|
In consideration of the three major typologies of the corporate campus, the
corporate estate, and the office park; the office park is the category that
is perhaps the most likely to go unnoticed by design professionals and the
general public. Corporate estates and campuses are usually higher profile,
master planned design projects using design professionals to envision
buildings and landscapes that contribute to a favorable corporate image,
often through the appearance of a cohesive relationship between the
corporate building and its surrounding natural landscape. The office park
differs in that it is not always conceived of as a coherent master plan.
They are often developed over a period of decades by different builders and
developers as lots are bought and sold, thus making the office park less
likely to maintain a single vision or a well orchestrated overall plan.
The example of Ford at Fairlane
is unique, in that it falls under the definition of an office park with
many different tenants and lot owners, but because of Ford's history in
Dearborn and the presence of the Ford World Headquarters building in
Fairlane, the Ford identity is considerably more interconnected to the
office park than in a typical development scenario. Because the Ford
identity is inseperable from Fairlane, it has been important to Ford to
maintain more control over the future development of the office park, which
they do by employing an aesthetic code and offering centralized landscaping
services to all tenants, allowing them to orchestrate strategic ecological
planning and more substantial landscape projects.
Other reasons for the ecological and community developments at Fairlane are
related to Ford's larger intended corporate image as a 'sustainable'
American industrial corporation. Ford's website
has an entire section titled 'good works' which describes all of their
environmental and community initiatives through their products (the cars),
their assembly plants, their corporate properties, and with their
charitable donations. The projects at Fairlane are well publicized through
the Ford website and more specifically on the Ford
real estate website, especially the more visually marketable projects
such as the sunflower fields, which provide the company with striking
images of their headquarters building surrounded by fields of attractive
flowers.
Ford Motor Company's current CEO,
William Clay Ford Jr., great grandson of Henry Ford, is responsible for
some of Ford's recent sustainable overhauling. He is publicly known as the
Ford family environmentalist, practicer of Zen and Tibetan Buddhism, folk
guitar player, and quite different from previous hard-edged CEOs. A
Newsweek article describes that "He has horrified many in the industry
— and many at the company — by publicly blaming auto emissions
for greenhouse gases causing climate change. He speaks passionately about a
future with cleaner alternative fuels, recyclable cars and compostable
parts."6
Ford Jr.'s personal ecological goals have filtered through all aspects
of the company, resulting in the development of a Sustainability Steering
Team which oversees the environmental efforts and impacts of all of Ford's
products and properties. Since Ford Jr.'s tenure, the Ford Motor Company
has attempted to retool its image as a 'green' company, most notably by
instating the highly publicized Rouge Factory green redevelopment in
collaboration with William McDonough + Partners.
Automobile industries have received
very public criticism for vehicles emmisions, fuel consumption, toxic
factories, and the negative impacts of industrial decentralization in the United States.
Ford's efforts at Fairlane are part of a much larger picture of an American
industry attempting to improve an image that has been under public scrutiny
throughout its history.
The Urban
and Natural Context
Fairlane in Dearborn
Examples from Fairlane
Evaluations
back
|
|
|
|