Architecture
In addition to the prominent 12-story plus penthouse office building, the Glass House includes an adjacent three-story structure accommodating an employee cafeteria, dining rooms[3] and parking garage for 1500 cars—the two elements connected by a 400 ft concourse. The headquarters was designed in the International Style[15] by noted architects Gordon Bunshaft and Natalie de Blois, both with the firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill.[5] De Blois designed the three-story portion of the complex.[16]
Described as a "tall city in a park," the complex was master planned by William L. Pereira and Associates of Los Angeles, requiring multiple entry points to adequately serve the concentrated daily influx of cars. Located on 174 acre[1] (originally 120 acre)[3] previously belonging to Henry Ford's private estate, the grounds have since 1966[17] also been the site for the Arjay Miller Arboretum, featuring trees and shrubs native to Michigan.[18]
Constructed of reinforced concrete with an estimated 5 acre[19] of tinted, heat-absorbing glass, and standing 200 ft tall,[20] the Glass House features central air conditioning, escalators on the first eight floors to augment elevators, movable interior partitions and glass partitions for primary interior corridors.[19] To maximize interior flexibility, structural columns are located outside the exterior curtain wall or within the building's core, providing a clear interior span for office space.[19]
In addition to the tinted, heat-absorbing glass, the facade's curtain wall was designed with 2+1/2 in, lightweight sandwich panels composed of five layers: an outermost layer of 16-gauge porcelain enameled steel bonded to a 1/4 in expanded aluminum honeycomb, a sheet of 24–gauge galvanized steel, 2 in of cellular insulation (marketed as Foamglas) and finally an interior 18–gauge steel skin. The building used 6,616 panels in a semi-matte green color and was the largest known use of porcelain enamel composite panels in a single building at the time of its construction, using over 90,000 ft2 of the material.[21]
The long side of the building's rooftop mechanical penthouse screen walls originally featured the word "FORD" in tall block lettering – later replaced with the company's trademark Blue Oval logo. In 1999, the company replaced the "Blue Oval" at the penthouse screen wall with the words "Ford Motor Company" in the company's original trademark script, referred to by Ford as the "trustmark".[22] Ford returned the "Blue Oval" again to the penthouse screenwalls in 2003, in time for the company's centennial.[23]
Reception
The Skidmore Owings & Merrill 1956 headquarters building won the Office of the Year Award from Administrative Management Magazine in 1956[24] and in 1967 an Award of Excellence from the American Institute of Steel Construction.[24]
The columnist George Will said the building opened at "the peak of American confidence"[25] and described the headquarters as having a "sleek glass-and-steel minimalism that characterized up-to-date architecture in the 1950s, when America was at the wheel of the world and even buildings seemed streamlined for speed".[25]
