The Ford campus (Photo: Millard Berry) Ford Motor Co. has received voluminous publicity for its development of a 30-acre global mobility center in Detroit’s Corktown, anchored by the long-abandoned Michigan Central Station. Just 10 miles away in Dearborn, the company has started a radical overhaul of its 700-acre research and engineering campus along Oakwood Boulevard. And that project gets little attention. Yet work on the campus, located across from the Henry Ford Museum, is equally game-changing, combining an expansive corporate presence with nature and public access. Costs have been estimated at several hundred million dollars. The Ford campus is where 11,000 employees design future Ford products and test their inner workings. It’s the place where Lee Iacocca saw a model of the Mustang and instantly knew he had a winner because the brown clay prototype “looked like it was moving,” he later recalled.
The Ford campus (Photo: Millard Berry) Ford Motor Co. has received voluminous publicity for its development of a 30-acre global mobility center in Detroit’s Corktown, anchored by the long-abandoned Michigan Central Station. Just 10 miles away in Dearborn, the company has started a radical overhaul of its 700-acre research and engineering campus along Oakwood Boulevard. And that project gets little attention. Yet work on the campus, located across from the Henry Ford Museum, is equally game-changing, combining an expansive corporate presence with nature and public access. Costs have been estimated at several hundred million dollars. The Ford campus is where 11,000 employees design future Ford products and test their inner workings. It’s the place where Lee Iacocca saw a model of the Mustang and instantly knew he had a winner because the brown clay prototype “looked like it was moving,” he later recalled.