Detroit's Milwaukee Avenue holds a massive eleven-story brick monolith designed by Albert Kahn. This is the Argonaut Building. But historians know it better as the General Motors Research Laboratory. Built in 1928, it served as Charles "Boss" Kettering's playground. Kettering despised pure theory. He demanded results, preferably with grease on his hands. Inside these walls, his team solved the engine knock problem by introducing tetraethyl lead to gasoline. A toxic choice in hindsight, sure, but it revolutionized engine compression ratios. They also whipped up Freon here, transforming household refrigeration forever. The labs smelled like sulfur and ozone. Still, the breakthroughs kept coming. Engineers perfected the two-stroke diesel engine in these offices, which basically killed off the steam locomotive.
Actually, the innovations cooked up here went way beyond horsepower. In 1952, GM researchers teamed up with a surgeon named Forest Dodrill. Together, they built the Dodrill-GMR. It was a mechanical heart. The stainless-steel device looked exactly like a miniature twelve-cylinder engine, but it kept a 41-year-old man alive for nearly an hour during surgery. It worked flawlessly. Around the same time, Harley Earl's legendary styling section occupied the upper floors. Earl hated square boxes. He pioneered the use of clay modeling, which allowed designers to sculpt wild, sweeping curves. This made automobiles fashionable instead of merely functional.
Eventually, GM outgrew the brick giant. They packed up and moved to Warren in the mid-1950s. The Milwaukee Avenue building sat mostly empty for decades. Then, in 2009, the College for Creative Studies stepped in. They raised $145 million to turn the old labs into the Taubman Center. Now, students design future vehicles in the exact spaces where Earl shaped the Corvette. Pretty poetic. The ghosts of Detroit's industrial past now guide the next generation.
What Makes General Motors Research Laboratory Special:
