Inside General Motors’ dream studio

It’s been nearly 70 years since General Motors opened the doors to its iconic Technical Center in Warren, MI, where generations of designers penned thousands of cars within its Eero Saarinen-designed walls. Now, after decades of planning, GM has a gleaming new wing that unites more than 700 designers and creatives under one roof.

“The whole thing is about collaboration,” senior VP of global design Michael Simcoe told us during a tour. “Design has always been this place where the empire closes the doors, and in recent years we’ve tried to open that up, but it wasn’t really possible before because we didn’t have the space to bring in the engineers, all the program teams, and all the people we need to collaborate with. But we can do that now.”

Dubbed Design West, the new building flanks the historic Design Dome, creating in all a complex that Simcoe says is the largest of its kind. The latest wing alone measures 360,000 square-feet, or the equivalent of about 9 football (soccer) pitches — or slightly more than 6 American football fields. It houses all of GM’s “brand” studios: Cadillac, Buick, GMC, and Chevrolet, with the lower floors dedicated to exterior, interior, and clay modelling areas, including multiple flush-mounted plates and 44 mill sites equipped with custom Tarus 5-axis mills that were designed in partnership with GM’s Industrial Design team.

The mills even sport the GM logo — but don’t get too close, or the mills’ proximity sensors will embarrass you with an audible alarm and shut the machine down. Acoustic material helps to isolate sound despite the open spaces, and overhead grid lighting allows designers to see their models in varying degrees of brightness. Floor-to-ceiling windows enable more natural light, and vehicles can be more easily moved on to the patio areas for outside reviews. The ground floor also boasts a cafeteria on one end and a coffee bar on the other, providing much-needed sustenance for the long schlep in between.

Upper floors are home to conference rooms, hoteling stations, and viewing areas of the massive open space below — a luxury for designers who remember climbing ladders to glimpse the plan view of models in the comparatively low-ceilinged Saarinen studios. The new building successfully echoes the Neo-Futurist architect without pandering to him, with modernist touches that include a long corridor clad with fluted, warm-toned wood.

Despite the confidential nature of design studios, there is an abundance of glass, catching the sunlight by day and glowing from within by night. “We really wanted to make this look like a jewel box,” Simcoe says. One of the building’s highlights is the presentation room, with its 55-foot, 78-million-pixel power wall, along with a hidden door that opens to reveal a space large enough for a full-size model.

The addition of Design West puts the Design Dome, (which Saarinen originally modeled using half a tennis ball), at the centre of the campus, with the original viewing courtyard doubling as a gathering space for social activities such as food trucks and film screenings.

For cold Michigan winters, an underground tunnel connects the buildings, clad with 132 panels painted with colours from GM production vehicles, represented chronologically from 1950’s through the 2020s.

But what really breathes life into the new studio are the hands, hearts, and minds of the people who have called GM Design home throughout the eras. Scattered around Design West are around 40 art installations, created by current and past GM designers, creatives, sculptors and fabrication shop employees.

These include, among others, a large mural created from leftover leather upholstery from concept and production cars created by CMF design manager Laetitia Lopez and a sculpture, completed posthumously, by MaryEllen Dohrs, a Hollywood native who went to work for GM in 1950 at the age of 20, becoming the youngest designer to work at the automaker and one of the first women.

Out front, a raised boat, designed and built by creative digital sculptor Kirk Roda, carries a Japanese maple sapling, which will eventually be surrounded by grass and look as if it’s suspended, welcoming all those who round the corner from the main gate to the Design West entrance. One could say all the decor is a form of art, from the immense wooden wind tunnel propeller blade suspended above a staircase to the intricate patterns on the elevator surrounds.

The space, as with good car design, keeps newcomers and return visitors delighted with details that one might not pick up on until a second or third read.

While General Motors representatives won’t disclose the exact cost of Design West, the company announced around 2015 that it would invest US $1 billion into the Warren campus as a whole, and a spokesperson recently told us that the company’s “current and currently planned investments for the GM Tech Center campus are for approximately US $2 billion.”

As part of the overall strategy, the old Saarinen space is being renovated to accommodate other teams such as industrial design, UX/UI, and assembly shops, which were previously scattered around in other buildings. “This brings the whole team closer together,” Simcoe says. “Nobody gets left behind.”

But behind the collaborative spirit, the elegant decor, and the flashy tools is a larger, more poignant goal: to cement the power of the design department within one of the world’s largest car companies.

“It all seems very benevolent, but what it’s really about is control,” Simcoe says. “You have to bring people into your environment. Our leadership all the way to the top recognises the importance of their interaction with a physical model. If they’re all standing around together, you see a problem as it’s happening. That’s the real takeaway. It’s a chance to create a new design environment. You create a strategy for how you want to run the business and create the architecture around that.”