GM Tech Center at 70: Saarinen's Glass City Still Draws the Future to Warren

Seventy years after its dedication in 1956, the General Motors Technical Center still stops first-time visitors mid-sentence. Eero Saarinen's campus of glass, brick and aluminum — reflecting pools, a stainless-steel water tower, the great Design Dome — was built to tell the world that the automobile's future would be engineered in Warren, Michigan. It is now a National Historic Landmark, designated in 2014, and it is still at work.

The Tech Center covers roughly 710 acres between Mound Road and Van Dyke Avenue, a self-contained city of laboratories, design studios and office buildings where General Motors develops the vehicles it sells around the world. Generations of Warren families have measured their lives by its rhythms: the morning pour through the gates, the prototypes under covers, the test laps nobody talks about.

What happens inside has changed with the industry. The campus that once tuned carburetors now works on electric-vehicle batteries, software and advanced materials, and GM has continued to invest in Warren facilities, including battery-cell prototyping work, as the company remakes its lineup. The engineering may be digital now, but the address is the same one Saarinen drew.

For the city, the Tech Center is identity as much as employment. It is the reason 'Warren' appears in design histories and architecture textbooks, and the reason tour buses of architecture students occasionally join the traffic on 13 Mile. Few American suburbs can point to a workplace that is also a landmark of modernism.

Landmarks, though, have to earn their keep, and the Tech Center's best argument is the simplest one: the parking lots are full. As Warren marks seventy years of the campus, the glass city on Van Dyke is still doing the job it was built for — inventing what Detroit drives next.