
June 2003
For close to 50 years General Motors's Technical Center in Warren, Michigan,
a dozen miles from Detroit, has embodied the company's vision of the future
by looking forward without forgetting its past. Dubbed the "Versailles
of Industry" after it opened in 1956, the center--designed by Eero
Saarinen and considered one of his masterpieces--consisted of 25 buildings
sitting on 320 acres. Today it has expanded to 37 buildings on 640 acres,
but Saarinen's buildings remain the physical and spiritual core of this
elaborate home to GM's engineers, researchers, stylists, designers, and
other specialists.
Wayne Cherry, vice president of design at GM, still remembers the first
time he drove onto the Technical Center campus, when he was 24 years old.
As he steered his '55 Chevy through the main gate, a dramatic curtain of
water from the fountain in the lake greeted him. The glistening steel water
tower, manicured landscape, and contemporary glass-and-steel architecture
seemed an embodiment of everything GM stood for. "It had been my life's
dream to design cars for General Motors, the most forward-thinking company
in the world," he says. "Coming to work at the Tech Center was
like stepping into the future."
That future was the result of a design collaboration between Saarinen and
the automotive company. Together the team brought a research approach to
the design process, treating the buildings as industrial products. They
developed concepts like the movable wall panel, tested new techniques like
central air conditioning, and built mock-ups as if they were designing a
car. "The thoroughness of their thinking was amazing," says Larry
Faloon, GM's former executive director of communications and industrial
design. "To have realized that to get to our exhibition dome from the
studio required an underground tunnel system, because of inclement weather
and security, is amazing."
Today the Technical Center is on the National Register of Historic Places,
and GM's long-term planning vision includes a visitors' center, which the
company hopes to open in a few years. This year marks the seventy-fifth
anniversary of GM chairman Alfred Sloan's collaboration with designer Harley
Earl to create the Art and Color studio, the first design department
at any major car company. "When you come here you understand the heritage
of the company," trend and color designer Chris Webb says. "Sloan
really instilled the vision that GM products could be differentiated from
others through the use of design." To celebrate the occasion, on June
22 GM will give the public a rare opportunity to tour the campus and view
an exhibit of nearly every concept car created since Earl's arrival.
As many corporations abandon midcentury Modernist buildings or transform
them beyond recognition, GM has managed to strike a healthy balance, adapting
to modern needs and technologies while maintaining and preserving an architectural
masterpiece. The GM Technical Center's long life is a testament to Saarinen's
innovative and flexible plan, but also to the company's commitment
to good design.
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DESIGN CONCEPT
Eero Saarinen's design for the GM Technical Center campus expressed the
auto company's focus on metal-working, precision, and mass-production. "Like
the automobile itself, the buildings are essentially put together as on
an assembly line, out of mass-produced units," he wrote. "Down
to the smallest detail, we tried to give the architecture the precise, well-made
look which is a proud characteristic of industrial America."
Ezra Stoller/Esto |
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VICE PRESIDENT'S OFFICE
(pictured: Wayne Cherry, vice president of design)
While Saarinen designed the executive offices in most of the buildings
on the campus, Harley Earl enlisted the talents of his staff designers
to create his own office. The room is designed more like an automobile
than an office. "The first thing that strikes you about the space is
that it is not a traditional rectangular shape but rather a series of
sweeping curves, flowing forms and surface transitions," says its
current inhabitant, Wayne Cherry. "The eye flows around the room in the
same manner it would flow around a vehicle." The automotive visual cues
are carried throughout the design of the office. The built-in sofas and
desk--constructed of wood that had been machined, sanded, and
laminated--suggest the wooden block models used in car development at the
time. The wood paneling on the walls is treated with an automotive-like
finish; polished metal accents highlight the edges. Even the glass table
is on a hydraulic system that lowers to coffee table height or rises to
conference table height. |
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Graham MacIndoe for Metropolis |
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FURNISHINGS
(pictured: Chris Webb, trend and color designer; Helen Emsley, chief designer,
Color and Trim; and the staff of the Color and Trim studio)
GM fastidiously maintains the Tech Center interiors, keeping the
original design whenever possible. The cafeteria, for example, still
contains the original Knoll chairs, recently recovered in white
upholstery. As a designer, Chris Webb finds Saarinen's entire complex
inspiring. "As you go around the building there are obviously many
areas that highlight Saarinen's major design interests," he says.
"Also you have original pieces of furniture by great designers like
Saarinen, Mies van der Rohe, and Florence Knoll still being used, which
offers a certain inspiration." He sees the building as
evolutionary, like the design process itself. "It's a beautiful
environment, but it wasn't built with all the technology that we have
today," he adds, explaining the difficulty of managing computer
cables while being careful not to take away from the appeal of the
space. "This building really mixes the best of the old and the
new." |
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Graham MacIndoe for Metropolis |
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COLOR AND TRIM STUDIO
The circular Color and Trim studio, where designers work on paint colors
for GM brands, was carefully rebuilt after a fire in 1979. Connected to
the studio is an outdoor patio over a garage: trees, grass, and other plants
all live in soil just three feet deep. "Attention to design details
like that is really nice," Webb says. "What's more, natural daylight
is the most important light to review colors, so we do color reviews out
there and will even roll scale vehicles onto the patio." |
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R&D ADMINISTRATION BUILDING STAIRCASE
The dramatic circular staircase in the R&D Administration Building,
nicknamed the "Floating Staircase," acts as a large-scale sculpture
for the lobby space. The steps seem to hover in space, held from above and
below by stainless-steel suspension rods, while the banisters are built
in place, with expensive alloys and teak. |
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DESIGN DOME
The dome's floor can be set up as an auditorium for an audience of more
than 1,000 or used as an exhibition hall. Multiple lighting settings allow
designers to study cars under all sorts of conditions and appraise their
appearance in a variety of lights. The outer dome is 65 feet high with a
span of 188 feet and is made of an aluminum shell three-eighths of
an inch thick--thinner in relation to the dome size than an eggshell is
to an egg. |
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DESIGN MODULES
To make the buildings as flexible as possible, Saarinen used a five-foot
module, or grid, throughout the plan for placing lighting, movable fittings,
and mechanical services like plumbing and heating. At the time a four-foot
module was standard, but GM wanted larger offices for its employees. The
module is visible in the grid of the ceiling panels, which are five feet
wide. To this day the crisp lines of the panels help sculptors and designers
evaluate surface development on concept cars: the reflection of the grid
in the shiny surface of a model will reveal imperfections like warping. |
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WINDOWS
Instead of using old-fashioned window caulking, Saarinen set the
large-scale thermopane panels into their metal frames like car
windshields, using Neoprene gasket weather seal, the result of a
collaboration between Saarinen's firm and GM. Even today if a window is
damaged, the new one is installed in the same fashion. |
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FIXTURES
Nicknamed the "teacup," the white fiberglass receptionist's desk
in the lobby of the Design Center administration building is one of Saarinen's
more playful gestures. It is currently being restored as part of the company's
ongoing effort to maintain even the smallest original details of Saarinen's
design. |
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COLOR
Saarinen punctuated the campus landscape inside and out with colored brick
walls, providing a vital contrast to the Machine Age aesthetic of the steel-and-glass
industrial buildings. For the ceramic glazed brick Saarinen chose eleven
intense colors--crimson, scarlet, tangerine orange, lemon yellow, chartreuse,
royal blue, sky blue, tobacco gray, brown, black, and white--to resemble
autumn leaves reflecting the late afternoon sun. The glazes were conceived
in the ceramics program at Cranbrook Academy of Art. |
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Graham MacIndoe for Metropolis |
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LANDSCAPING
The GM Technical Center's 140-foot elliptical stainless-steel water
tower, holding an emergency water supply of about 250,000 gallons, rises
prominently out of a 22-acre man-made lake. The lake was designed, in
part, as an economical measure to cut down on landscaping costs. The
lake, lawns, trees, and two lesser pools--all designed by Thomas
Church--are arranged to keep the spaces between buildings interesting and
human. In 1998 GM hired landscape architects and environmental
specialists from Hargreaves Associates and Ove Arup to apply sustainable
design ideas to the re-masterplanning of the Technical Center. |
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