Tour General Motors’ Global Technical Center in Michigan – a midcentury icon with a new addition

As a symbol of midcentury American industrial might and dominance, the General Motors Global Technical Center in Warren, Michigan, is unrivalled. This was the ‘dream factory’, the birthplace of the stylish, status-driven mobility that convinced a nation of its place at the forefront of the industrialised world. To visit the campus today is to simultaneously step back in time to the auto industry’s heyday of boundless confidence, whilst also sampling the far future of manufacturing.

The Global Technical Center remains at the heart of GM’s creative operations, some 70 years after it opened, conceived by GM executives Alfred P Sloan, Charles Kettering and Harley Earl. The commission was originally handed to Finnish architect Eliel Saarinen in 1944 and was completed by his son Eero. Construction began in 1949 and the first phase of the 664-acre complex was completed in 1956.

The campus still has the power to impress, its palatial scale combined with lovingly curated details, from bespoke tiles to Alexander Calder’s only sculptural fountain. The site remains a steadfastly contemporary statement, even as popular passion for modernism and midcentury design passes through constant cycles of renewal, resurgence and rejection.

Right now, America is both obsessed with the role of national industry yet also dismissive of modernism’s utopian and egalitarian rhetoric. For General Motors, it’s an existential period of change, buffeted by social, political and cultural complexities that design and technology can only go some way to achieving.

Despite a market cap of approximately $73bn (more than Ford but a fraction of Tesla’s $1.28tr value, despite the company having sold over six million vehicles in 2025, roughly four times as many as Tesla), GM doesn’t even get a look into the top 20 companies in an age obsessed with tech and finance.

Yet it’s a truly global concern with factories in multiple countries, including China, South Korea, Brazil, Mexico, Argentina and more (European operations effectively ended in 2017 when GM sold its brands and assets to Stellantis, although Cadillac has now returned to the territory), and – most importantly of all, GM makes tangible objects that people need, want and desire.

The evolution of the Technical Center

To get a feel for what the massive Tech Center must have been like in the days of Harley Earl, we get a quick orientation in the GM Archive, overseen by the archive and special collections manager, Christo Datini. The company’s archival store is vast, although in the early days, a substantial amount of material simply wasn’t retained in-house and tended to find its way to the homes of individual designers (that said, the Detroit Institute of Arts has a substantial collection).

Nevertheless, the GM Archive still holds eight million-plus photos and a quarter of a million films, along with digital media, microfilm, models and much more. Publicly available Vehicle Information Kits provide documentation on 900 heritage models, but to get a real sense of the brand, it’s worth sifting through the original material. The archives are rich with presentation sketches, models, renders, from the work of unsung design hero Wayne Kady to the costumes created for Motorama staff and the Parade of Progress roadshows. ‘The archive runs the gambit,’ says Datini.

A fair amount of the information relating to design now lives in the main Design Center building at Warren, providing material for regular exhibitions. In the old days this was a hugely secretive space, with each brand’s studio closely guarded. Today, the archive serves to connect the team with designs and ideas from the past, encouraging innovation, reverential reference without the perilous drop into pastiche. The archive department is also responsible for overseeing the campus heritage – the site received a National Historic Landmark designation in 2014.

Part of the pride in the campus comes from GM’s close corporate involvement. GM’s own design department did a substantial amount of interior design, taking over from Saarinen’s office, allowing Earl and his team to bring in elements of automotive design through colour, trim and materials.

Everywhere, you can see aspects of this crossover, like the glazed curtain walls that used automotive sealant technology. It also evidenced the company’s absolute confidence in its way of doing things. For example, the Blue Room, a serene executive dining room created by interior designer Ruth Adler-Schnee, was redesigned by Earl, who considered it too feminine.

It was Earl who drove the vision, as the 1940s turned into the 1950s and the post-war economic miracle made wizards of GM and its design team. It was intended to look like the future, just like Earl’s own personal Buick Y-Job – often cited as the first-ever concept car – represented a rolling symbol of tomorrow’s aesthetic.

Given his visionary stance, Earl probably didn’t care too much for the ‘Versailles of Industry’ appellation bestowed on the complex, thanks to the sheer scale and the formal lakes. This is where Calder’s only fountain continues to dance, with Antoine Pevsner’s constructivist sculpture The Flight of the Bird welcoming visitors at the main entrance to the complex on Eero Saarinen Boulevard off Mound Road.

The site is bisected by train tracks that run north-south. As well as the Design Center and Design West, you’ll also find R&D, chemical engineering, fabrication, training, and hundreds of other operations large and small, with the main buildings connected underground via tunnels to circumvent the Michigan winters.

These days there’s also a dedicated battery lab, and the site’s Central Restaurant – once the preserve of executive diners – is now Cadillac House at Vanderbilt, a state-of-the-art facility dedicated to the bespoke client experience of the Cadillac Celestiq. Consistency is everything. In the C-suite, doors and walls are clad in mahogany panelling; GM bought up a forest to ensure consistency. It also bought the kiln that made the coloured glazed bricks that adorn the various buildings.

The last piece of the jigsaw

The new Design West building is the last piece of the jigsaw of the original campus to be built. A vast complex that wraps behind the original Saarinen buildings, it unites the GM brands in an open-plan space that reverses the old, siloed way of working. The new building coincides with the arrival of new vice president of global design, Bryan Nesbitt, replacing Michael Simcoe, who retired in summer 2025 after a 42-year career with GM.

It also means Nesbitt gets the ultimate office, Earl’s former eyrie, with its unobstructed view across the lake and fountain to the R&D Building. Now meticulously restored, these original Saarinen buildings contain the design details, key features and materials that launched a thousand midcentury knock-offs, all superbly brought back to as-new condition. Everything, from the bright red banquettes of the canteen to the cantilevered staircase rising above a shallow pool, aluminium door handles and wood panelling, is present and correct.

Nesbitt sits at the same desk designed by Harley Earl for his own use, a bank of analogue controls at his right hand to operate the air-conditioning, motorised desk light, radiogram and to automatically open and close the office door. The chairs placed in front of the desk are pitched very slightly lower than the one behind it, a classic executive power move.

‘Back when I was 11, I toured Art Center College of Design [in California],’ Nesbitt tells us. ‘I knew then I wanted to be a car designer.’ Born in Phoenix, Nesbitt ultimately made it to Art Center, going on to work at what was then DaimlerChrysler before starting his GM career back in 2001 when he interviewed with the legendary designer Wayne Cherry.

After ultimately heading up GM Europe design, Nesbitt went on to become the company’s VP of design for North America. Following a stint in China working with GM’s joint-venture partners, he returned to the States and steered Cadillac’s current revival.

‘Automotive design has a unique tendency to trigger emotion’, Nesbitt says. Vehicle design is typically about the future. This definition was very, very literal in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, from the emergence of streamlining to the influence of fighter jets. These days, it’s hard to get inspired by the next Nvidia chip.

Today, Nesbitt and his various teams are responsible for a vast vehicular portfolio. That’s not all. Every facet of GM’s design output, from logos to colour palettes to presentation films to motor show reveals, brand experiences, is all done in-house. Even the visual elements of Cadillac and Chevrolet motorsports – liveries, the driver suits – is all done here.

The new design studios cover around 360,000 sq ft. Huge halls feature arrays of milling machines, full-size styling bucks, computer terminals, breakout areas and all the paraphernalia of design, connected via a network of corridors. Here you’ll find a gallery’s worth of new artworks, many commissioned from members of the team.

‘This new building is all about collaboration,’ says Nesbitt. ‘By co-locating engineering with the design studio and digital teams, it can all happen here on site. We’re making a lot of effort to speed up our processes, so we need new tools. You can validate ideas faster. The building is a working tool.’

The speed of iteration is evident everywhere. GM is design management on a global, multinational scale, an operation so enormous that Harley Earl couldn’t even have begun to comprehend its complexity and scope. It’s a world where might is still right, from the array of full-scale mock-ups – faithful but still foam – of tomorrow’s trucks and pick-ups to the huge mood boards that keep all the teams on the right track via regular internal presentations – the ‘right glide path,’ as Nesbitt says. A car is still most people’s primary lifestyle purchase, the consumption and expression of identity and image.

Despite the petabytes of data and gigaflops of image processing ability, it does all come down to the look and feel of a physical surface. It’s still faster and more efficient to sculpt a scale model and then scan it, creating a digital file that can be output at full size via a computer-controlled clay milling machine. At the same time, there’s the growing importance of ‘digital twinning’ in the design process – wherein the characteristics and qualities of a physical model exist simultaneously as a computer file.

With such a wealth, diversity and volume of new design being created at any one time, it’s perhaps inevitable to find AI being used discretely around the studio. AI systems can translate 2D sketches into 3D animations, appearing as fully rendered vehicles traversing the landscape of your choice. Right now, it’s an iterative tool for rough and ready presentations, not originating designs or creating final material.

Design West is remarkable for its openness; what might have once been considered individual brand fiefdoms are now all part of one, long linear creative process. Walk the lines and workstations and you move from heavy trucks to mid-engined supercars, from sedans to concepts.

Crystal Windham, a 31-year veteran of GM, heads up GM’s Industrial Design Department. One of her tasks is to keep the wider team abreast of global trends in innovations, colour, materials and the wider world of product and even architectural design. That involves visiting Salone di Mobile, amongst other events, as well as finding ways to protect what she calls ‘the essence of the brand.’

This remit stretches to designing dealerships, boutiques and stands or even creating the desert polo set for Cadillac’s recent Elevated Velocity concept car, as well as the stand used to display it at the Quail. As GM’s in-house creative agency, her team is across accessories, graphics, events, and interiors, with the company’s new global headquarters at Hudson’s Detroit providing ample opportunity to celebrate GM’s products, heritage and the all-important ‘surprise and delight’. Windham is also closely involved in GM’s educational outreach, helping ‘build a pipeline of talent’ in a competitive industry.

Designing the interface

Sebastian Bauer heads up the Human Interface Design department, newly integrated into the overall design process. With former experience at Apple and Google, Bauer’s role includes what he calls the ‘holistic customer experience,’ all the way from the vehicle greeting animations to the touch and feel of controls and user interfaces. A key task has been to create a foundational UI that can be used and adapted across all GM’s brands and sub-brands.

In the past few years, software has become a major bottleneck in the development process. As his colleague Todd Parker points out, ‘hardware has a long lead time, software is short on the front end but longer on the back end.’ Design unites the two, with the tantalising prospect of the being able to ‘use software to extend lifespan and utility of a vehicle via Over The Air [updates].’

Different markets are adopting technologies like autonomy at very different speeds; as a global business, GM has to be across them all. ‘What should the cabin do when you no longer need to look at the road?’, Parker asks rhetorically. Given that trust in technology is conveyed via the interface itself, the HID team has to weigh up the pros and cons of touchscreens versus conventional controls, for example, and then have that same conversation across every single GM brand.

Having the so-called ‘foundational UI’, with strong modularity, should speed up the process of bringing individual brand personalities to the fore. Some brands rely on hardware more than others – ‘they’re not just functional but also ornamental and aesthetic,’ he says, adding that ‘for Cadillac, we have to be very intentional when we use them. I want to make sure that when you get in any car the interior fits that emotion.’

Tristan Murphy: steering the Corvette

Tristan Murphy, who heads up interiors for the next-gen Corvette, describes the 2023 C8 Corvette’s switch from front- to mid-engined as a major move. ‘It opened up the performance of the car,’ he says, ‘Corvette has always operated outside the norms of GM… they don’t write songs about Volvos,’ he notes. It certainly demonstrates GM’s range, a company that starts with the mass-market sub-£25k Chevrolet Trax is also one that can sell out 100 examples of the $241,000 Corvette The Quail edition.

The Corvette CX and its CX-R racing sibling were the most intricate concept models ever created in-house at GM. Paired with the Corvette Concept overseen by Julian Thomson’s team at GM’s UK Advanced Design Studio, the trio has given the nameplate a boost, upgrading its hypercar credentials and paving the way for even more high-performance Corvettes in the future.

Sharon Gauci: overseeing Buick and GMC

Sharon Gauci leads Buick and GMC design. GMC is the truck-centric brand that dates back to 1911 (the name GMC has nothing to do with General Motors – it’s the Grabowsky Motor Company). ‘It’s a brand with great strength in its heritage,’ Gauci says, ‘it’s bold, precise and capable.’ GMC’s design philosophy leans towards chiselled, premium forms, what Gauci calls ‘industrial sculpture.’ Although GMC models have a lot in common with their Chevrolet counterparts, the former is allowed to be more architectural.

GM’s portfolio is a collection of closely related models differentiated through materials, performance, technology and branding. For example, Cadillac, Chevrolet and GMC have a full-size SUV on the same platform with some shared parts. As a result, wheel design and brightwork matters hugely. To the untrained European eye, unfamiliar with the all-American truck aesthetic, this differentiation is as stratified and codified as America’s own complex class system.

The brand with the biggest bandwidth is probably Chevrolet, analogous to Ford in terms of scope and appeal. As Nesbitt says, ‘it’s the only brand that goes from entry level to hypercar, under one name.’ Although crossover and encroachment seem inevitable, somehow the GM machine keeps each brand in its own lane, steered by strident marketing and self-selecting sticker prices.

The mid-century precision of the General Motors campus is a cornucopia of techno-futurist promise; Saarinen, Calder, Earl, the coloured tiles, orange banquettes and glittering metal water towers. The whole ensemble oozes optimism, optimism in the power of industry, design, and the unceasing naked demand of the consumer.

Back when the Technical Center was built, the automobile was the most covetable byproduct of the military-industrial complex, an expression of American soft power, and a global cultural export. Could it ever be that way again? The world is very different, and design is no longer a realm of universal signifiers that everyone buys into from the ground floor up. What is certain, however, is that in Design West, GM has built a highly effective tool for managing a creative portfolio of unprecedented scale.

GM.com, @GeneralMotorsDesign