That's exactly why this building is on the list, because the process is what matters. But not only did the process inform the building as to what it wanted to be, the building most definitely allowed that process to happen, evolve, and ultimately become extremely refined. Highland park was the real testing ground that allowed the River Rouge plant to even be conceived. Forget about the model T, it's all about the assembly line and Highland Park is where that all really took shape. So while I wouldn't say 'It's just a building', I do suggest that it is a really dumb building, but that's kind of the genius of it. It was flexible and open and adaptable. It was like a lab where things could be discovered. Say you need an extra man on the line for whatever reason. Well, you would need to stretch out the existing line to make room for that and the building was designed to let that happen. Say a car part doesn't fit through the door, well you take a wall out, since the concrete skeletal frame and thin glass facade lets you do that - in a few hours. This building is the place where the Model T went from like 20 hours to make to less than 2 minutes to make and it's no question that the building played a major role in letting that happen. And check this out. When they even needed more space than anticipated, they built scaffolding onto the side, essentially extending the machine onto the street. It worked and it was beautiful.

You have to remember that we're talking about 1908 here. Nobody was thinking about buildings in this way before. In a way, the fact that you find this building meaningless is even more telling of its complete ubiquitous power. These types of buildings and their way of thinking about space totally revolutionized manufacturing throughout the world and it happened in the matter of a few decades, which is why it feels so normal, but at the time this was really new and groundbreaking shit. Even Corb's manifesto which says that "Architecture is a machine for living in" wasn't published until 15 years later. And Corb was in fact greatly influenced by what he saw during his visit to industrial America. Architecture was starting to empathize with and incorporate the car. For me, the real interesting thing that this building talks about is how our lives were starting to become compartmentalized. Now (in 1910), you would GO to work, and GO on vacation, and GO to grandma's house. Our lives were exceedingly being dictated by the clock and reduced to schedules. You can read this in the elevation of the building. It's a grid of repetitive rectangles all working together to create the mass of a whole building. I mean, is it just a coincidence that the elevation of the building, as wholly dictated by it's functionality, looks exactly like a calendar? This was also happening in painting at the time too, which of course was equally revolutionary. Cubism was partly about deconstructing the body into parts and reassembling them. It was about, for me, the beginning of the lack of cohesiveness in our daily lives. Highland Park is where all of this started.