With 13 engineering facilities scattered up and down the I-75 corridor, General Motors came to the conclusion a decade ago that that portion of its operations wasn't running on all cylinders

During the 1990s, GM began consolidating its engineering staff into a cluster of buildings in Pontiac called the Centerpoint Business Campus, intended, the automaker says, "to create a world-class office facility for employees that supports GM's global engineering enterprise."

The latest addition to the Centerpoint campus is the Truck Products Center-North facility, a three-story, 660,000 square-foot building that will house 2,000 GM employees. Walbridge-Aldinger and the building trades have been on the $63 million job since June 1, 1999, and construction is expected to wrap up about six months from now.

According to GM Facility Manager Lawrence Pitcole, the North facility on the Centerpoint campus follows the six-year-old , 1.1 million square-foot Truck Products Center Central building, and then the construction of the 400,000 square-foot Truck Products Center East building. The TPC West building, a vehicle test lab, was also constructed. Not anticipating the world's voracious appetite for GM's truck products the last few years, "we found we didn't build big enough," Pitcole said, "and that brings us to where we are today, with the TPC North. We think that when we're finished here, there's a good probability that this should be it for awhile."

The L-shaped building, which will create both a physical and visual gateway to Centerpoint, "will basically define the campus," Pitcole said.

But getting the structure built hasn't been easy - even before construction started. The area was once a residential neighborhood and was a parking lot for trucks that served a nearby plant, so underground water and sewer lines, including major sanitary and storm trunk lines, had to be relocated. High-tension power lines in the area were also relocated.

According to Walbridge-Aldinger Project Manager Glen Bays, the project is currently employing about 167 building trades workers - about 40 less than when the project peaked out last August.

"The job is going well," Bays said. "We have a good relationship with the unions out here and they're doing good work."

FIREPROOFING is applied by Jose Nieves of Plasterers Local 67 and W.E. Harnish in the upper reaches of a level of the 660,000-square-foot Truck Products Center North building in Pontiac.

Here is an aerial view of the building from two months ago.