Forget Apple Park, Lake Nike, and Amazon’s new 'Landscraper' concept. the coolest corporate headquarters in American is still General Motors’ Technical Center, built in 1956. see for yourself.
GM’s Monument to Modernism
Saarinen’s final design amounted to the fullest embrace of mid-Century modernism anywhere in America. Inside and out are precise angles and the kind of utility befitting the world’s largest car maker. Glass and marble and polished steel with a floating spiral staircases and a stainless steel water tower to loom over its man-made pool. The Tech Center would yield a number of high-profile jobs for Saarinen, including the St. Louis Arch and the TWA flight center at JFK airport.
The first thing General Motors did right was hired the right design firm: Saarinen and Associates, a choice championed by GM's Chief of Styling, Harley J. Earl. Eero Saarinen was just under 40, but his clean, contemporary aesthetics were a good match for the space-age visions Earl and company were just beginning to produce. Earl and his team brought a new level of swagger to the company’s fleet and he wanted to make sure that GM’s design and technical brain trust worked in a setting befitting visionaries, not actuaries. “Ket,” he told GM’s research head Charles Kettering, ”don’t put them them in a bank.” And in the end, they didn’t, possibly because Earl waited until Kettering retired in 1947, before his final push on the Center’s design.
But it’s not the coolest office in America. Nor is Nike's lakeside office or whatever new towers Amazon built this week. In fact, the sleekest, most ambitiously-designed place to work in America was built by General Motors when Dwight Eisenhower was in the White House and a moon landing was still pipe dream, a literal moon shot.
In a few weeks, Apple’s army of product geniuses and marketing wizards will start filing into its splashy new Cupertino HQ. Architect Norman Foster designed Apple Park to look like a ring-shaped spaceship, according to the vision of late Apple founder, Steve Jobs. It is nearly a mile in circumference, will accommodate 12,000 employees, and has massive glass doors that open up to the outside.
The 320-acre site took eleven years to build (with a three-year work stoppage for an auto-workers strike) and $100 million in 1950s dollars. It’s official unveiling ceremony, in May of 1956, was hosted by Walter Cronkite and President Eisenhower addressed the crowd from Washington in the first ever closed-circuit simulcast. Architectural Forum called it, “an architectural feat which may be unique in our lifetime.” Life called it a “Versailles of Industry.” And it still looks just as sharp and thoroughly modern as any building around, a throwback to when America was the undisputed champion of industry and its headquarters showed it. It is mid-century modernism at its purest.
The design standards of General Motors Technical Center didn’t end inside the walls of modernist glass and steel and high lacquered brick walls. The office furniture was as contemporary and forward-looking as the stainless steel water tower or the Styling Auditorium’s iconic dome. Legendary designers like Harry Bertoia and Charles and Ray Eames, designed chairs and desks that were later produced for the masses and have since become pillars interior design.
furniture
The FLOATING Staircase
Kevin Roche, then a young associate at Saarinan, was responsible for the circular staircase in the Research Administration Building. It is called the “Floating Staircase” and each of its marble steps was made of Norwegian granite and weighs 1,500 pounds.
Simple brick played a crucial role in the Technical Center’s distinctive look. A local, but world renown ceramist named Maija Grotell, head of the nearby Cranbrook Academy of Art’s Ceramics Department, was commissioned to create glazes for the brick. She created eleven autumnal colors—from tobacco grey to tangerine orange—which were mostly reserved for showcase areas like executive offices and employee dining halls, providing a bright contrast to the drab grey featured in most of the campus interior.
Beyond brick
-Eero Saarinen, The Details of Modern Architecture, Vol. 2: 1928-1988 by Edward R Ford.
“General Motors is a metal-working industry: it is a precision industry; it is a mass production industry. Thus, the design is based on steel—the metal of the automobile. And, down to the smallest detail, we tried to give the architecture the precise, well-made look which is a proud characteristic of industrial America.”