The General Motors Argonaut Building opened in Detroit in 1928. Built in two stages, the massive 11-story, 760,000-square-foot structure was commissioned by GM’s CEO, Alfred Sloan, to house the automaker’s engineering and design teams at the dawn of the American automobile industry. Over the following decades, some of the most notable discoveries of the 20th century would come from within its walls: safety glass, the automatic trans-mission, and Freon. It was also home to the studio of Harley Early, who introduced the concept of the “model year” to drive demand for cars.
But Argonaut, like GM itself in many ways, fell into disrepair in the late 1990s, and a few years later, the building was abandoned. By 2008, it was slated for demolition, and it would have been if not for the foresight of the long-time president of a local college to return the building to its roots and experiment with an idea to co-locate a charter school, a college, and a manufacturer all under one roof in the hopes that it would spark human creativity by bringing together what often are silos in the development of human capital.
Today, the Argonaut Building, since renamed the A. Alfred Taubman Center for Design Education, has been reborn for the new economy. It is home to the College for Creative Studies, which has more than 400 students enrolled in six undergraduate and four graduate programs (and another 1,000 students at a campus a mile away); the Henry Ford Academy, a charter school with 840 students in grades 6–12; and the headquarters and factory for Shinola, a watch and leather-goods maker, which employs 350 people at the site.
The hope is for a virtuous cycle, said Richard Rogers, the president of the College for Creative Studies, so that "students in the school are inspired to go to college and perhaps have careers at companies like Shinola and those employed by Shinola can send their kids to the school right where they work.”
In doing so, this single location for school and work in Detroit could serve as a potential model for improving and simplifying the complex pathways students now navigate from education to career. As Jacques Panis, Shinola’s president, told me job titles “are like a foreign language” to students these days.
“They have no idea what a project manager or a marketing specialist actually does on a daily basis,” he said. “Seeing what people do here opens them up to this ecosystem.”
The workforce that young adults are entering these days is much more fragmented than in previous generations. With many occupations found primarily in only certain regions of the country—tech job along the costs, for example—swaths of students have limited exposure to careers that might interest them. So young adults pick careers based on what is familiar to them, not necessarily what they might be passionate about. If their neighbors or parents or friends’ parents are doctors, lawyers and teachers, they will likely choose one of those paths as well.
A Mixing of Careers
Two surveys in the last several months from Gallup paint a dire picture about the transition from education to the workforce.
The first survey found that most students get their advice about what to study in college from family and friends and not formal sources such as high-school counselors or college advisors. The most beneficial career advice, the survey found, comes on the job during internships or employment after college. Those who valued the guidance they got from co-workers or bosses were least likely to have second thoughts about their college major. So having students mingle with professionals on a daily basis like they do at the Taubman Center in Detroit could provide some of that informal advice.
The second survey from Gallup found that only about a third of college students feel prepared that they’ll graduate with the skills and knowledge they need to succeed in the job market and in the workplace. The expectation among those in the Taubman Center is that with constant exposure to hands-on learning in a real work setting, students can feel more ready for what’s next after graduation.
During a visit to the Taubman Center last fall, I met Drayton Redding, a student at the College for Creative Studies. A few years ago, while attending an inner-city Detroit high school, he was introduced to careers in the automobile industry through a program sponsored by GM. Redding told his high school guidance counselor he loved drawing cars, but instead of directing him down the street to the College for Creative Studies, the counselor encouraged him to apply to Michigan State University to study engineering.
After struggling for a semester at Michigan State, an adviser there suggested he transfer to the automobile design program at the College for Creative Studies. “Growing up, I didn’t know drawing cars was a career,” Redding said as he carved a clay model of a car in a studio on the sixth floor of the Taubman Center. Although Shinola does not build cars, Redding said the company has nonetheless affected how he thinks about design. At most universities, design majors rarely cross paths with engineers, and both groups never see how their ideas developed in the classroom are turned into actual products.
With Shinola in the same building as a school and college, students can witness the entire manufacturing process from beginning to end by dropping by the factory floor or regularly talking with workers who visit classrooms or through impromptu conversations in the building’s elevators. “They can now see products designed and see how they work,” said Panis. “In most other places, an industrial designer might design a pipe for the washing machine but never see that pipe put into practice. Here, what they design could be put into practice.”
A Solution for the Skills Gap?
The experiment in Detroit also offers a potential solution to the “skills gap” that the U.S. and many other countries are facing as employers complain they can’t find workers with the right set of skills. With a company and a college located in the same building, college officials can quickly discover how to build on their strengths and alter programs to produce graduates with skills that better meet the needs of the workforce.
The new program in fashion accessories design at the College for Creative Studies is a case in point. The global fashion accessories business—handbags, shoes, and leather goods—is a $51 billion business. Yet no design college in the Midwest had a program specifically focused on accessory design. “Detroit doesn’t have a fashion industry, but it will never have one if our best and brightest leave,” said Aki Choklat, chairman of the program.
Students from the region interested in the fashion went elsewhere to school and rarely came back home to work. Or they were like Amineh Ahmed, who grew up nearby Troy, and similar to most college students nationwide didn’t want to travel far to attend college. She started at Oakland University in Michigan, where she hoped to parlay a business major into a career in fashion.
When CCS started its program in fashion accessories design, Ahmed transferred the following semester. She quickly realized that a business major alone wouldn’t have been enough to find work in her field. “Shinola helped design this program for what most companies need—people who can work across a variety of areas but also have deep knowledge in one particular area of fashion,” Ahmed said.
Choklat, the chairman of the program, was recruited by the college from Italy where he led a similar effort at a school run by the famed designer, Ferruccio Ferragamo. One day near the beginning of the fall term at the College for Creative Studies, Choklat is huddled with Ahmed and another student, looking over their drawings spread out on a table in a wide-open, sun-drenched room. Because the building was originally conceived by GM to temporarily house cars during their design phase, and in later years to be photographed for brochures, the building has an open floor plan with tall windows and few pillars—quite unusual for a building from that time period.
For the college, the building’s open layout offers maximum flexibility to grow or shrink programs as demand in the job market inevitably shifts. The building also demonstrates how the physical space matters in encouraging teamwork and cross-pollination of people and ideas. The Taubman building is inspiring—its history, its grandeur, and its architecture.
“Space is very underrated in education,” said Chris Quezada, the digital art director at Shinola who has also taught at the college. “We are teaching design in a building where the concept of design was founded. This building has been reclaimed.”
This post has been adapted and excerpted from a profile that Jeffrey J. Selingo wrote as part of the “What Works: Building Skills across America” series for the American Enterprise Institute.
