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Ford Motor announced on Sept. 15 that it will be moving its world headquarters from the iconic Glass House on Michigan Avenue in Dearborn, Michigan to a newly developed innovation hub near the Henry Ford Museum.
The move will take place over the next several months to a new 2.1-million square-foot world headquarters building. That building will house executives and product developers and it will include modern amenities such as seven restaurants designed by an executive chef and outdoor work spaces, the company said.
Ford's current headquarters, dubbed the Glass House because of its windowed exterior, is an iconic 950,000-square-foot building on 212-acres of land that's served as the company's headquarters since 1956. Ford employees will vacate it by early next year. Then, Ford will start a "sustainable demolition" of the building and it will be torn down by either the end of 2027 or by mid-2028, said Jim Dobleske, CEO of Ford Land, Ford's real estate arm. Ford will retain ownership of the land and continue to operate two buildings located on it, he said.
Meanwhile, the automaker has been working with Dearborn city officials on ways to turn the site into a park or sporting space once the Glass House comes down.
“Ford Motor Company’s importance to our community cannot be overstated," city of Dearborn spokesman Hassan Abbas said in a statement to the Detroit Free Press, part of the USA TODAY Network. "More than just the industrial heartbeat of the modern American economy, Ford’s legacy is deeply intertwined with this city’s history. We’ve been proud neighbors with the world headquarters across Michigan Avenue, and we are excited for Ford to contribute to the city’s vitality as the company finds a new home in its expansive new, state-of-the-art facility just down the road in Dearborn.”
The automaker's new world headquarters, designed by global architectural firm Snøhetta with global design and engineering consultancy firm Arcadis, will be located about a mile west of its current world headquarters building. Ford is not confirming exactly how many employees will be assigned to the new world headquarters building, but about 500 employees already are working in the new building, Dobleske said.
Dobleske said the first half of the building's total population will move in starting in October and November then "we’ll welcome the remainder of just over another 2,000 folks coming into the site" by the end of 2027 after Ford completes the full construction of the building. That adds up to about 4,000 employees who will be located in the new headquarters and they will come from various parts of the company, not necessarily direct transfers from the Glass House.
Ford's Glass House can currently accommodate 2,000 employees, Ford spokesman Dan Barbossa said. When the construction and move to the new building are completed by 2027, Barbossa said about 14,000 employees across the new innovation campus will be within 15 minutes' walking distance of each other.
Ford Executive Chair Bill Ford said the move will make it the first time in the company's modern history when Ford’s top executives and its product development teams will be together in one facility, which will improve efficiency. Also, he said, the new and modern digs will help Ford attract and retain top talent. Ford said he visited Apple's world headquarters in California a couple of times and was inspired by its beauty and how much the employees seemed to enjoy working in it.
"When we’d recruit people, we’d have to show them everything but where they were going to work," Ford told the Detroit Free Press and a small group of reporters. "It was really bad. So we knew we needed to upgrade our whole product development area and that kind of quickly morphed into our executives should be there, too, because we really want to get the product and the people making product decisions together on a more real-time basis.”
Moving from an old era into the future
Ford has been building and renovating this new campus for several years. The new campus will use the same name as the campus where the Glass House stands: Henry Ford II World Center. Ford also will take with it the iconic address of 1 American Road.
The new headquarters is located at Oakwood Boulevard and Village Road, near where Ford's Product Development Center once stood and across from the Henry Ford Village.
Bill Ford said the move will be a bit emotional for him because he has so many memories from the nearly 50 years he's spent working at the Glass House. There were many good times there and then there were times such as during the Great Recession when "we had some really tense meetings" as Ford struggled to avoid government assistance or filing for federal bankruptcy protection like its crosstown rivals General Motors and then-Chrysler had to do. A couple meetings in the Glass House he recalls were "dominated by outside lawyers, which was not a lot of fun."
The company started tearing down its Product Development Center, which was built in 1953, in 2020, but it still has some more of it to demolish before it can complete construction of the new site, allowing the rest of the employees to move into the new headquarters by 2027, Dobleske said.
The grand opening of the new world headquarters building is scheduled for November, and at that time the new building will officially be dedicated as Ford World Headquarters.
"By the end of 2027, more than 90% of where our global office employees sit will either be in new or newly renovated spaces," Dobleske said. "When you think about the size of Ford Motor Co.’s overall portfolio, which is — including commercial and manufacturing — it’s roughly 3 million square feet, that’s a really significant stat."
Dobleske said corporate leadership will be in proximity to designers and engineers to foster innovation. The campus layout is intended to bring cross-functional teams together and has been designed to reduce the movement of materials. For example, it takes about 36 minutes to move a vehicle or product from one end of the Glass House to the other, he said. In the new headquarters, "because of the vertical integration, we’re able to do that in just about 3 minutes."
Bill Ford put it more plainly about the Glass House: "It’s better days are behind it."
"(The Glass House) was built in a time when everybody closed their door and had their private office and there wasn’t this whole notion on team work and collaboration, which is what we prefer to have happen," Ford said. "It happens elsewhere in our facilities."
A return of the 5-day work week?
The new campus and headquarters building will be adjacent to Ford's surrounding buildings in the Oakwood area such as the Ford Engineering Lab and Ford Experience Center. The benefit of having thousands of employees in walking distance will shave off hours of wasted time, Bill Ford said.
“Right now, if you’re in world headquarters and you want to go over to what we call the PDC, the Product Development Center, you get in the car, drive over, look for a place to park, you walk down the long hallway … that whole thing takes a long time. So even if you’re only over there for an hour meeting, you’re burning two hours for sure out of your day," Ford said. "I, for one, always felt very cut off at the Glass House. I just felt like I’m not where the action is. Yeah, there are a lot of executives there, but it’s hard to get a feel for the business sitting in an office building with nothing else going on around you."
The new location, he said, will allow for the design studio team, the engineers and executives to meet on 5-minutes' notice if needed.
The push for more real-time collaboration begs the question: Will the automaker bring the workforce back to the office five days a week? Ford recently implemented a new policy mandating a return to four days a week in the office for hybrid employees.
Barbossa declined to commit to any future shift in return-to-office plans saying, "We're focused on implementing our current global work arrangement policy, which is four days a week onsite for our hybrid employees."
History meets the future
The new HQ might be new, but the dirt it sits on is historic.
The former Ford Product Development Center, which opened in 1953, is where some of Ford's most iconic vehicles were born: The Mustang, Thunderbird, Continental, F-Series pickups, Ranger and Ford GT.
When the campus was first dedicated in 1953, President Dwight D. Eisenhower joined the celebration live through the first-ever use of closed-circuit television. Bill Ford said the company has not made plans to invite President Donald Trump to inaugurate this new facility. Ford plans an employee-only event until the company has a public opening later this year; that's when some politicians will be invited in.
But for now, here are some key details of the new building Ford shared:
- The building is 2.1 million square feet.
- It will feature six Design Studios and a large Design Showroom that allows for a full product review in a single space for the first time.
- The facility includes a 160,000-square-foot food hall accessible to all Ford employees, wellness rooms, mothers' rooms and over 300 tech-enabled meeting rooms.
- The new headquarters is designed to be a Net-Zero Energy Building, supported by 100% renewable electricity from the campus's Central Energy Plant. The facility has a goal that 95% of all its disposable items will be compostable, recyclable or reusable.
"The building is not just a building," said Jennifer Kolstad, Ford's global design director. "This is a tool that we’ve been dreaming about that will bring cultural and behavioral change because it’s been designed that way. The priority, not just for this building but for our entire portfolio, is our employees' wellness."
The 'gold standard'
Kolstad called the new headquarters building "the gold standard" of design because Ford used "wellness priorities" such as light and access to the outdoors to allow employees to take "moments of repose" and work in different ways.
There will be no assigned desks or offices, Dobleske added.
"That's why we created so many unique seating postures within the Hub, so that people can go to different locations in the building to do their work where they’re comfortable," Dobleske said. "That's private rooms, that might be desks with double monitors, it could be a couch area, it could be a collaboration space or a phone booth room.”
Kolstad said the new headquarters will offer 160,000 square feet of amenity space open to all employees, including seven food and beverage pavilions with "high-quality food." Ford worked with Aramark Workplace Hospitality Portfolio Executive Chef Grant Vella to design the restaurants, which are surrounded by a "beautiful setting that also includes collaboration spaces to do work," she said.
"So don’t think of it so much as a cafeteria, it’s more like that third space where the entirety of the Ford community is welcome to come," Kolstad said.
Another feature of this floor is direct access to the outdoor courtyards.
"From any floor, from any place in the building, you have either visual sightlines to the outdoors or direct physical access to a contained courtyard where you’re also welcome to go outside and do work," Kolstad said. "We have some areas that we designed that are technically outdoors, but sitting in these courtyards, we are encouraging our employees to book and leave the main building and go into a beautifully designed pavilion for a meetings or other activities."
There are some little architectural "easter eggs" across the building. For example, Kolstad said on the exterior glass of our building, there is a pattern across the façade and if a person looks closely they will find digits. Those digits are "significant patent numbers in our history hiding in the façade. So every detail big and small has been considered.”
Then there is the art. Kolstad said in the new headquarters building Ford has consciously combined archival materials, "things that our employees may have never seen before," with artwork that Ford built or designed from parts of vehicles or things it uses in the design and manufacturing process.
In 2022, General Motors did some similar upgrades with designs and art in its engineering offices at the GM Technical Center in Warren.
Hackett's brainchild
Dobleske and Bill Ford declined to say how much Ford spent to develop the new campus and world HQ building. But when Ford unveiled its sweeping plans in 2016 to redevelop dozens of buildings in Dearborn that house more than 30,000 employees, the 10-year redevelopment project was estimated to cost $1.2 billion at that time. It was headed by Ford Land and architectural firm SmithGroup at that time.
At the time, Ford said the project will transform the automaker's presence in the city into two distinct campuses over the next 10 years.
Bill Ford said the vision for it shifted in 2017 when Jim Hackett became CEO.
"Jim really was the guy who said, some years ago, our facilities around the world are really tired and in some cases embarrassing, like our Product Development Center. It hadn’t changed from the day I started there in 1979," Ford said.
Ford spent close to $1 billion to renovate Michigan Central Station in Detroit. This project was similar in that it would not only provide employees with a better and more collaborative work space, but it would attract and retain talent.
“To attract the best talent you have to give them really interesting problems to work on and you have to give them great places to work," Ford said. "We feel they have interesting things to work on but we didn’t have great places to work and now we do."
Ford said given that automakers are hiring more tech-savvy talent to work on new technology for vehicles, some of whom come from Silicon Valley, the company had to have modern offices with wellness amenities.
Construction on the site started in 2020 and then COVID hit, Dobleske said, which gave Ford a chance to pause and re-envision the masterplan.
"It was about early 2021 that we started looking at, ‘Do we need to start thinking about this building a little differently?' That’s when we started talking about potentially making it the new world headquarters and pulling our executives over to that site to bring them closer to the product," Dobleske said.
Bill Ford said the leadership had been talking about building a new headquarters building for at least 30 years, but every time the industry hit a down period, it put such expenditures on hold to be revisited at a later date. Which is why the buildings got older and older.
"I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been through that in my career. Hence we have a lot of really old buildings," Ford said. "I give Jim Hackett a lot of credit because he gets criticism for many things, but I give him a lot of credit for Jim saying to me, ‘Look, I’m not going to be the CEO here forever, I can take the heat and I’ll make this decision to really revitalize a lot of our buildings and particularly the Product Development Center.' "
Ford said Hackett, who had been CEO of Steelcase office furniture, found the architect and relied on his Steelcase experience to help design the more modern work spaces.
The history of the Glass House
Ford's current world headquarters, the Glass House, is the sixth building to house the company's skilled white-collar workforce and executives in Ford's 122-year history. The 12-story building, which is lined with tinted heat-absorbing glass windows, was built between 1953 and 1956.
According to previous reports in the Detroit Free Press, the Glass House's history is tied to founder Henry Ford's grandson, Henry Ford II, who became president of the auto company in 1945. Ford II thought the company's administration building, built in 1923, next to Ford's River Rouge factory, was obsolete.
So Ford decided to build an office building on the lawn and among the trees in the center of Dearborn's farmlands that were once owned by Henry Ford. The idea is that it would be removed from the congested city and close to the suburbs where people preferred to live.
Decades later, Ford decided to tint the building's 3,083 windows to reduce glare and absorb heat, according to The Filmshield Group website, which said its "energy-saving window film" project was one of the company success stories.
"Ford says the company is now enjoying the benefits of an energy consumption reduction, which could save them an estimated $57,000 a year in energy costs," said the Filmshield Group website, which was undated but suggests mid-1990s.
Indeed, before the window tint installation, Ford could not cool the building below 80 degrees on hot summer days. And in the building’s Trading Room, employees had not been able to open their drapes for more than seven years, because the sunlight made it difficult to see their computer screens.
The Glass House was designed by Skidmore, Owings and Merrill and is considered International Style as first coined by Museum of Modern Art curators in New York in the 1930s. The International Style, also called Modern European Architecture Style, refers to architecture that emerged in Holland, France and Germany after World War I and became the dominant architectural style until the 1970s.
Jamie L. LaReau is the senior autos writer who covers Ford Motor Co. for the Detroit Free Press. Contact Jamie at jlareau@freepress.com. Follow her on Twitter @jlareauan. To sign up for our autos newsletter. Become a subscriber.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Ford announces new world headquarters by 2027, retires 'Glass House' HQ
Reporting by Jamie L. LaReau, Detroit Free Press / Detroit Free Press
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