On the second floor of Ford Motor Co.'s ultra-modern new world headquarters in Dearborn there is a wide crevice that shoots up to the roof where massive skylights let in waves of natural light.
In this spot, a person can look up to the top floors and get a peek at one of the most secret floors in the new four-story building: the third floor where Ford develops new products.
Ford has strategically placed fogged glass around the windows of the third floor to maintain security, yet still provide just enough transparency to remind people of Ford's history and its mission.
"You will be able to see properties and people moving back and forth behind that glass. You won’t be able to tell what type of vehicle it is, but you’ll see the activity," said Jim Dobleske, CEO of Ford's real estate arm Ford Land. "We wanted people to feel like they were part of the design and engineering process even if you are part of finance or supply chain. You can still see product and people moving throughout those heavily secured spaces as if you were a part of it.”
The architectural element is a tip of the hat to Ford's roots. The company's third world headquarters was the Piquette Avenue Ford Plant in Detroit from 1905 to 1910. It was there that company founder Henry Ford designed the famous Model T, the car that put America on wheels and made Ford a global powerhouse. Henry Ford designed that car in a secret room there, you guessed it, on the third floor.
If you look closely throughout this new state-of-the-art building, you will see all kinds of nods to Ford's heritage over its 122-year history.
The new world headquarters, called the Hub, will accommodate 4,500 to 5,000 employees when it is completed over the next two years. It is designed to bring Ford's salaried workforce together to work differently compared with the culture of its longtime headquarters on Michigan Avenue dubbed the Glass House.
"Ford's new headquarters is the polar opposite of the Glass House, which was built for a command-and-control management style," said John McElroy, host of "Autoline After Hours." "Instead of a highly structured layout with long, straight rows of offices and cubicles on each floor, the 'Hub' features free-flowing traffic patterns that wind and bend in different directions through different departments."
The design is meant to encourage a lot more interaction and collaboration among employees, McElroy said, calling it "a well thought through design that has the potential to change the culture of the company — all for the better."
But Ford is not leaving its history behind as it moves forward. For example, the iron gates commissioned in 1953, that employees have driven through for nearly seven decades when entering Ford's Product Development Center, came down when that part of the PDC was removed to make way for this new world headquarters.
Ford saved those gates. Now the gates frame the entrance to the new world headquarters. This time, employees walk through them rather than drive through them to get to the building.
“We’re really proud of taking the history that we have on that campus and combining it with the modern approach in buildings like this and the other facilities that have been renovated to take Ford into the future," Dobleske said.
Ford recently took the Detroit Free Press and other media inside the building that was officially christened Ford's new world headquarters on Nov. 16. The 2.1 million-square-foot facility contains six outdoor courtyards (one gives a shout-out to the history of the Four Vagabonds), 14 welcome areas that lead to secured work zones, six massive design studios with new technology, updates to its clay, paint and metals shops (where Ford still uses a 1948 metal shaping machine every day) and an impressively modern new showroom for designers to sell their ideas to executives.
Oh, then there is Gallery Hall, a massive food court featuring seven unique restaurants headed by professional chefs where even some of the lettuce for salads is grown in house. Its most popular item, which many employees take home for dinner, is the $6 rotisserie chicken.
A building built Ford Tough
The new world headquarters is located on Oakwood Boulevard directly across from The Henry Ford. It is Ford's sixth world headquarters and undoubtedly the largest. About 2,000 employees are currently assigned to work there now that Ford has returned to a four-day-a-week in-office policy. That figure will more than double in the next 18 months.
The layout is as follows:
- First floor: Contains lobbies, design fabrication shops and a state-of-the-art showroom.
- Second floor: Contains Gallery Hall restaurants, two design studios and a secure workspace.
- Third floor: Contains more secure workspace and multipurpose meeting rooms.
- Fourth floor: Contains four more design studios that will open in May 2026.
The building is the brainchild of architect Craig Dykers of New York-based architectural firm Snøhetta, which designed the new Library of Alexandria in Egypt and the National September 11 Memorial Museum Pavilion in New York City.
Dykers said his firm bid and won the job at Ford, but he had to figure out how to make a building that would reflect how Ford wants its employees to feel when in it. It had to inspire efficiency, creativity and overall wellness.
"People wonder how we came up with how it looks, but first we had to find out what it needed to be," Dykers told the Free Press. "We worked with experts here on what was needed and then designed it in an aesthetic way."
The architects aimed for a human centric design to make people feel good about where they are and encourage collaboration, Dykers said.
"Every stair has a social space," Dykers said. "So, you go up a few steps and there’s a very generous landing where if you bump into somebody, you can talk to them. There’s a number of ways to meet people.”
Barton Malow is building the world headquarters. So far, the steel used in the construction of it is enough to build four Eiffel towers, said Mike Bonner, a project executive at Barton Malow who's been leading the construction of the building.
Bonner, who has his own historic ties to Ford with several generations of his family having worked for the Dearborn-based automaker, said the entire building sits on a deep foundation of huge steel piles where "if you were to line them up end to end it would be about 56 miles … so that goes all the way from Ann Arbor to East Lansing. That’s just the foundation itself.”
Bonner said the foundation is "beefed up" because the building is constructed so that a Ford F-250 heavy-duty truck can be driven just about anywhere inside of it.
Aesthetics and art
There are two grand entrances: one for employees called the American Road Entrance. The other for the public called the Oakwood Entrance.
The American Road Entrance incorporates design elements Ford has used throughout the building and in other facilities where it's done updates. The floors are a rich white terrazzo and there are accents of white oak streaming across the ceiling and along the walls. A grand winding staircase lined with perforated white metal leads to the mezzanine level, where there's a cafe that sells coffee and pastries, and eventually to the second floor.
Artwork like this installation of 70 parts of a deconstructed Ford Bronco Raptor greet employees and visitors in the new American Road Lobby at Ford World Headquarters on Monday, Nov. 10, 2025.
The artwork throughout the building either encompasses actual parts taken off Ford's vehicles and assembly lines or they are commissioned work that supports local artists. In the American Road Entrance there's a massive striking cream-colored art piece hung high above the turnstiles made from Bronco SUV parts. At the far end of the entrance, hung low on the wall, sits a commissioned painting by Beverly Fishman, the former head of the painting department at Cranbrook Academy of Art.
Ford calls the staircases throughout the building "communicating stairs." That's because they are meant to offer spots for employees to either start a conversation or, in some instances, there are bench seats built in them to serve as seating for town halls or other meetings held on the stairs. The building also has 34 elevators and two freight elevators to move vehicles around.
The cornerstone to a new campus
Dobleske stood before a broad picture window on the second floor the day he took the Detroit Free Press through the building.
It's one of Dobleske's favorite spots in the building because it offers a spectacular panoramic view of The Henry Ford and nearly all of Ford's new campus.
On the far end of the room, called the Tech Lounge, is a large workspace where Ford's technology team sits. Directly in front of the picture window are some small pods — basically high-backed rounded dark blue chairs with a tiny table to be used as private work stations for those who want a view while they work. The color scheme throughout this building reflects Ford's Blue Oval logo: mostly dark blue furniture, white floors and white oak wood accents.
A workspace called the Tech Lounge at the new Ford World Headquarters on Monday, Nov. 10, 2025.
“It’s a beautiful space to come and get a little heads down time or collaborate with others," Dobleske said of the Tech Lounge and its picture window. "But the reason I wanted to bring you here today is because of the vantage point that we have across campus. This building is a cornerstone, but it’s not the only facility that we’ve renovated across our campus.”
He points through the window to a building to the left. That's Ford's Driving Dynamics Lab, which sits in front of Ford's test track. Ford renovated it in 2019. The building next to it, with four big stacks shooting up from its roof, is Ford's new central energy plant.
"We get steam and electricity out of that plant for nearly every building on this campus," Dobleske said.
There is Ford's Dynamometer Lab. That's where Ford conducts heavy testing on its engines. Beyond it sits a tall parking structure. Both have been renovated. A new parking lot is still being built. There also is the other half of the Product Development Center that will be demolished by the end of 2027 as Ford continues to expand the world headquarters building.
“So almost all of our buildings on this site have undergone some form of renovation already to create a similar work experience that we have here, in those other facilities," Dobleske said. "This building then becomes that cornerstone or hub, if you will, where people will be able to come to world headquarters and enjoy spaces like this.”
This car company wants employees to come by foot, not by car. The landscaping, also done by Snøhetta, was designed to be walkable with pathways connecting the buildings through green space.
"In the past, you would get in your car and drive building to building for meetings and that would eat up 20 minutes depending on where you were coming from and where you were going to," Dobleske said. "Now there’s an 18-acre park that we call Horsepower Park. We have outdoor seating, we never had that on the campus before."
Welcome area work spots
The areas where its employees work are set behind security doors and they are called work zones. Teams are usually assigned a space in a particular work zone so that colleagues can work together in their team.
If an employee from another Ford facility came to world headquarters, they would see a "Welcoming Area" outside the secured work zone where they could meet a person without having to go through the extra security. In the Welcoming Area there are workspaces that range from cushioned chairs, to a high-top table with monitors to use or a regular table and chairs. Around the edges of these Welcome Areas are small offices that employees can step into for a private meeting or a phone call.
“This is an arrival to work place because we are bringing everyone closer together on campus ... being able to walk to this building is great, and then trying to find your co-workers and do some collaboration without having to go into all those extra layers of security is great," said Sean Corriveau, Global Design Studio director at Ford Land. "We were very intentional on locating 14 of these arrivals throughout the entire building.”
Don't worry about getting lost either. Ford has put in digital maps at all the elevator banks that can be transferred to a cellphone and used to find your way in any of Ford's new buildings.
A courtyard like no other for the Four Vagabonds
Set right outside this Welcome Area is the first of six fully accessible courtyards throughout the building. This one is called the Forrest Courtyard and employees can get Wi-Fi out here and work. The Forrest Courtyard is clad in a green terracotta rain screen reflecting the theme.
But the grandest of the courtyards is still under construction: the Great Lakes courtyard. It is a 30,000-square-foot ode to nature set in the center of an office building.
The Great Lakes Courtyard, which is still under construction, is one of six outdoor courtyards at the new Ford World Headquarters on Monday, Nov. 10, 2025.
"Each courtyard is named and designed after a Michigan geography so in the Great Lakes courtyard, the blues are represented in the blue terracotta rain screen," Corriveau said. "This one has a couple of unique features though, not just its scale. It traverses from the second floor here up to the third floor. It’s fully accessible with stairs and ramps that are heated in the winter so we don’t have to deal with ice and snow and they lead you to these great pavilion conference rooms that are being installed as we speak.”
When completed, the Great Lakes courtyard will be fully landscaped with more than 40 different trees and areas to sit and work outside.
Then, there are the two pavilion conference rooms, constructed out of wood, to be used as meeting spaces. They give a special nod to Henry Ford.
"These two pavilions were designed and intended to reflect the tents from the camping trips that the Four Vagabonds used to take," Dobleske said.
The Four Vagabonds were friends: Henry Ford, lightbulb inventor Thomas Edison, writer John Burroughs and Harvey Firestone, the founder of Firestone Tire & Rubber Company who spent summers between 1915 and 1924 camping across the United States.
Archive photo of the Four Vagabonds, who took a series of summer camping trips from 1915 to 1924, From left to right: Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, Harvey Firestone, and John Burroughs, dubbed the Four Vagabonds.
"They used to travel, not only Michigan, but the entire country, and camp," Dobleske said. "They would set up these tents. The designers took that idea of the tents and built them to reflect a little bit of how those tents looked. When you go out there, you feel like you’re in an outdoor environment.”
Let's eat!
As you make your way through the second floor, you will come upon an employee favorite spot: Gallery Hall. It is a mammoth, 160,000-square-foot food hall that not only serves but displays nearly every kind of cuisine imaginable — the way art would be displayed in a gallery.
From triple smash burgers, to sushi, to chicken shwarma, to homemade pizza, to protein smoothies, salads and specialty gelato, there's something for everyone.
The first thing Ford New World Headquarters Executive Chef Grant Vella will tell you is — with seven kitchens, each run by a professional chef — this is not your grandfather's cafeteria.
“It’s more of a restaurant energy. These kitchens are see-through so it can bring our guests into the experience of the kitchen action," Vella said. "This is a live-action station where the guests can see chickens on the rotisserie. The one behind me is called Fire and Stone. This (is) centered around this state of the art pizza oven that we have here. It actually controls the heat to 3 degrees. So the key to the perfect crust is to have it hover right around 700 degrees. So it’s pretty amazing."
Vella hails from metro Detroit and started his food career by owning food trucks. He took it up a notch and graduated from the prestigious Culinary Institute of America. He last worked at Italian eatery Mad Nice in Detroit before Ford hired him about 2.5 years ago. Vella credits his grandmother for his passion for food, a quality he looked for in the chefs he has hired at world headquarters.
Seating options in Gallery Hall dining area at the new Ford World Headquarters on Monday, Nov. 10, 2025.
"My grandmother would cook lasagna and want all the family at the table and what it really taught me is that food is about love and caring and bringing people together. That’s how I grew up and that’s how I became a chef and developed a passion," Vella said. "The Gallery (Hall) on the second floor is the centerpiece that brings all the people from the top floor and the basement up here to collaborate and dine in one space.”
In the center of Gallery Hall is a French patisserie that highlights local vendors such as James Oliver Coffee from downtown Detroit, Zingerman’s baked goods from Ann Arbor and Momento Gelato based out of Northville and Detroit. Vella is most proud of that last find, calling it an "amazing company."
“The first few times I looked for gelato, I tasted it and it just didn’t hit right. It didn’t have the proper mouth feel, the decadent feel that gelato should. I found this guy who lived in the Amalfi Coast his entire life and came over and lived in metro Detroit and had the same problem," Vella said. "He couldn’t find true, authentic gelato. So he made it himself. That really just hit home and I said, ‘Listen, I need you in here immediately.' "
A dream 'hobby shop'
Next stop for our tour was to go inside Ford's design studio on the second floor where new vehicle designs are underway. That meant handing over any cameras.
In here, Ford has instilled more acknowledgment to the past. Etched into the glass on the windows are the numbers of all the patents Ford has ever held in its company history.
A new feature for designers in these studios are the use of LED screen technology. Gone are the sheets of paper with designs on them tacked up on boards or projectors shown up on screens. Here, designers can view their work on the LED screen without glare despite the tall windows that let in natural light from a courtyard. Yes, another courtyard so that the designers can place a vehicle outdoors for a view of it in any natural light.
Travel down a long hall and there's a huge freight elevator used to move vehicles up and down floors to various studios including the clay modeling and metal shops in the basement, a place that Ford's Jim Connor calls "a very big hobby shop."
Connor, director of Ford's 3D processing, said every show car or concept car that Ford builds will be made in this shop area by the 95 people who work there.
What's new about it is the state-of-the-art equipment that allows designers to move and manipulate the clay vehicle models using a remote control. The little control is a big improvement. In the past, if a clay designer wanted to turn a clay car model, they would have to get four people to help them pick it up and physically turn it by hand.
What's old in this shop are many machines from the 1960s or prior that Ford painstakingly refurbished from the Product Development Center. One of them, a 1948 Monarch Lathe, which is used to shape metal, is still used every day by Ford's designers because it remains spot-on accurate and functional, Connor said. The money saved by refurbishing it and continuing to use it could then be put into the other state-of-the-art newer technology there, Connor said.
"We've got a very nice mix between old and new," Connor said. He pointed to the Monarch Lathe and added, "You can't buy a better one than this one right here."
Ford also uses custom clay it buys from Japan that it dubs "Goldilocks." Most industrial clay typically comes in either soft, pliable clay that is easy to hand work or hard, dense clay for easy mill work. Connor said the "Goldilocks" clay does both hand and milling work just right, hence the name. But it's not cheap and so far, no domestic company has been able to match it, though Ford continues to look for it stateside.
The showroom that sells the car
Back on the first floor sits the money shot of the building: Ford's product showroom.
This new space incorporates five elements of a new vehicle reveal process all in one area as opposed to Ford's previous showroom space at the Product Development Center. There, those processes were separated, creating inefficient use of time and interruptions to a presentation.
The 2026 Ford Mustang GTD sits on one of the ten turntables in the Product Showroom at new Ford World Headquarters on Monday, Nov. 10, 2025.
In this room, there are 10 turntables for vehicles, a colossal light fixture in the center that can replicate the light at high noon to dusk for an outdoor effect; there is an exterior courtyard too for real natural light and even a conference room to go over marketing and finances for a car.
Along one wall sits a digital screen that is 64 feet long and 12 feet tall that allows Ford to do a “true digital review right next to physical assets," Corriveau said.
"That was about a five minute walk from the actual showroom previously to the digital showroom," Corriveau said. "So you get these moments of interruption in a vehicle review, that now we brought those things together.”
Off of the showroom floor is the color and materials room, another component that was decoupled from the past showroom making teams and leaders stop their reveal for five minutes to then walk to a separate color and materials display room.
Lastly, a conference room sits behind fogged glass where executives and designers and engineers can review the vehicle data and digital elements and then “with a flick of a switch the glass becomes clear" and they can see into the showroom full of cars.
In short, Ford vehicle developers can now show the vehicle, the colors and materials, all the finance that goes behind it and all the development elements as well as see the whole portfolio put together in one space all at once, said Elisangela Previte, director of global business operations at Ford Design.
When you consider that, it makes this room as important as that secret third floor. For when those folks come out from behind the foggy glass on the third floor, it is to this room they come to sell their idea to the powers with the check book.
“This is a most special space because not only are you developing a product upstairs, but this is where you sell your idea," Previte said. "This is where you can present your idea in the best light and get engagement of our partners whether it’s design, the factory as well as our outside partners and customers.”
Jamie L. LaReau is the senior autos writer for USA Today Co. 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: Inside Ford Motor's new world headquarters are nods to the past and cues to the future