Dignity of labor.

Drawing on the functional, egalitarian traditions of the modern American workplace, these two modern factories in the Mid West combine technical efficiency with simple form.

QMR 

The creation of the industrial workplace in America has a distinguished architectural history. The patronage of inspired entrepreneurs like the Johnsons in Racine, Henry Ford, Sam Irwin at Cummins and D. J. De Pree of Herman Miller, combined with the effort of an equally inspiring group of architects produced buildings planned for efficiency, geared to technical innovation and production but also preoccupied with design.

Two recently completed industrial projects clearly seek to build on these traditions. QMR, a manufacturer of plastic components employs about 55 people in its new building at River Falls, a small town set in the rolling farmland of western Wisconsin. The facility created for an industrial client with worldwide interests provides manufacturing space, with associated offices, meeting rooms, staff amenities, materials storage and truck docks.

The single-storey building has been sited between fields and a wooded ridge above the main road into town. The elevation most clearly visible from the road, the north face of the building, is predominantly solid. A precast concrete panelled wall - cast to match the colour of the buff stone of a nearby escarpment - is topped by a series of square dormers. Little else is revealed and it is only on approaching the main entrance that the tilted roof becomes obvious. This simple move - lifting the thin metal roof deck and its everyday steel stick-like structure up to the south to create a monopitch - both acknowledges the site and transforms the workplace. Wedges of high-level glazing combined with generous floor-to-ceiling windows on the south and west, bring natural light into the heart of the building and connect machine hall, offices and staff lounge alike to the woodlands beyond. Since QMR run production for 24 hours a day throughout the week, this detail also transforms the building by night into both a lantern at the forest edge and an illuminated sign from the road.

The machines in the press hall are clean, relatively quiet, computerised and robotically assisted. Services are distributed from a carefully planned network of underground tunnels which ensures that systems can be changed with minimum disruption and leaves production areas uncluttered. A glazed screen separates production and office, yet at the same time emphasises the importance of the one large daylit space which accommodates all activities. Distinctions between blue and white collar carry little significance here, and in its design and organisation this modest industrial building suggests a new egalitarianism at work.

ORIGEN CENTER

The Origen Center promotes similar ideals. Designed as a place of exchange for manufacturing expertise and ideas, it is located at the Stout Technology Park - a collection of office buildings and research facilities flanked by farms on the edge of Menomonie in Wisconsin. The new building houses three different facilities: a manufacturing training centre, a start-up manufacturing production base and an incubator for new businesses.

Designed as a series of light steel framed pavilions placed on a long heavy raft of sparkling grey Cold Springs Granite, the building floats above a sea of grass and creates a distinct boundary to the park. Slender white painted circular steel columns and rectangular beams, set out on a rigorous 12ft x 36ft (3.5m x 11 m) grid, define the internal spaces and expand beyond the face of the building to frame the main entrance and a series of outdoor terraces. The external envelope is a taut skin of clear glazing and specially designed tongue and groove cedar boarded cladding panels.

Bringing a group of different activities together into one building provides an opportunity to develop a distinct sense of community, and the space which connects the facilities can provide a place in which social interaction might occur. At the Origen Center this connection is no mere institutional corridor. Grounded on the same Cold Springs Granite raft, lined with cherrywood panelling and delineated by curved fabric sails which billow within the exposed structural steel bays, this is very clearly seen as a place of significance. It is generous with good views out to the surrounding fields and also connects to open dining areas, lounges, meeting rooms and a copy centre which are available to anyone working in the building. The larger and more specialised training rooms and manufacturing centres are housed within boxlike enclosures built predominantly of cherry and glass. Using clear and translucent glazing to create these enclosures makes the industrial processes visible. The design obviously seeks to emphasise transparency both in the organisational environment of the centre and in its physical setting.

The economy tautness and transparency of these buildings recalls some of the ideas which prompted the Case Study Houses - which were described as 'background for life in work'.(*) The design of both the QMR facility and the Origen Center reflects the interest of extraordinarily committed clients and inspired architects who are obviously working together to frame new views of industry, make work a pleasure and, as Charles Eames recommended, are taking that pleasure seriously.

* Charles Eames and John Entenza, 'Case Study Houses 8 and 9 by Charles Eames and Eero Saarinen, Architects,' Arts & Architecture December 1945.