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Today it’s not difficult to find a manufacturing facility either here in Detroit or elsewhere that has been designed to be aesthetically pleasing. But in postwar America, the concept of elegantly-styled work offices for industries like the manufacture of the automobile was not the norm.
The efforts of one renowned architect helped change all that. His name was Eero Saarinen and his master work was the General Motors Technical Center in Warren, Michigan. Saarinen’s goal was to provide a symbol of tomorrow's industrial environment where the surroundings would be beautiful as well as functional.
Eero Saarinen
The “Tech Center,” as it has come to be known, was begun in 1949 and completed in 1955 as the new home to 16,000 GM engineers, designers, and technicians. The design of the sprawling campus was based on the “International Style” of architecture, heretofore rare in the United States, and included such signature features as low-standing, metal and glass buildings with colorful brick endwalls, a gigantic fountain that formed a wall of water 115 feet long and 50 feet high, a stainless steel water tower resembling a piece of modern sculpture, and a 22-acre, rectilinear-shaped lake placed in the center of the facility. While maintaining an overall horizontal look, the differing heights throughout the campus created a necessary variety.
Saarinen's Model of the GM Tech Center
The Tech Center’s modern buildings were surrounded by a carefully-manicured landscape. In fact, landscaping was an integral part of Saarinen‘s vision for the Tech Center as evidenced by the more than 13,000 trees, 3,180 shrubs, 55,941 ground cover plants and 155 acres of lawn covering the campus. The intention of the landscape design was to unify the Tech Center, while at the same time giving it variety through different planned vistas, the use of water features, and the contrast between open spaces and heavily planted areas. The Technical Center was designed to be visually appreciated from a car.
Then, as today, the innovative design of the Tech Center was praised throughout architectural circles. Architectural Forum, for example, lauded Saarinen’s work as “an architectural feat which may be unique in our lifetime,” while Art in America dubbed the Technical Center a “masterpiece” of 1950s industrial architecture and a successor to earlier work by modern architects Frank Lloyd Wright and Walter Gropius.
The American Institute of Architects (AIA) also recognized the achievement, awarding Saarinen an Honor Award in 1955 for the design of the Technical Center’s Central Restaurant, an elegant one-story structure with large glass curtain walls and decorative screen designed by sculptor Harry Bertoia.
The GM Technical Center was dedicated on May 16, 1956 before a crowd of 5,000 with President Eisenhower’s presiding and broadcast via radio to listeners nationwide. The Tech Center was constructed at a cost of approximately one hundred million dollars - the equivalent of about a half-billion dollars today.
Wayne Cherry, who retired as vice president of design at GM in 2004 after 42 years with the company said: “It had been my life’s dream to design cars for General Motors, the most forward-thinking company in the world. Coming to work at the Tech Center was like stepping into the future.”
Some of the landmark features of Saarinen’s undertaking include:
• Extensively placed tree-shaded pedestrian walks.
• Over 1 mile of underground tunnels connecting major Technical Center groups.
• The use of automotive materials and assembly line construction methods for erecting the buildings on the site.
• Interior walls built at plants and assembled on-site.
• Ceramic glazed brick construction, the materials of which were produced in a large kiln on the facility.
• Borrowing from techniques used in the auto industry such as designs for windows based on the mechanical sealing gaskets used on car windshields.
• Large, open lobbies to show off automotive products.
Of the dozens of buildings that make up the Tech Center there are six that are considered the facility’s core areas – Research & Development, the Design Center, the Engineering Buildings, the Manufacturing Centers, the Central Cafeteria and the Lake. Each has design features that were creatively and functionally innovative.
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 dramatic circular staircase in the Research &Development 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.
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.
Saarinen and his design team brought a research-oriented approach to the Tech Center’s design process. They developed concepts like flexible interior spaces that would allow for the regular rearrangement of office and technical areas. Saarinen accomplished this by eliminating interior columns to create large open areas and using standardized moveable partitions to delineate offices and shops.
The Engineering Buildings were the first to be constructed on the Tech Center site bringing all of GM’s architectural players together for the first time. The buildings were designed to have a "countertop" arrangement which provided additional desk space along the windows with files accessible to office workers when seated at their desks. The Engineering Buildings were arranged to provide exceptionally good lighting – by locating elevators, stairwells and rest rooms on the south side of the building, the drafting rooms received a maximum amount of northern light.
The Metallurgy Building within the Research & Development area, contains a working foundry, a lobby designed as a flexible exhibition hall with glass panels that slide to allow vehicles to be brought inside easily, and a roof that contains 72 fans to remove exhaust fumes from the laboratories.
The Design Center, the last of the main buildings to be completed, has a massive lobby 100 feet long and 30 feet wide. A staircase in the lobby is made of seven-foot, four-inch terrazzo slabs which overlap each other and are actually "suspended" from above. Each tread is caught in tension between pencil-thin stainless steel rods.
Perhaps the most remarkable new construction methodology occurred at the domed Styling Auditorium, which was designed to allow the viewing of new car designs under a variety of lighting conditions. Standing 65 feet high, with a span of 186 feet, the concept for this self-supporting aluminum clad dome was derived from the pressure vessel industry, which manufactured industrial metal tanks. Constructed of aluminum plates, the stressed metal skin of the dome was attached to the base of the structure by a tension ring, which also supported an interior acoustical dome that served as the ceiling of the Styling Auditorium.
The shop area within the two Manufacturing Buildings was developed to have a factory character and included wide, column-free spaces for maximum flexibility. Its lobby in Building A has three glass walls projecting from the facade, making it one of the most attractive buildings.
The centrally-located lake is man-made with an average depth of seven feet. The main fountain, located on the west side of the lake, pumps 6,000 gallons of water per minute to create a 115-foot wide, 55-foot high "wall of water." Four islands decorate the lake, with weeping willows gracefully hanging down. The lake has several varieties of fish, which help keep algae down (GM employees are allowed to fish, but for catch-and-release only).
Dubbed the “Versailles of Industry” after it opened in 1956, the Tech Center - considered one of Eero Saarinen’s design masterworks - consisted of 25 buildings sitting on 320 acres. Today, it has expanded to 37 buildings on 640 acres and includes a world-class computer network, state-of-the-art engineering facilities, and a new climatic wind tunnel. Saarinen’s buildings, however, remain the physical and spiritual core of this elaborate home to GM’s engineers, researchers, stylists and designers.
Industry watcher and historian Bill Harris had this to say about the Tech Center: “In a city where repetition and monotony had been elevated to an art form, a city of lunch pails and time clocks and production quotas, this place was the oasis. This was where people were paid to dream and experiment and create, and couldn't wait to get inside each day."
For more information on other architectural innovations connected with the automotive industry and labor, go to MotorCities National Heritage Area at www.motorcities.org.
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