The shape of things to come: New GM design center aiming to help speed EV shift
Warren — A new building intended to improve design processes as General Motors Co. dives deeper into electric vehicles is taking shape at the automaker’s historic Global Technical Center, giving employees behind future vehicles a fresh facility for the first time since the campus opened in 1956.
Construction is nearing completion on the 360,000-square-foot GM Design West building dedicated to brand studios where GM’s future products will come to life from digital and clay sculpting based on designer sketches.
The new space, part of a $1 billion investment on the Warren campus that GM announced in 2015, gives designers an open-concept space for more in-person collaboration. It also gives GM’s design team a place to be united in one section of the campus between two buildings connected by an underground tunnel that will be lined with bold panels of GM’s historical color palette.
“I’m excited because in my 25 years here, design has never really all fit in one spot,” said Mike McBride, GM’s executive director of design operations and immersive technology. “This will be the first time in my career where we’ll all fit in one spot. We’ve been spread out. It certainly enables more collaboration and efficiency.”
The new building comes as GM moves swiftly on its journey to go all-electric. It is expected to accelerate and improve the design process with more capable technology, easier access to different lighting to review designs and more than 100 collaboration spaces. It will open to employees at the end of the year.
“I started at GM in 1999 and since I started back then, we’ve always been talking about having a new design building, so it’s really just amazing to see it come to light within my career,” said Leah Woody, senior manager of creative clay sculpting.
The building’s open floor plan will allow the design team to be efficient, new mills will make the designing process faster and “the big impact for us too at sculpting is going to be all the natural light that we’re gonna get to help us read surfaces better and be able to utilize that, because (in) our current building, some of the studios don’t have the best natural light,” Woody said.
GM’s Tech Center sits on more than 700 acres in Warren. Construction on the campus started in 1949 and it opened seven years later. It was designed by world-renowned architect Eero Saarinen, known for the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, and was named a National Historic Landmark in 2014 by the Department of the Interior and the National Park Service.
“The original Saarinen design building was designed with the practices of the early 1950s in mind so the studios were big, open spaces with drafting tables,” said Natalie Morath, GM’s lead archivist and curator. “No one uses drafting tables anymore; they use computers. And when you have bright sunlight shining in through all these beautiful glass walls, it can be really challenging, especially when you’re looking at the minutiae of surfacing details. Having a lot more control and automation over the window treatments, that’s such a small thing but that will make a huge difference.”
Discussion about renovating or adding another design studio has been ongoing since the 1970s, Morath said: “Every 10 years you see a little proposal for what they wanted to do to expand the campus, it’s just this is the one that stuck.”
GM broke ground on the new design building in 2018 but halted the project months later as part of a cost-saving plan. Construction restarted in early 2021. Design and construction has been managed by Detroit based Walbridge, in partnership with SmithGroup.
There are Saarinen-inspired touches throughout the new building, from floating staircases to wood-paneled conference rooms, but employees also inspired the design.
“We had town halls,” McBride said on a recent tour of the new building with The Detroit News. “We set up some areas in different locations to simulate the environment so people could feel what the new space would look like.”
The building will showcase employee artwork with more than 30 unique pieces designed by 15 artists who are either current design employees or retirees, McBride said. The addition gives GM’s brand studios 60% more space.
The space is designed to be flexible and improve the design experience. For example, in the current design space, all of the clay mills are raised off the ground, creating a potential tripping hazard. In the new space, the mills are recessed into the ground, and new equipment with radar can detect movement and slow down moving parts to prevent injury.
Designers and sculptors can sit near the clay models, with space above them for other team members who need to be close to the product. The secondary level also gives designers another vantage point for viewing the vehicles, which is challenging to do in the current building. The new building has controlled lighting instead of simple on-and-off switches.
“Whether you’re on the first floor, the second floor you can really stand back and get a great view of the models as they’re being developed,” McBride said.
Adding to the efficiency of the new building are easier access points to a viewing patio with multiple turntables for team members to look at products in different lighting outdoors.
“You can just pull the vehicle off the plate and get it right on the patio … that can save actually a significant amount of time compared to how we have to do that today,” McBride said.
The current design building has walls and segmented studio space limiting collaboration across teams. The new building changes that.
“There are no walls, which gives us the flexibility as the brand portfolios grow and shrink,” McBride said. “You may be working on a lot for one brand today but less for that brand and more for another brand tomorrow; we can just ebb and flow that space through here. Today in the current building, there’s walls in the way of doing that.”
Each brand will have its own vestibule where they can showcase the brand’s identity.
A makerspace in the building gives designers and engineers the ability to experiment with 3D-printing technology. Two collaboration spaces could be used for employee lounging but are also large enough to fit vehicles, and each features a 20-foot LED screen to give presentations for vehicle reviews. A main presentation space has a 56-foot long LED screen and can also hold a vehicle. The space was placed above the lobby so outside guests can come in without seeing confidential products.
“Right now when we try to do these things, it’s a little chopped up,” McBride said. “The place we go to look at the presentation is in one spot, the car’s in another, so we’re bringing it all together.”
Employees from the advanced design and industrial design studios are currently spread out into other buildings on the campus. They will be able to come back to the current design building once the new space opens.
“They’ll be moving into the existing studio spaces and have more room and, frankly, more capability than they have today,” McBride said. “For example, our industrial design team today doesn’t have a place they could mill anything.”
A grand opening of the Design West building is set for the end of 2023.
khall@detroitnews.com
Twitter: @bykaleahall