DEARBORN (WWJ) -- Blue Oval draped collaboration spaces, tech enabled courtyards and a 160 thousand square foot food hall are just a few highlights of Ford’s new 2.1 million square foot headquarters building. There are also state of the art workshops, design centers with natural light and some strategically placed coffee shops.
“The main point, I would say, I hope people come away with for Ford’s new headquarters, is the amount of effort to really designing a building that works like a tool to support and enable the team members to do their best work when they are on site,” says Jim Dobleske, Ford Land Chair and CEO.
About two thousand of those team members are on site now. The workforce will double early next year. The goal is to have fourteen thousand employees within walking distance of each other on Ford’s Dearborn Campus.
“Finance and marketing and sales, HR, will be sitting side by side with our engineers and designers, and more importantly side by side with our products.”
Dobleske and other Ford executives taking us on a tour of the new building, which has a decidedly different feel than the Michigan Avenue “Glass House” headquarters that Ford has occupied for seventy years.
When the former headquarters opened in the fifties, it felt very futuristic. But, in recent years, it started to feel like a future that had come and gone. There was a definite sixties style. The new headquarters feels very high tech, with screens everywhere, lots of open space and lots of natural light.
“We’re super proud of this, and we think this is going to be Ford’s headquarters for the next seventy years.”
The new headquarters has the height of a seven story building, but there are actually four floors. There are two spacious lobbies. The main visitor lobby displays Ford vehicles.
Ford has strategically placed touch screens in a number of areas to keep people from getting lost. There are four separate levels of security, which will allow any Ford employee in the area to access some parts of the building, while others are strictly on a “need to know” basis. Frosted glass can allow people to see that there is activity in the critical design areas, but not let prying eyes see confidential new products.
The design areas now have more space, more natural light, and more connectivity so that designers in Dearborn can connect with their counterparts in other parts of the world.
We had a carefully controlled tour of the workshop where prototypes will be developed. It includes the latest state of the art modeling tools. But Ford also completely refurbished some traditional machining tools that had been in use, in some cases, since the 1940’s.
And, nobody who works in the building will starve. The food hall has eight different food stations with changing menus and food choices of all varieties.
“Ford is a global company,” says Executive Chef Grant Vella. “We have guests from all over the world coming in here. So, we want to pay homage to that diversity through this food hall.”
And there are homages to Ford history. There is a lot of blue. There are a lot of ovals. There are “Easter Eggs” in the glass in some windows that include the date of Ford patents.
One courtyard has meeting spaces that are designed to look like the campgrounds that Henry Ford and his “vagabonds” used during their trips.
The idea is to make the building uniquely Ford, without being over the top.
“We didn’t want our employees to see Ford,” says Jennifer Kolstad, Design and Brand Director for Ford Land. “We wanted them to feel Ford.”
The people who will work in the building did have a say in the construction. Ford Land CEO Jim Dobleske says that was particularly important in when it comes to product development and design.
“Collaborating with them through the design process really allowed us to insure that as we brought the functions together we were doing it in a way that made sense, and would help drive a lot of efficiency.”