General Motors is updating one of its icons, and it's not a car; it's an office located in Warren, Michigan. GM's iconic Tech Center opened in 1956. Now, as part of a nearly $2 billion investment, GM is adding on here over 1,000 workers, sculpting clay Cadillacs and Buicks, and using VR to imagine car interiors. This is like a Speed Racer kind of steering wheel with models all around the office. It was the perfect opportunity to play a game of Is this a real car? Is that a real car? Looks real, looks real, doesn't feel real. Yes, the original campus was designed by architect Eero Saarinen, and it changed how GM designed its cars. It's a Willy Wonka Factory for car design. We took a tour with the project's leads to learn how GM designed this new building so that its designers could make the cars of the future. [Music] GM's 710-acre technical campus is home to a lot of different types of work, from battery research to automotive engineering to car design, and the last

one takes place in these three buildings: Sarin's Design Center, the Design Dome, and the new building designed West. Inside the 360,000 ft building, it brings together digital designers and clay sculptors. This new building is all built around the way we work today. It's computer-based or virtual, but we still celebrate the need for a clay model of physical property because in the end, our customers, they buy a physical property. This ethos has been central to GM's process going back decades, which is why the look of the new Design West borrows heavily from its predecessor, GM's original Design Center. I feel like I've just walked into a Mad Men set. Yeah, it's a really cool office. The Sarin building is a mid-century marvel filled with mahogany secret doors, lots of old buttons. You know, they don't make knobs and buttons like they used to. No, they don't. And of course, Design Studios. We're in the original Sarin Design Center in our Advanced Design Studio. This space has been in use since the 1950s. Its key

feature light a grid of 5x5T lights cover the ceiling, and a line of windows flood the space with daylight. So right now, you can see along this window, you've got designer desks. You know, back in the 1950s, you wanted a lot of natural light for the designers to be able to sketch on their physical, you know, paper. But when computers were brought in, that layout became a problem. We had designers that would actually start to create their own ways to block the daylight from coming to their computer screens. So you would walk in here, and you would see different arrangements of foam core board trying to block their computer screens. And as more tech was brought into the old studios, they became overcrowded. So Design West became the solution. You're placing a building next to an iconic structure. How do you figure out what that building should be and how much space that building should take up? We wanted to sort of make sure that the building had its own identity, and I think the outward-facing facades are a

little bit more expressive, a little bit more strong, but then as it sort of turns to the Dome, it's sort of more reflective and inward-facing to tie the new and old spaces together. GM recreated features like Cherrywood paneling, hexagonal ceiling tiles, and glazing brick walls. At design West's core is a massive open studio space. The windows here are bigger than in the Sarin studio, and the light grid, while still made of panels, has been updated to allow more control over things like brightness and color temperature. These are set to 5,000 K to mimic daylight. This vehicle, that vehicle, that vehicle, the small model vehicle on the end, they're all silver. Yeah, why so? Look up, and you can see that the stripes that are reflected in the body side of the vehicle. Silver is a good medium to see a surface. If it's a flat surface, they'll go across cleanly, and they'll be tight together. As the surface changes, then so these lines will open out, and so their workers don't feel inclined to

build little foam caves. All of the digital design work was pushed back under the mezzanine with black ceilings to absorb light. But as they look past their screens, they're looking outside, they're looking through the studio, so they're seeing the creation or the validation of the products that they've been designing. Sarin's Design Center siloed off each brand into its own studio, but in Design West, the team broke down those walls. The old studios are smaller spaces, locked spaces, and so a Chevrolet and a GMC working in two different studios. They may share an architecture, but you could be solving the same problem or creating the same problem twice. Now those designers could see each other working. Yeah, while GM says it's committed to clay modeling for now, this space is meant to adapt to any changes in the way cars are designed in the future. Prices can change, the prices will go away like it did from the past to now, but the built environment and the reflection and the good places for people to work, I'm hoping that last one structure that has lasted.

Sarin's design Dome. What I love about the Dome is I feel like it looks a little bit like a spaceship that's about to just like take off and leave us. Um, spaceship full of exclusive cars. Yeah, this Dome has been a stage where the good and the bad designs have been presented. The Dome was designed in part to act as an artificial sun. Just so I understand it, the lower ring here, darkness, is to sort of prevent any additional reflection or bouncing of light. And then the Dome itself is the sky, is the sky. But GM spotlights the cars to emphasize finer details. You know, we'll do tricks with this engineered lighting environment to make the vehicle look its best, showing it up. Yeah, with the addition of Design West, the Dome now connects the new and the old. It's really the heart and soul. It's at the center of the whole complex. Since Sarin's time, the playing field for car manufacturers has changed dramatically. In 1956, GM had the largest share of auto sales in the US, accounting

for 42% of new car sales in 2023. GM was still on top in the US but with a share of about 17.7% of new car sales. The car industry is competitive and incredibly fast-paced. Is this building meant to speed up the design process in any way and get more of those ideas out quicker? Absolutely. We believe the space that we've designed and created here will help us move faster as a company. And how important is moving quickly as you think about the future and the transition to electric vehicles? I mean, it's super important. I mean, it's a race to see who's going to win every day. The industry is very competitive and we need to be fast. The office is going to help you win that race? Absolutely. When GM's campus first opened all those years ago, it had a sign near the entrance that said where today meets tomorrow. The sign is gone now but the message lives on.

Inside GM’s Newly Updated ‘Willy Wonka Factory for Car Design’ | WSJ Open Office

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