At the concerted effort of General Motors' Vice President of Styling, Harley Earl,[3] the corporation selected architect Eero Saarinen as the architect for the "Tech Center," with construction beginning in 1949. The original campus was completed in 1955 and ceremonially opened by PresidentDwight D. Eisenhower on May 16, 1956. The facility cost the company approximately US$100 million at the time—over US$1 billion in 2023 dollars.
In the following decades, the number of buildings at the Tech Center increased with the massive Vehicle Engineering Center (VEC), several wind tunnels, a battery development area, and most recently a pre-production operations (PPO) building. This growth was spurred by increasing saturation of technology in its vehicles—and by General Motors' continuing centralization of engineering.
Description
The "Tech Center" is a 710-acre campus located in Warren, Michigan and includes 38 buildings designed to accommodate over 21,000 employees. The site is bounded by Van Dyke Avenue on the east, by Mound Road on the west, by Chicago Road on the north, and by 12 Mile Road on the south. The Tech Center is divided by a north-south railroad right-of-way: the western half includes research, design, and advanced engineering activities while the eastern half includes more planning, current engineering, pre-production, and service activities.
The site offers an advanced technology business atmosphere emphasizing flexibility, efficiency, innovation, quality, safety, and security. It includes 11 miles (18km) of roads and 1.1 miles (1.8km) of tunnels, 2 water towers as well as 2 reflecting pools one of which is at least 22-acre (89,000m2).
Cole Engineering Center (formerly VEC-Vehicle Engineering Center)
Estes Engineering Center (formerly AEC-Advanced Engineering Center, which was previously Powertrain Engineering)
Pre-production Operations (PPO)
Training Center
Service Engineering Center
After-sales Engineering
Design significance
The General Motors Technical Center building, seen here in 1956.
The Tech Center was the first major independent project of Eero Saarinen after leaving his father's firm, and proved to be foundational to his later success.
Saarinen collaborated with design consultants and artists, including Alexander Girard and Cranbrook designers Harry Bertoia, Maija Grotell, and Florence Knoll. The design integrates not only Saarinen's architecture, but also planning; civil design; landscape architecture (by Thomas Church); interior design and fine arts. Artworks include works by Harry Bertoia, Alexander Calder (the fountain at the north end of the main reflecting pond), Antoine Pevsner (sculpture, The Flight of the Bird, aka Bird in Flight, at the south end of the same reflecting pond, outside the Styling Administration Building)[4] as well as paintings by Charles Sheeler and Jimmy Ernst.[5]
The architectural style and collaborative methods of development Saarinen practiced were used successfully in other large-scale corporate campus projects for clients including Bell Labs, IBM, and the John Deere World Headquarters. His design for the Tech Center received architectural acknowledgements beginning in 1956, when it was described as "one of the great 20th Century compositions born out of the sense of civic responsibility of a great corporation" by Max Abramovitz, and it was described as an "Industrial Versailles" by Architectural Forum. Its architectural importance was cited as the primary reason for the center's 2014 National Historic Landmark designation.[6] The American Institute of Architects honored it in 1986 as the most outstanding architectural project of its era.
↑ Mike Litterst (September 30, 2014). "Secretary Jewell, Director Jarvis Announce Nine New National Historic Landmarks Highlighting America's Diverse History and Culture" (Press release). Washington. U.S. Department of the Interior.
↑ Michael H. Hodges (December 11, 2019). "New book celebrates Eero Saarinen's GM Tech Center". The Detroit News. But GM's design guru, Harley Earl, was a risk taker, and "very much wanted the campus to reflect the future orientation of the company," Skarsgard said. "So he just waited till Kettering retired (in 1947), and then pushed hard to go with Eero."
Eero Saarinen was a Finnish-American architect and industrial designer who created a wide array of innovative designs for buildings and monuments, including the General Motors Technical Center in Warren, Michigan; the passenger terminal at Dulles International Airport outside Washington, D.C.; the TWA Flight Center at John F. Kennedy International Airport; and the Gateway Arch in St. Louis. He was the son of Finnish architect Eliel Saarinen.
The Cranbrook Educational Community is an education, research, and public museum complex in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. This National Historic Landmark was founded in the early 20th century by newspaper mogul George Gough Booth. It consists of Cranbrook Schools, Cranbrook Academy of Art, Cranbrook Art Museum, Cranbrook Institute of Science, and Cranbrook House and Gardens. The founders also built Christ Church Cranbrook as a focal point in order to serve the educational complex. However, the church is a separate entity under the Episcopal Diocese of Michigan. The sprawling 319-acre (1,290,000 m2) campus began as a 174-acre (700,000 m2) farm, purchased in 1904. The organization takes its name from Cranbrook, England, the birthplace of the founder's father.
The North Christian Church is a church in Columbus, Indiana. Founded in 1955, it is part of the Christian Church. The church building of 1964 was designed by Finnish-American architect Eero Saarinen (1910–1961) and completed in 1964. Saarinen's father Eliel Saarinen had designed the First Christian Church in Columbus.
The Irwin Conference Center was designed by Eero Saarinen and built in 1954 in Columbus, Indiana, United States. It is currently owned and operated by Cummins, whose world headquarters is located across Jackson Street in the Cummins Corporate Office Building. In recognition of its unique and beautiful design, the resource was designated a National Historic Landmark by the National Park Service in 2001.
Cadillac Place, formerly the General Motors Building, is a landmark high-rise office complex located at 3044 West Grand Boulevard in the New Center area of Detroit, Michigan. It was renamed for the French founder of Detroit, Antoine Laumet de La Mothe, sieur de Cadillac. It is a National Historic Landmark in Michigan, listed in 1985.
Balthazar Korab was a Hungarian-American photographer based in Detroit, Michigan, specializing in architectural, art and landscape photography.
The MIT Chapel is a non-denominational chapel designed by noted architect Eero Saarinen. It is located on the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts, next to Kresge Auditorium and the Kresge Oval, which Saarinen also designed. Though a small building, the Chapel is often noted as a successful example of mid-century modern architecture in the United States. Saarinen also designed the landscaping surrounding all three locations.
Gunnar Birkerts was a Latvian American architect who, for the most of his career, was based in the metropolitan area of Detroit, Michigan.
New Center is a commercial and residential district located in Detroit, Michigan, adjacent to Midtown, one mile (1.6 km) north of the Cultural Center, and approximately three miles (5 km) north of Downtown. The area is centered just west of the intersection of Woodward Avenue and Grand Boulevard, and is bounded by, and includes the Virginia Park Historic District on the north, the Edsel Ford Freeway (I-94) on the south, John R Street on the east and the Lodge Freeway on the west. New Center, and the surrounding areas north of I-94, are sometimes seen as coterminous with the North End, while in fact separate districts.
Allan Bernard Temko was an architectural critic and writer based in San Francisco.
The TWA Flight Center, also known as the Trans World Flight Center, is an airport terminal and hotel complex at John F. Kennedy International Airport (JFK) in New York City. The original terminal building, or head house, operated as a terminal from 1962 to 2001 and was adaptively repurposed in 2017 as part of the TWA Hotel. The head house is partially encircled by a replacement terminal building completed in 2008, and flanked by two buildings added for the hotel. The replacement terminal is home to JetBlue's JFK operations. The head house and terminal are collectively known as Terminal 5 or T5.
Knoll is an American company that manufactures office systems, seating, storage systems, tables, desks, textiles, and accessories for the home, office, and higher education. The company is the licensed manufacturer of furniture designed by architects and designers such as Harry Bertoia, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Lilly Reich, Florence Knoll, Frank Gehry, Charles Gwathmey, Maya Lin, Marcel Breuer, Eero Saarinen, and Lella and Massimo Vignelli, under the company's KnollStudio division. Over 40 Knoll designs can be found in the permanent design collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.
Christ Church Lutheran is a congregation of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) in Minneapolis. Its buildings—a sanctuary with chapel (1949) and an education wing (1962) designed by Finnish-American architects Eliel Saarinen and Eero Saarinen—have been internationally recognized, most recently in 2009 as a National Historic Landmark by the U.S Department of the Interior.
The CBS Building, also known as Black Rock and 51W52, is a 38-story, 491-foot-tall (150 m) tower at 51 West 52nd Street in the Midtown Manhattan neighborhood of New York City. It is the headquarters of the CBS broadcasting network. The building was constructed from 1961 to 1964 and was the only skyscraper designed by Eero Saarinen, who referred to the building as the "simplest skyscraper statement in New York". The interior spaces and furnishings were designed by Saarinen, then Florence Knoll Bassett after the former's death. The building was also the headquarters of CBS Records before the early 1990s.
The Argonaut Building, renamed in 2009 the A. Alfred Taubman Center for Design Education, is a large office building located at 485 West Milwaukee Avenue in the New Center area of Detroit, Michigan, across the street from Cadillac Place GM's former corporate headquarter office. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2005.
The Prentis Building and DeRoy Auditorium Complex consists of two educational buildings, the Meyer and Anna Prentis Building and the Helen L. DeRoy Auditorium, located respectively at 5201 and 5203 Cass Avenue in Midtown Detroit, Michigan, on the campus of Wayne State University. The buildings were built at the same time, and were designed by architect Minoru Yamasaki to interrelate functionally, spatially, and architecturally. The buildings were constructed at a critical point in Yamasaki's career when he was experimenting with ornamentation, light and shadow, and the use of pools and gardens to soften perception of standard International Style architecture. The complex was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2011.
Rødovre Town Hall is located at the centre of Rødovre, a municipality some 9 km (5 mi) to the west of Copenhagen's city centre. Completed in 1956, it was designed by the Danish architect Arne Jacobsen. A fine example of the international architecture trends of the 1950s, it was inspired by the General Motors Technical Center to the north of Detroit.
Marianne Strengell was an influential Finnish-American Modernist textile designer in the twentieth century. Strengell was a professor at Cranbrook Academy of Art from 1937 to 1942, and she served as department head from 1942 to 1962. She was able to translate hand-woven patterns for mechanized production, and pioneered the use of synthetic fibers.
Robert F. Hastings (1914–1973) was an American architect in practice in Detroit. He spent his entire career with Smith, Hinchman & Grylls, now SmithGroup, and was its president from 1960 to 1971 and chair from 1971 to 1973. He was president of the American Institute of Architects for the year 1971.
Susan Skarsgard is an American graphic designer, calligrapher and writer known internationally for her calligraphy as well as her work as a designer and founder of the GM Design Archive & Special Collections at General Motors. In 2019, she authored Where Today Meets Tomorrow, Eero Saarinen and the General Motors Technical Center, published by Princeton Architectural Press.
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