On a recent tour of Ford Motor Company’s new Dearborn, Mich. headquarters, Jennifer Kolstad, global design and brand director, stopped walking and pointed up. Skylights rip through the center of the building like a spine, throwing light down through four floors of studios, shops and workspace. They were nearly value-engineered out of the project more than once.
“They’re almost kaleidoscopic in the way they cast and throw light around. And people just gravitate toward the light. We fought very hard for why we needed them,” Kolstad said. “And we did win. Thank God we were able to keep them, because it’s made the building.”
That design tension over light, over materials, over whether a corporate campus should feel like modern workplace, museum or a machine shop — is the real story of Ford’s new 2.1 million-square-foot headquarters. Arcadis served as architect and engineer of record on the project, working alongside Snøhetta and Ghafari Associates, with Arcadis also leading the interior design. Ford has described the result as one of the first smart buildings of its kind in the automotive sector, and the building’s job is bigger than housing 6,000 employees. It’s meant to physically unite a company that had spread its design, engineering and product teams across a sprawling campus for decades.
Joe Pettipas, principal and global service director at Arcadis, put a number on what that fragmentation used to cost. Before, getting from one part of Ford’s campus to another for a meeting could eat up half an hour. Now, with design staff consolidated into one building, that trip takes six minutes.
The building was very much impacted by Jim Hackett’s ideas. Hackett, the former Steelcase CEO who later ran Ford, pushed the company to scrap an earlier design from Smith Group and start over. “It’s not good enough,” Kolstad recalled him saying. “It’s not representing the future of this legacy brand.” Ford ran an international design competition instead, which Snøhetta won, before bringing on Arcadis as architect and interiors partner.
The timeline tells its own story about how much the world was changing just as the project took flight. Planning started in 2017. Ford broke ground in 2020 — just as COVID hit. “The company asked the question, ‘Have we done the right thing?’” Kolstad said. Rather than pause construction, Ford brought in scientists, ecologists and workplace researchers to stress-test the building’s premise against a suddenly uncertain future of work. That research now underpins Ford’s broader design methodology, one Kolstad said touches more than 300 million square feet of Ford facilities and the space of its 10,000 dealerships worldwide.
What they landed on is gleaming glass building built for 6,000 people today, expandable to as many as 12,000, organized around neighborhoods rather than assigned desks. The one-desk, one-person model that once defined Ford’s culture is gone entirely, replaced by a mix of settings, postures and what Kolstad called “hospitality tricks” borrowed partly from hospitality and healthcare design. Ford’s headquarters has changed, but its management was forced to change as well. “If my boss sees me sitting in a comfortable posture, do they think that I’m goofing off or working?” Kolstad said, describing the hierarchy baked into decades of assigned seating. Ford settled on a four-day-a-week in-office policy, and Pettipas said adoption has been climbing steadily, “not atypical anywhere in any business, quite frankly.”
The building leans hard into smart-building products well beyond furniture. According to project architect Arcadis, the Ford World Headquarters incorporates ICT systems design, digital equity initiatives, advanced security including drone-enabled surveillance, deep-fiber “zone box” networking, inclusive multi-view collaboration technology, integrated solar shading and smart restroom monitoring as part of one of the automotive industry’s first fully integrated smart workplaces. Pettipas described the underlying goal as giving people a genuine range of places — semi-private, private, collaborative — to take a call or work as a team, rather than defaulting everyone back to a desk and a phone.
Materials received the same rigor. A wood soffit in clear cedar was a deliberate splurge Ford refused to value-engineer away; a white terrazzo floor first used at the Ford Experience Center now shows up in dealership showrooms as well. The headquarters, which has done so much to connect people that were once spread across a massive campus, has also united Ford’s design language for its spaces, said Kolstad. That includes the company’s vast number of dealerships as well. Called the Ford Signature Program, when a customer walks into a new Ford dealership, they will see the same palette of colors, same woods, same finishes and same art as the headquarters and every other new dealership.
“What you see here is, by and large, what you’ll see everywhere around the world now,” she said of Ford’s design palette. “It’s really satisfying to see the Ford spaces start to synchronize. I was in China a few weeks ago and it looks like this and people feel the same. They’re full of pride that it’s a Ford space. But the approach is about authenticity and timelessness. We don’t believe in disposable architecture or design. We want to invest with the longer view because we are Ford. And so we’re using materials that will last and we’re spending money where it counts.”
As you walk through the project, she said, employees and visitors see common furnishings and textiles. There are white walls and big art moments. It is a very clean, deliberate and tailored design that represents Ford’s brand to the world.
Pettipas said the design speaks to future forward flexibility as well. “You can change out a few things. It can be something different, but it’s still the same. The bones are the bones are the bones,” he said.
Ford employs an extremely substantial art program globally, including artists that are local and regional to each location. At the Ford Experience Center, the front door moment is a Tiff Massey piece. She’s a black female artist from Detroit who studied at Cranbrook. The company also has made some art of its own. Working with art consultant Farmboy, Ford used surplus metal discs that are part of the automotive design and manufacturing process to create a huge piece of wall art at the main entrance of the building. The discs, round, and about the size of your hand, are used to test color on Ford vehicles. The discs match the colors available for Ford vehicles throughout its history, starting with Model T black and moving toward colors that are options on today’s cars and trucks. Ford will add its current year colors to the art piece over time.
The showroom is the heart and soul of the building, said Kolstad. It is truly where the rubber meets the road; where Ford launches new products and where executives kill or green-light new vehicle designs. The theater-like space features a dome with an oculus in the center of the room and an area that can accommodate 10 vehicles on turntables. Behind the stage is the showroom where designers and executives can view new vehicles and an executive decision making forum. The lobby of the showroom uses concept car sketches from Ford’s archives as art.
Ford employees certainly won’t go hungry. There are seven different food pavilions, organized like a French marché where employees are encouraged to meander through the space and choose from one of the self-sustained, scratch kitchens. Ford’s executive chef came from stellar Detroit Italian eatery Mad Nice. “The food is exceptional. You’ll see the views to nature. It is designed that way for respite. And the energy in this space when it’s going is palpable. It’s buzzing. It really works and we didn’t have that before,” said Kolstad.
Six themed interior courtyards, each tied to a Michigan ecosystem and each with their own color identity. The courtyards tier up so that at any of the three levels they are connected to, you can physically access the space. The courtyards also contain beautiful enclosed pavilions separate from the building that can be used as meeting spaces. Kolstad said they are a tribute to human experience design. They are yet another stamp left by Jim Hackett, who championed the pavilions.
The furniture and furnishings in the Ford world headquarters is a who’s who of the industry. Prior to Kolstad’s arrival at Ford, the company had a tight collection of furniture and procurement arrangements with MillerKnoll and Steelcase, almost equally split and heavily negotiated. Kolstad said she “broke that up” and opened up procurement to the full collection of the industry. While MillerKnoll and Steelcase furniture still play a prominent role, the headquarters also includes furniture from Bernhard, Fritz Hansen and Haworth, to name just a few. “We’re working with them all,” said Kolstad.
While still under construction, the outdoor space is as spectacular as the indoor. Trees, site furniture and walking trails ring the building and Ford campus and many employees could be seen enjoying the outdoor areas on a recent visit. Pettipas said the outdoor campus was carefully thought through and uses indigenous plantings and other natural landscaping. “It was also philosophically part of the give back to the neighborhood too, because once that building gets revisioned and the addition to this building gets built in 2027, those parks are accessible,” he said.
Ford is a massive publicly traded company, so even though the facilities are designed tastefully and for employee comfort, Kolstad is serious about measuring and making sure the company gets a return on its $1.2 billion investment.
“The harder work is not making the thing,” Kolstad said. “It’s making the business case.” She’s now pursuing a doctorate on exactly that gap, what she called the difference between design’s internal vocabulary and the metrics a C-suite actually responds to. “That aligns with their KPI,” she said. “Because their KPIs and our KPIs are fundamentally different. That’s the work we all need to do as an industry.”
Strip away the terrazzo and the courtyards and what Ford built in Dearborn is really an argument made physical: that six minutes beats thirty when it comes to tracking down a colleague, that light and material and art aren’t decoration but retention strategy, that a building can flex from pandemic to hybrid to whatever comes next without being torn up every time the world changes. It’s 2.1 million square feet of proof that design and revenue aren’t opposite ends of a spreadsheet.
