A Tale of Two Campuses

I’m visiting General Motors’ Technical Center, in Warren, Michigan. It’s a few days before CEO Rick Wagoner is asked to resign by the Obama administration. But today, on this luminous early-spring afternoon, the large artificial lake glistens in the sun, the stainless-steel water tower shines like new, and the glazed brick—burned orange, paprika red, and bright blue—shimmer on the windowless sides of low, rectangular buildings, looking like huge pieces of modern art that punctuate the gray campus with its glass, steel, and aluminum details. The architecture, as Eero Saarinen and his client saw it, expressed American optimism, innovation, technology, and design excellence—the cornerstones of our auto industry between 1946 and 1955, when the campus took shape. This progressive center of technology and design gave definition to an industry that reshaped the American landscape. It also put in place a complex business that helped create the wealth of nations in the 20th century.

Later that week, I’m in Charlottesville, Virginia, walking toward Thomas Jefferson’s Academical Vil­lage on a gray Saturday morning, the Blue Ridge Mountains barely visible in the mist. As I leave behind the sprawling campus of the University of Virginia (UVA) and come upon the great lawn, edged by parallel colonnades that organize rows of small student rooms and gracious pavilions (each of them a unique design), I’m again struck by the power of place. With its red brick, white woodwork, and classical order, assembled to echo our national belief in unity and independence, the Jefferson campus is also an expression of its arch­i­tect’s restless intellect. His dramatic rotunda (based on the Pan­theon, in Rome) opened its grand windows to views of untamed nature beyond the well-tended lawn. Inside, when the university opened in 1825, were books on architecture, astronomy, botany, philosophy, and political science. This library, built to take the place of the church that dominated other 19th-century campuses, went a long way toward defining liberal education in the United States.

On this weekend, the UVA campus is alive with students, parents, and tourists. Groups of them gather on the lawn examining everything in sight. I overhear earnest discussions of Jefferson, democracy, history, and architecture. Nearly 200 years later, they’re still coming “to drink the cup of knowledge,” as Jefferson predicted. They all seem to know, intuitively, that the architecture around them embodies a big idea that needs tending.

Though the GM campus was also based on a big idea—the efficient production and distribution of a technologically sophisticated product—it now conjures a very different mood. But I want to remember the original spirit of the Warren campus, so I imagine what it must have been like when the place was abuzz with the best and the brightest in design, engineering, materials science, and manufacturing know-how. That was when the Calder fountain still worked, when the Bertoia sculpture in the dining room wasn’t competing with the garish Quiznos signs, when the elegant furniture in the reception areas was upholstered in the bright reds and blues of the campus, rather than the dull black of today. I marvel at architecture that still feels innovative after more than 50 years, and I note the results of Saarinen’s meticulous research: neoprene weather sealant, a luminous ceiling that in-corp­orates air-conditioning, and the eggshell-thin aluminum covering the dome that houses new cars.

In trying to understand what happened here, I keep asking questions that Wagoner and other CEOs might have asked themselves: When did GM’s managers stop seeing what Saarinen gave them? How does an institution lose its appreciation for such a major, and visible, asset? How different would things be today if GM had committed itself, long-term, to the research and innovation its architecture so eloquently symbolized?