It may already be 11 years old, but the McLaren Technology Centre (MTC) in Woking in southeast England looks like it was built just yesterday. A space-age, futuristic building with snaking suspended bridges and see-through cylindrical elevator shafts, the corporate and production head office of the McLaren Group – a collection of specialist high-tech companies dedicated to the design and development of Formula One vehicles, high-performance sports cars, electronic systems and composite materials, each maximizing the benefits of the global reputation that McLaren has established as one of the most successful teams in the history of F1 since it began competing in the sportin 1966 – is all about transparency, access and communication, as glass may be found everywhere so everyone can see what one another is doing in a spirit of openness, interconnectivity and interaction, working towards a common team objective. Upon approach, you catch sight of a lake that forms a perfect circle together with a rounded organic-shaped building shaded by a seven-meter cantilevered overhang and an entrance raised on stilts recalling Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye in France. It features a continuous curved glass wall, partly developed using McLaren’s own technological expertise, which allows daylight into the interiors, thereby providing all employees with an awareness of the outdoors.
Inside, what McLaren’s calls the “boulevard” – a spectacular, jaw-dropping gallery of five decades worth of its historic and present-day cars, such as the famed MP4/4 F1 in which Brazilian three-time Formula One world champion Ayrton Senna took home the 1988 F1 drivers’ championship and McLaren secured the constructors’ championship, company founder Bruce McLaren’s British Grand Prix-winning 1969 M7C F1 in egg yolk yellow and the brand-new P1 GTR in yellow with green stripes – greets visitors and leads to hospitality areas, a fitness centre, a swimming pool and the staff restaurant with views of the lake and the landscape beyond. The building’s circulation is organized around double-height, broad linear “streets” and individual “fingers” of adaptable floor space, each with its own specific functions, with production and parts storage areas on the lower levels, and top-lit design studios, offices and meeting rooms above.
The building’s design reflects the culture and philosophy of McLaren by focusing on a clean, healthy and well-controlled environment for its staff. While designed to be a carbon-neutral, flexible and pleasant working environment, the MTC also represents McLaren as a global leader in cutting-edge technological innovation and high-value manufacturing, the state-of-the-art facility providing the McLaren technical team with the most sophisticated equipment to optimize its performance, which serves to draw and retain the best engineering and design talents in the world. A symbol and tool, the MTC ensures that McLaren stays at the vanguard of British engineering and technology, while helping to strengthen and develop the McLaren brand as a pioneer within British industry across a range of fields. Having established the use of carbon fiber in vehicle production over the past 30 years, it hasn’t built a car without a carbon-fiber chassis since introducing it into racing and road cars with the 1981 McLaren MP4/1 and 1993 McLaren F1, respectively. The MTC also demonstrates McLaren’s commitment to nurturing the rebirth of design and manufacturing in the UK, which have been the cornerstone of British industry for more than a century and are vital to its future economic growth.
Designed by Foster + Partners, the London-based architecture and design practice led by Sir Norman Foster, the MTC was completed in 2004 after six years of hard work with the aim of establishing a new benchmark that would become a model for the workplace of the future. Pioneers since the early 1970s of the design of flexible offices that can respond rapidly and easily to changes in work practices and communications and information technology, Foster + Partners is dedicated to designing sustainable, low-energy workplaces, which will benefit the environment, provide real cost savings for clients and create an enjoyable work environment that motivates and influences the people working within it to increase a company’s productivity.
The brief for the MTC was to build a global headquarters to unite under one roof the majority of the group’s employees working on a wide range of functions, formerly scattered across 18 locations in and around the Woking area. The building houses design studios, laboratories, research and testing facilities, electronics development, machine shops and prototyping and production facilities for the Team McLaren F1 cars and McLaren Automotive’s road and track cars. Whilst economically and industrially supporting Woking as a world-class centre of manufacturing innovation and technology, the town’s largest employer supplies over 1,283 jobs, 33 percent of which are in engineering, with no plans to build its cars elsewhere. This year will see a 30 percent increase in investment in research and development from 2014, and an additional 200 employees, which will bring the total up to 1,500.
The architectural challenge lay in accommodating a structure with a built-up area of 63,000sqm (of which 57,000 sqm is office space) within a 20,000-sqm footprint the extent of the farm buildings already on the 50-hectare green belt site and not exceeding the height of the surrounding trees to minimize the visual impact of the project. Therefore, the architects came up with the idea of a low, deep-plan edifice sunk into the landscape, protected from view by the planting of 100,000 new trees and shrubs, which also help to improve biodiversity. The main frame of the building includes over 5,000 tons of steelwork, large enough to house nine
Vertical loads are propped up by 5-mm elliptical stainless steel tie rods – the same tie rods used to strengthen the bodywork of the Team McLaren F1 racing car – which form a framework from which 40 tons of laminated glass are hung with practically no obvious means of support. Mike Flewitt, CEO of McLaren Automotive, a British manufacturer of luxury, high-performance sports cars, says, “The fact that all the offices have glass windows and you can see through them may make some people feel quite exposed, but actually, if what you’re doing is what you should be doing when you’re in there, which is contributing to the whole, then you don’t need anywhere to hide, you don’t need any walls between you. It encourages the kind of work environment we want, which is one team, whether it be a car team or a F1 team, trying to deliver goals. For us, it’s trying to deliver great cars for our customers. For them, it’s trying to win races. Our building is very carefully maintained and that pays off. I think it will stay relevant for quite a long time. Anything beautiful and looked after lasts a long time.”
Opting for an environmentally-friendly building strategy, the adjacent lake’s 30,000 cubic meters of water form a critical part of the cooling infrastructure for the entire complex, absorbing the waste energy generated by the building and its specialist systems, pumped via a natural filtration system of reed beds and a cleansing biotope through to the building’s heat exchangers. Rainwater is captured onsite then fed into the lake, which also serves as an ecosystem for aquatic species. Greywater produced in the building is treated through the reed bed system before flowing into the nearby river. To ensure the ideal work environment for employee well-being, natural and artificial light are combined innovatively, with an automatic control system providing a constant level of light in the office areas, whatever the time of day and weather conditions, and sky lights to provide diffuse daylight.
Located in a separate building at the entrance to the complex, the £40m two-storey McLaren Production Centre (MPC) housing 32,000-sqm of accommodation – a subsequent manufacturing facility opened in 2011 that has allowed McLaren Automotive to increase its production capacity and to launch a range of new road cars, debuting with the 600-bhp MP4-12C – is just over seven meters high and buried underground to reduce its physical presence and to be invisible from the nearby road,sensitive to its rural setting. The extensive planting of trees also camouflages the building within the green-belt site, and the landscaping project reused all existing soil – none left the site, which is highly unusual. The MPC is connected to the MTC via a subterranean tunnel and they share a common design language: the MPC is fitted with aluminum tubes, the rounded corners of its rectilinear plan recall the curves of the MTC, and its entrance is a circular glass drum below the overhang of the roof canopy, echoing the MTC.
Even at full production, the super-clean, all-white MPC just hums quietly without the use of robots or air tools – not your typical factory. Flewitt explains, “Building by hand is important. It’s not that we don’t use robots because we don’t like robots, and it’s not craftsmanship for the sake of being able to say that it’s handmade. The reality is that people have automation typically for either quality or financial reasons. It wouldn’t be cheaper for us given our volumes, our very long cycle times and the complexity of our vehicles where almost every vehicle is different. You fundamentally have to program a robot to do something, but if you’re doing something different every time, then people are more flexible. As long as you get great people, and train, manage and motivate them well, then they are a great resource. It’s just the most appropriate way to do what we do.”
On my tour, I witness a flexible, lean and modern production line with the P1 and P1 GTR (the greatest driving car that communicated what McLaren was all about), 650S (influenced by the MP4-12C, which brought emotional engagement to McLaren Automotive) and 570S Coupé (the first model in the recently-launched Sports Series, a new more affordable range) on the floor, as general assembly is performed by hand, though the various models move along the mechanical and esthetic work stations at differing speeds with two or three operatives per station, before thorough inspection of every car at 10 quality gateways. The actual production workforce who will touch a component that goes into making a car like the 570S Coupé is around 300, including staff in the basement below performing engine dress and sub-assembling doors and instrument panels, with others in the paint shop and testing areas. Today fully operational, the MPC builds cars across a three-tier product range – Sports Series, Super Series and Ultimate Series – and delivered a record 1,649 vehicles worldwide in 2014, aiming to reach 1,800 this year and eventually 4,000 in 2017.
Flewitt concludes, “The MPC is almost a big square box because it was about creating a space that would allow us to have the flexibility to build our cars and, as we introduced new models, to change over from one to the other to be able to build whatever the client ordered. It’s very functionality-driven inside, whereas as you come over to the MTC, it’s very different, particularly the front of it as you drive around the lake. In a sense, the MTC is trying to make a statement about what McLaren is, about it being modern and very technical. It’s about McLaren communicating with its sponsors and its sponsors being able to communicate with their audiences about what the McLaren brand means because in F1, 70 per cent of the income comes from sponsors – it’s a business-to-business relationship. The building itself actually serves the purpose of winning sponsorship. I always think of the years with
