The automaker giant is undergoing a renovation to centralize its over 30,000 workforce
This month, the automaker, Ford Motors Co. will commence the decade long revamp of its traditional headquarters and engineering campus at Dearborn, Michigan. The initiative intends to modernize a set of 60 year old buildings established at the center of the States’ auto-industry expansion.
The company initially plans for reconstructing 7.5 million square feet of space and building a couple of campuses –one at its world headquarters and another at its current design and engineering center. The automaker is likely to converge its massive 30,000 employees –which are currently sprawled through seventy distinct buildings –to two main campuses. The major chunk of the existing architect will be destroyed and overhauled by slim, sleek, and asymmetrical buildings with wide areas of grassy land and glass in between.
The company hasn’t unveiled the project cost yet.
A Managing Principal at Axis Advisors Inc. –a real estate advisory firm, Steve Morris has roughly calculated the project cost to be ahead of $1.3 billion. Mr. Morris’s estimation is based on the construction pricing in the metro Detroit area for similar office structures.
Since their construction, Ford’s Dearborn Michigan buildings haven’t had a considerable renovation, excluding several minor interior updates. Regarding the revamp, automaker’s Chief Executive, Mark Fields cited: “The key element of our transformation plan is to consolidate our fragmented footprint and replace it with a centralized campus.”
The reconstruction is also likely to include modification in the automaker’s storied headquarters building which is 1956 structure and is dubbed as “Glass House” because of its glass-clad, boxy modernist architecture. The company expressed that it will only bring about few minor interior changes with modernized cafeteria and new workspaces in an attempt to preserve the quintessential look of its headquarters.
The Michigan based car manufacturer had recently expanded its research lab in Palo Alto, Calif. and is currently looking forward to new offices worldwide including India and Middle East.
Since the day Ford was founded –which marks for over a century –Dearborn had been the company’s center of gravity, home to the company’s classics Thunderbird and Mustang and other generations of vehicles which took the company on the rollercoaster of boom and busts. Ford’s 12-story headquarters and several other buildings have been furnished by using mid-20th century furniture –a period when Detroit was the frontrunner in the auto industry worldwide.
Since Ford is currently at the most profitable points in history therefore it is spending billions in order to construct factories, respond to Silicon Valley rivals, invest in new product programs, and to renovate its premises.
The company anticipates that the new engineering campus’ construction is likely to be completed by 2023. The new campus will provide new research and development facilities, construction of new design dome, and updated workspaces. Ford remarked that the work on the second campus is likely to begin in 2021 and will take around five years to be completed.
Rival General Motors Co. has also been reported to overhaul its Warren, Michigan based technical campus, a place which has been the company’s hub for engineering and vehicle design. The initiative –which is likely to be completed in 2018 –will create around 2,600 salaried jobs .
Contrary to the objectives of GM, Ford has said that the anticipated renovation is only being done to centralize the workforce and it will certainly not create new jobs.
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