The buildings that line Interstate 90 in Illinois are typically undistinguished, banal, light-industrial boxes and chain motor inns. The Trumpf Smart Factory, just northwest of Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport, defies that convention with its bold use of corrugated, rust-colored Corten steel sheets and glass for a facility designed by the firm of Barkow Leibinger. Trumpf, a German company, is not a new client for the Berlin-based architects, who developed the master plan for Trumpf’s Stuttgart campus from 1997 to 2010. But the gently rolling plains of northern Illinois are a new landscape for principal Frank Barkow, a Montana native. “It’s so beautiful,” he says while describing how the building’s simple figure-eight plan, organized under a single shed roof, is oriented to align with the highway along its front and to overlook the gently sloping wetlands to the rear.

When we visited on a September afternoon, sunlight flooded the double-height entry lobby, a generous space created where the building’s two volumes overlap at one corner. The north volume, housing offices and support spaces, wraps around a gravel-lined courtyard planted with a variety of young trees. Exposed steel beams and metal grating run across the pitched ceiling, and charred Douglas fir softens the walls. The larger, southern volume, where Trumpf’s metal-cutting machinery is installed in a factory setting, follows the “industrial logic of section versus plan,” according to Barkow. In the tradition of natural day-lighting in factories, floor-to-ceiling glazing clads the long north and south facades—and, of course, the space is column-free. The detail is in the section, which is animated by the depth of eleven customized Vierendeel trusses that span 45 meters. They support a catwalk running the length of the showroom, and giving views of the machines below.