DEARBORN, Michigan — Ford Motor Co.'s decision to relocate its world headquarters to the large, glass-faced Hub west of Oakwood Boulevard and demolish its existing Glass House headquarters for outdoor community space is an effort to improve efficiency, attract top talent and support the community it has long called home.

The short move down the road comes amid a historic transformation in the industry from electrification, autonomy and digital services. Putting leadership, administrative staff and product development teams under one roof seeks to make Ford a more nimble and efficient operation, effective at attracting and retaining the talent sought by Ford and competing rivals like General Motors Co., Silicon Valley tech firms and other global innovators.

In a letter emailed Monday, Executive Chairman Bill Ford and CEO Jim Farley informed employees of the impending move to the Hub, built on the site of the automaker's decades-old Product Development Center.

"To attract the best talent, you have to give them really interesting problems to work on, and you have to give them great places to work," Bill Ford said during a virtual briefing. "We feel that they've got really interesting things to work on, but we didn't have great, in many cases, great places for them to work. And now we do."

More: Bill Ford describes 'emotional moment' in Glass House departure as Hub next HQ step

The Hub will anchor Ford's Dearborn campus — to be called the Henry Ford II World Center, a carryover from the official name of Ford's current world headquarters located at Southfield and Michigan Avenue. Up to 4,000 people will be able to work in the eventual 2.1 million-square-foot, glass-faced, four-story Hub, and another 10,000 employees will be within a 15-minute walk of the main building. An additional 9,000 will be within a 15-minute drive, allowing the Hub to serve as a central meeting place for different departments.

The address designating its current world headquarters — 1 American Road — will move to the Hub in November. That's when a grand opening of the vast complex will be held.

"Ford Motor Company’s importance to our community cannot be overstated," Mayor Abdullah Hammoud said in a statement. "More than just the industrial heartbeat of the modern American economy, Ford’s legacy is deeply intertwined with this city’s history. We’ve been proud neighbors with the world headquarters across Michigan Avenue, and we are excited for Ford to contribute to the city’s vitality as the company finds a new home in its expansive new, state-of-the-art research hub just down the road in Dearborn."

Reevaluating headquarters is a trend in the industry. General Motors Co. will move its HQ to the sparkling new Hudson's Detroit development in downtown Detroit from the Renaissance Center, which first opened in 1977. Ahead of that, it increasingly relocated employees to its Warren Technical Center.

GM will take up four floors of the new 12-story mixed-use building owned by mortgage mogul Dan Gilbert's Bedrock LLC, adjacent to the complex's skyscraper. Move-in is expected to happen by January. GM is working with Bedrock on redeveloping the Ren Cen with a smaller hotel, apartments and new retail and community space.

Former North American leaders at Chrysler parent Stellantis NV discussed selling its Auburn Hills headquarters in a leaseback deal, too, amid intensifying financial pressure.

These companies are looking to be innovative so they can compete against Chinese automakers that have affordable, advanced internet-connected electric vehicles, said Peter Berg, professor of employment relations at Michigan State University.

"It's always interesting, the question of 'Can we be a new company in the old space we have?'" he said. "Of course you can. But whether they feel the need to rebrand themselves in a brand new space, it’s easier to show we are different when we look different."

He added: "The Renaissance Center looks old now. It doesn’t look new. It looks like the past. It's the same thing (for the Glass House). People like to work in shiny new spaces. If they can articulate a vision that they're not this stodgy, old auto company, but that they're creating exciting and different product, that they have this place for collaboration, that's good for recruiting."

Meanwhile, Ford will demolish its Glass House, Ford's headquarters since 1956, along with the adjacent Ford Credit building over an 18-month period. Most employees will move out by the end of the second quarter in 2026, with demolition expected to finish between the end of 2027 and mid-2028.

Ford will retain ownership of the property to preserve it in the event of a need for future use. But for now, it is in the early stages of working with the city of Dearborn on a "park-like environment," after concluding continuation of the building wasn't financially sustainable, said Jim Dobleske, CEO of Ford Land, the entity managing Ford's properties. That could include sports fields or other amenities.

Demolition would open about 100 acres for public use on the 212-acre site. The Service Research Center garage and the data center behind the current world headquarters will remain standing.

With COVID-19 shifting expectations and uses of workspace, Ford began looking at the Hub as a new headquarters in early 2021, Dobleske said.

"It's really not conducive to how people work today," he said during a virtual briefing. He described the current HQ as a big center core with individual offices wrapped around the windows.

"We need to bring those cross-functional teams together," Dobleske continued, "to collaborate more, to really practice, not only consolidating our work teams, but the collaboration that we see when engineers and designers and finance team members and marketing team members get together in a much more of a walkable footprint, so they can co-locate when they need to.

"They have the privacy when they need to, and the New World Headquarters ... becomes the anchor of our campus, and allows those teams to come together quickly when they need to, whether that's for an hour, a week, a month, and then go back to their spaces where they can get that heads-down time. So, this space will operate and function very differently than our current world headquarters."

Bill Ford said he feels outside of the "action" with executive offices siloed in the Glass House away from product development. An hour-long product meeting, he said, easily becomes two with the time it takes to move between buildings and find parking.

The Hub will be able to move a vehicle from one end of the site to the other in about three minutes, compared to the former Product Development Center's 36 minutes. Almost double the number of people can also work under the same roof.

Bill Ford hopes the Hub will be a place where people want to work, likening it to Apple Inc.'s headquarters in California: "Our Product Development Center hadn't changed from the day I started there in 1979. And when we recruit people, we have to show them everything, but where they were going to work. I mean, it was really bad."

One example: Ford himself recalled a moment working in the Glass House's basement when the ceiling fell in on him.

Under former CEO Mark Fields, the automaker in 2016 announced a 10-year renovation plan for its Dearborn presence that at the time was expected to support 24,000 workers across two walkable campuses: a product campus across the street from Oakwood Boulevard and The Henry Ford Museum, and a World Headquarters campus near the Glass House, including its renovation, off Michigan Avenue.

But in 2019, the automaker reformed those plans under former CEO Jim Hackett for a new direction with a different architecture firm, Norway-based Snøhetta, which designed the National September 11 Memorial Museum Pavilion, the Oslo Opera House and the renovated Michigan Central Station.

That plan, designed for 20,000 employees, still called for walkability, but also integration with the greater Dearborn community. It focused on the Michigan Avenue corridor that connects from the University of Michigan to Dearborn to Detroit's Corktown, where Ford gave new life to Michigan Central Station to anchor an advanced mobility campus there expected to house 2,500 Ford employees.

The company had examined the possibility of campus renovations and a new HQ for 30 years, Bill Ford said, but updating buildings is among the first costs to go in tough times instead of eliminating vehicle programs or cutting jobs.

"I give Jim Hackett a lot of credit," he said, "because he gets a lot of criticism for many things, but I give him a lot of credit for Jim saying to me, 'Look, I'm not going to be the CEO here forever. I can take the heat, and I'll make this decision to really revitalize a lot of our buildings, and particularly the whole Product Development Center.'"

Having been CEO of office furniture maker Steelcase Inc. for nearly 20 years, Hackett said he was the "right guy, right time" and well-connected for the endeavor. The building, when conceived, wasn't intended to be the next HQ, but even prior to the pandemic, the goal for flexibility and cross-discipline collaboration was there. Hackett recalled a conversation with Bill Ford where it was mentioned that leadership might want to be where the action will happen over the old-school process of people coming with images and ideas to the separate executive offices.

"We wanted to upend all of that," Hackett told The Detroit News. The retired CEO recently toured the Hub with David Kelley, who founded Stanford University's Hasso Plattner Institute of Design and created Apple's mouse. "The complexity (of product development) was going to change dramatically because of the technology.

"This is going to get credibility from people who might not have seen themselves in an automotive kind of assignment," Hackett said. "If you recruited people and said you're going to go in a building of all engineers, versus you're going to be on the team that's making the next Maverick, I think the second pitch is going to be much more attractive to the tech people that might go to a tech company."

Hackett also gave credit to Farley for ensuring the completion of the project to benefit employees and customers.

Solely funded by Ford up until now, the automaker declined to share the cost of the development, though with construction to go, the company isn't ruling out applying for local tax incentives where appropriate, spokesperson Dan Barbossa said. Experts in 2019 estimated the Dearborn plan to be $1 billion on top of the $940 million Corktown campus efforts. The Glass House, when announced in 1949, was estimated at $14 million (almost $190 million today).

Ford broke ground for the new Hub in 2018. Construction began in 2020. Phase one of construction will finish by the end of the year, allowing for about half of the occupants to move into the site. Five hundred employees are already working in the Hub, and the next wave will arrive in late October and early November. CEO Farley hasn't moved his office yet.

The remaining third of the building will be completed by the end of 2027, following demolition of the remaining former PDC, which was dedicated in 1953. At that time, another 2,000 employees will be able to locate there. Not all employees currently working in the Glass House will be assigned to the new HQ.

The changes in Dearborn sought to leave behind the low-ceiling, cubicle-riddled maze that was Ford's research and engineering center in favor of modern, open and collaborative work spaces. Like most of Ford's other office buildings, the Hub will employ a shared-desk work model where employees aren't assigned a specific seat — a structure that has caused some consternation as in-office employees effective this month must work at least four days a week on-site, a day more required than GM employees currently.

Ford's investments in its footprint have been a global endeavor beginning as early as 2016 in India. By 2027, 90% of Ford's in-office employees will be working in new or renovated spaces. Including commercial and manufacturing, Ford owns more than 300 million square feet of footprint.

The new World Headquarters Building sits on the site of the former Product Development Center. The facility has six design studios and a design showroom that, for the first time, allows for full product review in a single space. The building also has multi-monitor desk spaces, huddle and conference rooms, phone booths, couches and other work environments to support diverse needs.

A 160,000-square-foot food hall with seven food and beverage pavilions and a rotating menu curated by an executive chef through Aramark will be accessible to all Ford employees. There are also wellness rooms, mothers' rooms and more than 300 tech-enabled meeting rooms. The Hub features outdoor courtyards and 12 acres of greenspace, too.

Despite the resources on site, the design does seek for greater integration to the surrounding Dearborn community, Dobleske said: "We believe that the work we've done on the campus, renovating those 29 buildings (in Dearborn) and the 14 million square feet, will create a walkable environment, not only for on-campus, but also to Michigan Avenue to make sure that our team members are participating in restaurants and stores and shopping and everything else."

The building is designed to be net-zero energy with 100% renewable electricity from the campus' Central Energy Plant. The goal is 95% of disposable items will be composted, recycled or reused. The design reduces the need to move materials by more than 83%.

The Hub will also feature works from local artists and pieces from Ford's archives, including vehicles from the company's Heritage Fleet. There are also "Easter eggs" hidden throughout, said Jennifer Kolstad, global design and brand director at Ford Land. On the building's exterior glass, for example, digits of significant Ford patents cover the facade.

"Every detail, big and small," Kolstad said, "has been considered."

New HQ vs. old HQ

Square footage

The Hub: 2.1 million by the end of 2027

Glass House: 950,000

Stories

The Hub: Four floors

Glass House: 12 floors and a penthouse

Employees

The Hub: Up to 4,000

Glass House: Around 2,000

Glass surface area

The Hub: Approximately 250,000 square feet of exterior curtain wall

Glass House: Approximately 106,000 square feet of exterior curtain wall

Cost

The Hub: Undisclosed. Experts in 2019 estimated the Dearborn campus renovation at $1 billion

Glass House: $14 million estimated in 1949 (almost $190 million today)

Year opened

The Hub: November 2025. Phase two is expected to be completed in 2027

Glass House: September 1956

Groundbreaking

The Hub: 2018

Glass House: 1953

Site size

The Hub: 320 acres for the new Henry Ford II World Center campus

Glass House: 212 acres

Architects

The Hub: Snøhetta

Glass House: Skidmore, Owings & Merrill

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