Shortly before his father died in 1950, Eero took over the family business. His first commission, a vast technical center for General Motors on a 320-acre suburban site in Warren, Mich., would have daunted a lesser talent. Saarinen set aside an earlier design that he and his father had prepared and sought inspiration in Mies van der Rohe's Illinois Institute of Technology campus in Chicago, then under construction. The GM Technical Center owes a debt to Mies, but it is a small one. Saarinen's steel-and-glass-and-porcelain-enamel walls, developed with GM engineers, are high-precision skins, lacking the usual Miesian rhythm of structure and infill, and the overall layout is scaled to drivers rather than to pedestrians. The brightly colored, glazed brick walls (used to identify the six different divisions housed at the center), as well as the stainless-steel dome and water tower, are more sculptural—and more playful—than most '50s modern architecture. The serenity of the monumental basin was disrupted by a fanciful water-ballet fountain designed by Alexander Calder.