Architectural gem spawned big ideas

The General Motors Technical Center almost wasn't the architectural showcase that it is, designed by architects Eliel and Eero Saarinen with an eye to both form and function.

It almost got designed by GM's own engineers — which certainly would have shifted the equation toward low-cost function and away from elegant form.

To this day, the Tech Center's elaborately landscaped campus houses GM engineering and purchasing functions, preproduction operations, design, r&d and various salaried workers, for a total of about 18,000 employees, mostly white-collar.

It's home base for Bob Lutz, vice chairman of global product development; Ed Welburn, vice president of global design; Jim Queen, group vice president of global engineering; John Smith, group vice president of global product planning; and Larry Burns, vice president of r&d and strategic planning.

Clearly, the Tech Center, dedicated in 1956, is still a functional place where things get done — even if, over the decades, it doesn't have quite the technological monopoly within the corporation that it once had.

GM has added technical centers in other global markets, such as one in Bangalore, India, that opened in 2003. GM also now has 11 design centers in eight countries, in addition to the main GM Design Center with its famous design dome. The Design Center was the last of the main buildings on the Tech Center campus to be completed, in 1960.

But the Tech Center, in Warren, Mich., a suburb north of Detroit, is much more than the place where GM invented this or that or the place where GM gathered up, for the sake of convenience, many of its scattered operations after World War II from where they had sprung up all over the Detroit area.

It's also an architectural icon, recognized by the American Institute of Architects in 1986 as the most outstanding architectural project of its era. In 1990, the site was listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

You have to wonder whether the aesthetic value of the site helped some of those breakthroughs bubble to the surface. If nothing else, the Tech Center made GM a more appealing place to work.

Among the center's long list of innovations are the first four-wheel disc brakes; the first energy-absorbing steering column; the first child-restraint system; the first high-volume, front-drive car; the first catalytic converter; and the first low-cost antilock braking system.

But the beauty of the place was strictly optional and almost didn't happen.

"General Motors is an engineering organization. Our operation is to cut metal and in so doing to add value to it," said retired Chairman Alfred Sloan in his 1964 book, My Years With General Motors.

Given that unsentimental viewpoint, when Sloan and Charles "Boss" Kettering came up with the idea of a GM Technical Center in 1944, the company gave serious thought to making it strictly functional — and considered having GM engineers design it themselves.

Sloan said chief designer Harley Earl advocated hiring "an architect of stature" to make the future Tech Center more distinctive.

"Several others felt that any emphasis on high aesthetic standards might be detrimental to the practical operations of the center, and so they wanted General Motors itself to design and plan the project," Sloan said.

It's interesting to consider what a Tech Center designed by automotive engineers would have looked like: maybe like the "inside-out" Pompidou Center in Paris, with its exposed skeleton and all the mechanical systems on the outside?

Or simply a series of squared-off, anonymous office buildings? Rows and rows of cheap but functional Quonset huts?

Fortunately, Sloan backed Earl.

But board member Lammot DuPont had to be convinced that "dressing up the place" wouldn't cost a lot more and wouldn't interfere with getting work done, according to Sloan's book. In an exchange of letters written just as World War II was ending in Europe, Sloan reassured DuPont on both points. DuPont said he was satisfied, and Earl was given permission to find an outside architect.

"The selection of the Saarinens was not a difficult choice," Sloan said, based on nearly unanimous endorsements everywhere Earl checked among architectural schools.

Eero Saarinen and his father, Eliel, were indeed "architects of stature." The father was a prominent Finnish architect and urban planner. The family moved to the United States in 1923 and, ultimately, to Bloomfield Hills, outside Detroit.

The son had made a name for himself by designing the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, winning a 1947 architectural competition. The arch used gleaming stainless steel, the same material that later would be used to build the famous Tech Center water tower.

Like many other features at the Tech Center, the water tower was both beautiful and functional. It supplied water to the complex's giant air-conditioning system, according to Pride of Place: Building the American Dream, a 1986 book by architect Robert A.M. Stern.

Every facet of the Tech Center reflected the optimism and modernism of the era. That included even the furniture — which used innovative materials such as plywood veneers pressed into three-dimensional molds, then covered with foam and fabric and rested atop metal legs.

The Saarinens submitted preliminary plans in July 1945, weeks before the end of the war in Japan. A postwar strike from the fall of 1945 through March 1946 delayed the start of construction, according to Sloan's book.

Then, in the postwar automotive boom after civilian production resumed, GM put off building the Tech Center because the need to expand its production operations was more urgent.

Construction finally began in 1949. At the time, the Tech Center was the largest corporate building project ever, costing more than $125 million.

Eliel Saarinen died in 1950, and the son, at 39, inherited the project. The Tech Center was dedicated and formally opened on May 16, 1956.

Eero Saarinen died in 1961, at age 51, after surgery for a brain tumor.

Sloan, who died in 1966, wrote in his book, "I am satisfied that the decision to provide this aesthetically distinctive and functional center for our technical talents was a sound and desirable one."