Dearborn – Ford Motor Co.'s new world headquarters aims to help the company navigate the global auto industry as it is – and likely will be in the competition for talent and technology leadership.
Dubbed “the Hub,” it anchors a campus that fosters collaboration between employees across different teams, speeds up movement of people and vehicles, and helps attract top talent – attributes the automaker is leaning into as it competes against rivals increasingly focused on electrification, connectivity and self-driving technology.
The building features a “crown jewel” showroom, eight cuisine stations, six courtyards, six studios and a state-of-the-art prototype shop – that’s also still using a 1948 lathe.
The glass-faced, four-story building – that eventually will encompass 2.1 million square feet – will replace the smaller Glass House across town, which is set to be demolished. The Hub will help drive faster product development, higher profits and more innovation, executives said.
“This one really allows us to pull how we work at Ford Motor Company together with a building,” Jim Dobleske, chairman and CEO of Ford Land, the Dearborn automaker’s real estate arm, said during a tour ahead of the building’s grand opening Sunday. “This building is meant to be a tool for us to really help facilitate collaboration of our teams.”
No longer is this site of Ford’s former 1953-opened product development center a cubicle city. Top executives and support staff aren’t siloed and separated by department three miles away in the 1956-opened Glass House. Instead, they’ll be around open spaces with employees in engineering, design, sales, marketing and finance, likely all working together.
There will be 4,000 people assigned to the building, whose construction will be completed in 2027 – double those working out of the previous 12-story headquarters. There are more than 14,000 people within a 10-minute walk and another 9,000 people within a 10-minute drive. By 2027, 90% of Ford’s in-office employees will be working in new or renovated spaces.
“This really allows our teams to work very differently than they have in the past,” Dobleske said about the headquarters.
A previous pilot aimed at working more collaboratively brought forth the popular Maverick small pickup that debuted in 2021. The Hub will offer a physical space matching that mentality, Dobleske said.
Adrian Aguirre, chief Expedition engineer whose whole team has worked from the Hub for about a month now, already has seen the benefits of the openness and mixing of teams. Almost daily, he said he’s had experiences of running into the right person or had a conversation that sparked an idea – situations that would’ve otherwise happened over email or perhaps not at all.
“It was more like everyone had their own little fiefdom,” Aguirre said. “Even though we mentally and culturally had broken through the barrier, the physical things are still there, and now those walls are literally not there. You’ve built a place that responds to the kind of culture and way that we work hand-in-hand.”
Ford isn’t the only Detroit automaker getting new digs. Crosstown rival General Motors Co. plans to move into the downtown Hudson’s Detroit development from the Renaissance Center, which first opened in 1977. Ahead of that, though, it increasingly relocated and consolidated employees about 17 miles away at its Warren Technical Center, which it also has updated.
GM will take up four floors of the new 12-story mixed-use building in Detroit owned by mortgage mogul Dan Gilbert’s Bedrock LLC, adjacent to the complex’s skyscraper. Move-in is expected to happen by January. GM is working with Bedrock on redeveloping the Ren Cen with a smaller hotel, apartments and new retail and community space.
Chrysler parent Stellantis NV’s North American headquarters in Auburn Hills connects the Pentastar-topped executive office tower to its vehicle development technical center. Under previous leadership, however, the company discussed selling the 1990s building in a leaseback deal amid intensifying financial pressure. Since then, though, Stellantis has increasingly returned employees to in-office work.
Glenn Stevens, executive director of MichAuto, the automotive arm of the Detroit Regional Chamber, recalled his first visit years ago to Tesla Inc. It was chaotic, but it differed from legacy automakers in that everyone was working together in the same space.
“That’s what the best companies are doing,” he said. “It’s better to have the people and technology tools and suppliers and all the functions together to work as fast as possible in the most innovative way as possible. You have to have the highest quality and the highest design, or you can’t compete, because that is what those other global companies are doing.”
A unique project
At Ford’s new headquarters, employees enter through the American Road Lobby and walk up the stairs to “the hive,” a cafe area with coffee, other beverages and food where Ford employees can work or have a meeting. It’s reminiscent of the hospitality hub that will greet customers under Ford’s new dealership retail design, signaling the global effort to create a recognizable Ford design without the company’s name plastered in all spaces.
“(Ford CEO) Jim Farley has said in the past, when you walk into our existing headquarters building, you’re not quite sure if you’re walking into Ford or if you’re walking into a shampoo company,” Dobleske said. “This building, you know you are walking into Ford Motor Company.”
White walls are broken up by splashes of wood and earthy tones, Ford navy blue accents, and artwork that showcases Ford’s history and modern products and artists from Detroit and Cranbrook. Floor-to-ceiling windows let in daylight. A rug from Shaw Hospitality Group repeated throughout the building is the Blue Oval in a proprietary textile cut up and collaged together. Oval motifs repeat throughout the design.
On one of the upper floors of the Hub, there are executive offices and a board room, like on the top, 12th-floor C-suite of the Glass House – one of the few changes made to the design of the building once Ford decided to make it its new headquarters, Dobleske said.
But for the most part, employees don’t have assigned seats, working instead in a hotel-style model that Ford has adopted at most of its office spaces in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Every corner turned seems to reveal open desks, tables and chairs or lounge areas for meeting in groups. Closed-door individual “focus” rooms and team “energy” rooms are also found throughout the building.
Special credentials are needed to access the studios where Ford keeps the trucks, SUVs and other vehicles of the future. There are desks for designers, more capacity for vehicles than the previous product design center had, and large digital displays for reviewing designs. A two-tiered courtyard brings daylight in, and lighting can be changed inside when Michigan’s skies don’t shine as brightly. Vehicles can be driven into the courtyard and on the roof as well. Fritted windows that block ultraviolet light incorporate an oval pattern and Ford patent numbers.
Two vehicle elevators in the building help reduce the time it takes to move vehicles and materials through the building by 83%. Downstairs is the 207,000-square-foot prototype shop with spaces for milling clay models and all sorts of materials except glass – wood, metals, plastics and more. A whole room is dedicated to 40 3D printing machines capable of handling various materials – a revelation since the old building predated the technology, said Jim Conner, director of 3D process for Ford Design.
Designers benchmarked the Hub against other corporate headquarters and research and engineering campuses, said Craig Dykers, founding partner at Norwegian architecture firm Snøhetta, which is behind the project. But most comparison facilities are making small digital technologies or entail flat airplane plants.
“This is the largest facility of its type (at least in North America) that’s three dimensionally mobile, so things move up and down and sideways, which is very unique,” Dykers said.
Quieter and new milling machines are in the studios and prototype shop. But Ford employees also refurbished old equipment: they’re using legs from 1930s Ford Engineering Lab drafting tables for tables in the prototype lab, another 50 cast-iron tables likely from the Ford River Rouge complex date to the 1920s, and 40 machines in the metal shop trace to the 1960s, '50s and '40s.
It’s a neat preservation of history, Conner said, but the reuse of some of these pieces is more practical than anything.
“It’s better quality than the stuff today,” he said, adding that newer machines are pricier and often built for mass-scale production. “It’s a win-win from a price and design standpoint.”
Eventually, the vehicles developed in the studios will make their way to the showroom to be seen by executives, media and other visitors. It features 10 vehicle turntables, a color and materials showroom, a conference area, a 64-foot-by-12-foot screen for digital reviews and the ground floor of the studio courtyard for exterior review.
“What we really have is five different programmatic spaces,” said Sean Corriveau, Ford Land global design studio director, “that used to be disjointed across all of the other facility, which would require team members to go from one space, have a short walk to get to another, so on and so forth, for a holistic property review.”
Added Elisangela Previte, head of global business operations for Ford Design: “This is where you sell the products, where we get the best engagement from our internal customers, and have everybody in the same place to develop the best products for Ford.”
Other amenities
Wider walking paths and a 12-acre Horsepower Park greenspace featuring retention ponds and native vegetation are open to the public. Additionally, a Ford merchandise store and display area for Ford Racing that looks upon the Henry Ford Museum across Oakwood Boulevard will be completed in the first quarter of 2026.
Inside the building, courtyards, some accessible to employees, also bring in sunlight along with skylights. Courtyards have themes that represent geographies in Michigan: the “savanna” one attached to the showroom, a tree-spotted “forest,” sandy dunes, a plant-filled fern gully, falls with a passive water retention feature that activates during storms, and a rocky Great Lakes shoreline terrace with tent-shaped conference pavilions in ode to the camping trips of the “four vagabonds” – Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, Harvey Firestone and John Burroughs – between 1916 and 1924.
“These will be pretty flagship conference rooms,” Dobleske said. “If you’re bringing suppliers or others into our buildings, these would be a great space to bring those folks and really let them see and feel Ford in a different way.”
Movement was a key design principle to promote wellness, collaboration and innovation, said Jennifer Kolstad, Ford’s global design and brand director. Staircases are focal points, though there are elevators for accessibility, too. Fogged glass also allows visuals of movement of people and vehicles “behind the scenes” in secure areas of the building without giving away company secrets.
“You’re always going to get that feeling of activity as we walk throughout the entire building,” Corriveau said.
Throughout the building, there are also 14 hospitality suites at these “nudge points” with coffee and water stations where employees can keep lunch and eat. But Ford employees across the Henry Ford II World Center campus also will have access to the 160,000-square-foot “Gallery,” Ford’s cafeteria with scratch food pavilions for Mediterranean, Asian, Italian and other cuisines with selections rotated weekly and seasonally. Halal, vegetarian and gluten-free options are available as well.
Grant Vella is Ford’s executive chef. He’s a Metro Detroit native whose grandmother instilled in him a love for culinary arts. He previously oversaw Ford’s food portfolio in North America and has experience at a few Detroit restaurants, including Mad Nice in Midtown
“Ford is such a global company, we have diverse guests from all the world come in,” Vella said. “We want to make sure that we pay homage to that in our menuing. We want to try to stay true to the authentic flavors of the cuisine, but at the same time, we want to make sure that we don’t sacrifice quality as well as ease of service or flow service.”
Of course, there’s also dessert, including cakes, frozen yogurt and gelato from Detroit’s Momento. To-go dishes are also available, including $6 rotisserie chickens.
“If your partner calls, ‘on the way home, pick up some dinner,’ we got you covered,” Vella said. “We want to extend the hospitality beyond the normal hours of business.”
Ford might be leaving behind the Glass House, which is expected to begin a sustainable demolition after most employees move out by the end of the second quarter of next year, but in its new headquarters, the company hopes it will pave a bright future in Dearborn.
“It was critical that we design this project to be a good neighbor,” Kolstad said. “This really is the critical mass of Ford Motor Company now, and it signifies our way of working for the next 100 years.”
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